Book Review: ‘When We Cease to Understand the World,’ by Benjamín Labatut - The New York Times

Schwarzschild had given the world its first glimpse of black holes. His true subject is the ecstasy of scientific discovery and the price it exacts - from the individuals who sacrifice everything in its pursuit, and from the human species, which gains ever more powerful tools to master a world that keeps eluding comprehension.

In the final chapter, we encounter a reclusive gardener who had once been a mathematician but "Now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing." The man, who gardens only at night because he maintains that plants suffer less if they are handled in their sleep, believes that "It was mathematics - not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon - which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant."

That night gardener is one of the few invented characters in a book otherwise built on real events. The opening chapter stays close to the facts in its account of Fritz Haber, the chemist who saved countless lives from starvation when he figured out how to harvest nitrogen from the air, creating a plentiful supply of fertilizer, but who also caused the agonizing deaths of countless soldiers in World War I as the guiding force behind Germany's chemical weapons program. Modern science may have replaced mysticism as a path to knowledge, he seems to say, but it's shattered our holistic understanding of our world.

In Labatut's telling, Heisenberg then comes to recognize that the parameters of any given quantum object can never be identified with certainty. The variables are mathematically complementary, so that the more clearly we bring one into focus, the more it blurs our understanding of the other - as if, Heisenberg explains, "Reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both."

With his slippery hybrid of fact and fiction, Labatut slyly applies the uncertainty principle to the human pursuit of knowledge itself.



source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/books/review/benjamin-labatut-cease-understand-world.html

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