The Burden of Prometheus: Benjamin Labatut's Chorus of Broken Mechanics

 

“I believe in science…”

When I heard these words, several years ago, I was standing at the threshold of a ramshackle house in rural Alabama, after having invited the man who answered the door to visit my church. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. It was a rainy, drowsy Sunday afternoon, and the man looked out at me with a skeptical eye, something in the tone of his voice approaching the frontiers of politeness. His Southern accent and bass voice rendered the word as “SIGH-uhns,” like a man losing patience with existence.

“Really?” I asked. “O.K.” I glanced over his shoulder, failing to see test tubes over a Bunsen burner, a blackboard of indecipherable equations chalked up, perhaps a chart or two cataloguing the progress of a molecule. “Well, there’s only so much science can tell us about life…” I said, angling toward the concept of purpose, with a hopeful stop at faith.

“I’m more about science,” he insisted, edging the door ever so slightly closed. I thanked him for his time, and eagerly awaited his next paper on the nature of whatever. 

I thought of this after I finished “When We Cease to Understand the World,” the novel by Benjamin Labatut, which mixes the collected biographies of early 20^th century physicists with elements of fiction to examine the progress of atoms, lives, and theories. 

As I said, I didn’t know the man, so he very well could have been hiding his fusion reactor in the garage. Science doesn’t necessarily need to be confirmed by hard won degrees in great institutions, as this book illustrates. There are plenty of examples of self-taught men and women who unlocked daunting mysteries through persistence and the arrogance of ignorance - people who aren't aware that they aren't supposed to know. But I also understood that any theory will do when one doesn’t want to go to church. 

I also remembered that science brings its own salvations and damnations. A year from now, the director Christopher Nolan has promised “Oppenheimer,” a biographical motion picture on the life of the father of the atomic bomb. While Oppenheimer was able to shepherd a group of committed scientists into successfully creating the ultimate weapon, thus ending the Second World War, he had to live with the consequences, and the damnation of his fellow scientists for unleashing the Bomb. Beat the Nazis and the Japanese, and you may eventually be suspected of subversion by your own government. Life is like that.

But my skepticism at my rural scientist’s skepticism was healthy, and taught me a familiar lesson: Just as faith has much to do with personality, and motivation, so does unbelief. Some truths, we believe, are better left unconfronted, to our individual and everlasting damnations. 

In the case of Labatut's novel, the title tells the story: In seeking to understand the world better, we lose what command we had of the facts that got us there, acquiring along the way a whole new set of vexing and devastating questions. 

Quantum mechanics seeks to explain and understand existence at its most essential and most theoretical – the interaction of particles we cannot see, and how they make up the space of matter: in essence, the stuff of existence itself. At the same time from this interplay, which deals with a mind-numbingly infinitesimal world, we can understand the workings of the universe, a space so unutterably vast that we become atoms. We are masses of conscious matter. What are we, when we are barely tangible? Quantum physicists seek to make these arcane concepts, dealing with a subatomic universe, tangible with clean metaphor. Is there one theory? Two? An array as vast as the universe?

What Labatut’s novel does is accomplish the same work as the subjects of his work – render the quirky personalities, sometimes blazing like Old Testament prophets, sometimes like movie set Poindexters – into understandable quantities. Why is that some personalities gravitate toward each other, while still others are repelled away? What happens when a Heisenberg comes in contact with a Schrodinger? What happens when highly egotistical, highly intelligent, highly fragile men come face-to-face with their own mortality, and constitute their own singularities? What will get sucked into their maws, and be spit out into the unsuspecting universe? What spooky action results? What reactions?

There is rich ore here to be mined, not just in the personalities, but in the times. The background of quantum physics mirrors that of the modern world – the fin de siècle period just before World War I, when European civilization was careening toward the cataclysm of the Great War and the end of so many objective truths. What Labatut does is use these personalities and their theories to predict the outcomes that await them. The tortured front-line theorist Schwarzschild, by unlocking Einstein’s relativity to theorize the existence of black holes, correctly foresees the coming of Hitler, occupying the same trenches, wounded by the mustard gas brought about by science. When Heisenberg begins to understand that matter is not something we can gaze at objectively, he becomes pursued by the ghosts of atomized families, wiped from existence by the atomic bomb. 

The guts of the book is contained in the fourth and longest section, which bears the same title as the book. This dramatizes the struggle between Schrodinger and Heisenberg, with Bohr and Einstein serving as mathematical referees. Is the universe understandable, even graspable, at least when one looks at the numbers? It is the figure of Heisenberg who unleashes uncertainty – that great concept that lays beneath so much of our contemporary thought and discourse. Einstein is allowed his famous rebuttal to uncertainty: "God does not play dice with the universe!" To which Bohr replies, "It is not our place to tell Him how to run the world." This is what we are, whether we like it or not.

Labatut, a Chilean writer born in Europe, largely abandons his scientific rouge’s gallery in the final section of the book, instead giving us the fragmented story of a gardener who abandons science in ways similar to some of the theorists we have already encountered. “It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup,” he writes. Though the man has had some trauma in his life, as we all have, he understood the terrible consequences of mathematics:

“It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips when its paradoxes and contradictions.” 

If we go back to the dawn of the 20th century, we would find figures in Western thought sitting in the shade of Marx, Freud and Darwin. We would hear people saying that science was behind their theories, and facts are immune to personalities and the caprices of the individual. Yet the century since has allowed us to see all three of these figures, and their theories, in a new light. And recent history reveals that even scientific truth isn't immune to the clash of some personalities, and the impenetrability of others. 

Where the Victorian world venerated order, the modern world embraces uncertainty. It is better not to know than that understand, for by not knowing, we both know and are understood. A person may be a hero until they are not. The unknown quantities in life allow us to say whatever we want.