Understanding The World Gone Mad

Thoughts Upon Finishing Benjamin Labatut's Great Novel

Benjamin Labatut

I know, it’s Saturday, and I should be away from the keyboard. But I just this moment finished an incredible book, and because I never know what I think about something until I have written about it, that’s what I’m going to do now. Remember, this is a diary, not a newspaper. These are, as usual, half-thoughts. I’m interested in starting a conversation with others who are eager to think through things with me. I’m sending this to the entire list, in part so I can remind you that I’m still writing daily, so if you’re not getting daily dispatches, go to your settings in Substack and flip the switch that the software inadvertently toggled to the off position; Substack Help will tell you what’s what. Only paid subscribers can comment, though.

The book I finished is a non-fiction novel called When We Cease To Understand The World, by the Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut. I looked at that list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century in the NYT, and saw that I had only read three of them. Funny, that. I read at least three books each month, and always have, but so few of those cherished by literary elites were on my personal list. I’m out of touch, and I don’t know that that’s a bad thing, entirely, because honestly, very few of those titles on the list engaged me. But the Labatut one did. Here’s what the Times list said of it:

You don’t have to know anything about quantum theory to start reading this book, a deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses. By the end, you’ll know enough to be terrified. Labatut is interested in how the pursuit of scientific certainty can lead to, or arise from, states of extreme psychological and spiritual upheaval. His characters — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, among others — discover a universe that defies rational comprehension. After them, “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.” That may sound abstract, but in Labatut’s hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking. — A.O. Scott

It is! Oh Lord have mercy, is it ever. I bought the book on Kindle yesterday afternoon, began reading, and in less than a day finished the whole thing. True, it’s not very long, but I read voraciously, because it’s that kind of book. Nothing lights me up like a narrativization of ideas.

Cease (as I will call it) is a short novel composed of fictionalized tales about great men of modern science, especially quantum physicists. The first chapter concerns a non-physicist, and it’s the most terrifying. It is also, according to Labatut, the one chapter that has the least fictionalizing of real life (he says only one paragraph is fiction). Labatut begins with a riveting discussion of the dual nature of scientific discovery. Did you know that the discovery of the color called Prussian Blue — an intense blue that helped revolutionize painting — was part of the discovery of cyanide? Beauty, death — two sides of the same chemical coin.

This chapter mentions the life and achievements of Fritz Haber, a German chemist and Nobel laureate of whom I knew nothing until reading this book, but who actually played a big role in inventing the modern world. Labatut writes:

In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths.

… The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention.

You might think that’s a passage from a sterile discussion of the history of science. Far from it. We have been reading about how Haber discovered and produced the chlorine gas that drove so many to agonizing deaths in the trenches of the Great War. Haber’s wife, also a chemist, was so disgusted with her husband over this that she committed suicide. (This is how Labatut has it; I looked it up, and this is one possibility for her suicide, which took place after a fierce argument with her husband, but nobody knows for sure.) Haber was an assimilated Jew and proud German nationalist. His work was used (not by him) to create Zyklon B, which would result in the mass murder of most European Jewry in the Nazi camps. But there are tens of millions of people alive today who never would have lived, because their forebears would have perished in agony from starvation, had Haber not done his work.

The point Labatut makes in telling this story is twofold: that scientific breakthroughs often come from the madness, or near-madness, of visionary scientists; and that these breakthroughs can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at them. These themes play out throughout the rest of Cease, though in the realm of quantum physics. Here he is on Karl Schwarzschild, who was the first to solve Einstein’s field equations of general relativity:

He was convinced that mathematics, physics and astronomy constituted a single body of knowledge and believed that Germany was capable of exercising a civilizing force comparable to that of ancient Greece. To do so, however, its science must be raised to the heights already achieved by its philosophy and art, for “only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”

Schwarzschild embodies the tragedy of man’s quest for knowledge. He was a fanatic for knowledge — really more of a mad monk than a physicist. He solved the Einstein equations while serving as an officer on the Eastern front in World War I. He died from a horrible disease he caught there:

From there, he sent a letter to Ejnar Hertzsprung, a colleague from the University of Potsdam, which included a draft of his singularity, a description of the blisters that had begun to appear on his skin, and a long digression on the insidious effects the war might have on Germany’s soul, a country Schwarzschild continued to love, but that he saw reeling on the edge of an abyss: “We have reached the highest point of civilization. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.”

(One of the frustrating things about Cease is that we can’t ever fully be sure what is invented by Labatut and what is true. He says in a note at the end that he drew on a number of biographies of these scientists. It is based in truth, but partly fictionalized. I would imagine that these quotes are from real documents.)

One of the most intriguing things about Labatut’s work is how he imagines scientific geniuses as a kind of religious mystic. I read this passage three times; Schwarzschild was the first to theorize the structure of black holes:

According to Schwarzschild, the most frightful thing about mass at its most extreme degree of concentration was not the way it altered the form of space, or the strange effects it exerted on time: the true horror, he said, was that the singularity was a blind spot, fundamentally unknowable. Light could never escape from it, so our eyes were incapable of seeing it. Nor could our minds grasp it, because at the singularity the laws of general relativity simply broke down. Physics no longer had any meaning.

Courant listened to him, rapt. Just before the doctors came looking for him and the young man rejoined the convoy that would take him back to Berlin, Schwarzschild asked him a question that tormented him for the rest of his life, though at the time he considered it nothing but the ravings of a dying soldier, product of a creeping madness that had overtaken Schwarzschild’s mind as weariness and despair consumed him.

If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will—millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space—unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland. Courant tried to appease him; he said that he saw no signs of the apocalypse Schwarzschild feared, and that surely there could be nothing worse than the war they were mired in. He reminded Schwarzschild that the human soul was a greater mystery than any mathematical enigma, and that it was unwise to project the findings of physics into such far-flung realms as psychology.

But Schwarzschild was inconsolable. He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing we could do about it. Because the singularity sent forth no warnings. The point of no return—the limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pull—had no sign or demarcation. Whoever crossed it was beyond hope. Their destiny was set, as all possible trajectories led irrevocably to the singularity. And if such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?

Courant left to return to Germany. Schwarzschild died that afternoon.

Why did I read that three times? Because what if he’s right? And, what if we — our civilization, or humanity more broadly — have already crossed over the border of the singularity? If we have, then the gravity dragging us to our destination will be irresistible. At this point in the book is where the black sun of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, and the rest began to shadow me.

Later, Labatut profiles Alexander Grothendieck (d. 2014), a French mathematician who was an absolute genius, but a total lunatic who died insane:

Even his closest and most loyal collaborators believed he had gone too far. Grothendieck wanted to hold the sun in the palm of his hand, uncover the secret root that could bind together countless theories that bore no apparent relation to one another. They told him his goal was unattainable, and that his project sounded more like the pipe dreams of an amateur than a legitimate programme for scientific exploration. Grothendieck did not listen. After spending so long gazing down at the foundations of mathematics, his mind had stumbled into the abyss.

… Grothendieck could not stop fretting over the possible effects that his own ideas could have on the world. What new horrors would spring forth from the total comprehension that he sought? What would mankind do if it could reach the heart of the heart?

I don’t think nearly enough of us fret about that. We just accept progress like it’s an unalloyed good. You would have thought that the two great wars of the last century would have cured us of this. Nope.

What the fictional Grothendieck confronts here is the difference between magic and religion (or at least the Christian religion). Magic is about gaining power over the natural world to use it to impose one’s will. Religion is primarily about establishing a right relation to the natural world. The scientific quest to understand God’s rational creation can be an act of piety, rightly seen. But the borderline between magic and religion, in this sense, is mighty thin. You might even compare it to the borderline of the black hole.

How do you know when your innocent inquiries into the nature of ultimate reality have crossed the line into a gravitational field that will draw you inexorably into the darkness? Labatut poses the question in a scientific mode, but the question is generally true. My upcoming book Living In Wonder features a section based on an interview with an ex-occultist, “Jonah,” who began as a young man seeking out answers that his suburban Evangelical pastor could not answer. At some point in his spiritual search, he crossed the singularity, and didn’t know it. He ended up as part of a psychedelic cult, ritually worshiping demons before finding his way out. He says that curiosity about deeper spiritual truths is natural, but the churches of our time are ill-equipped to satisfy them:

“Once they feel that vacuum of meaninglessness,” he said, “once they encounter that starvation for spiritual realities that truly exist, the enemy forces are ten miles ahead of us, in having this infrastructure prepared to pull people into things that seem benign but will eventually be revealed as gateways to hell itself.”

We need to talk, he said, because people today aren’t wrong to seek enchantment—but if they do it outside a clearly and uniquely Christian path, they will inevitably be drawn into the demonic. Neutrality in this conflict is not possible. “Maybe it’s my role to be biased in that way,” he said, “because of how badly I was burned.”

More Jonah:

In the first of two interviews, I asked Jonah how the general cultural orientation toward openness and curiosity today leaves people vulnerable to the demonic. The danger, he replied, is “seeing curiosity and openness as virtuous apart from a grounding in a deeper commitment to truth.”

Would-be seekers should be aware that even as popular culture encourages them to be open and experimental, it decides which curiosities will be stigmatized and which ones glorified.

“We are all conditioned by media and academia to be ‘open’ toward a variety of increasingly extreme trends within culture, politics, and spirituality,” he said, “but closed toward almost everything associated with traditional Christian morality and theological understandings.”

Jonah is now an Orthodox Christian.

Back to Cease. Pondering what humanity might do with its knowledge, Grothendieck withdraws:

In 1970, at the high point of his renown, creativity and influence, he resigned from the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies after learning it accepted funds from the French Ministry of Defence. In the following years, he abandoned his family, disavowed his friends, repudiated his colleagues, and fled the rest of the world.

This really happened. He flew too close to the black sun, and fell into the abyss. The thing is, in my own severely limited way, I get it. I am preoccupied with the desire to buy a little cottage on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and go hide there with my books, my icons, and a dog, and just disappear. Only responsibilities to my children keep me from doing this. I don’t think this desire is something good, but it is understandable, don’t you think? Maybe all my thinking and writing about the collapse of our civilization, and the end of our world, has worn me out. Certainly the collapse of my world — the end of marriage, family, and the permanent loss of a sense of home — has exhausted me, and taken away from me the lust for life I used to have. I don’t say that to invite your pity. It’s just how it goes. Maybe I too have crossed a singularity. I’m finally starting to understand the advice of the mystical 20th century monk St. Silouan the Athonite: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”

At the end of Living in Wonder, I reveal for the first time a mystical vision I had back in 1993, near the start of my career as a writer.:

So, a final confession, of a mystical event that has guided the entirety of my career as a writer. It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this, but then, I’m too old to care what people think.

In 1993, at the beginning of my Christian walk, I was praying for a believing friend having an intense spiritual crisis when I had a sudden quasi-apocalyptic vision. I saw a civilizational catastrophe that cast light on the test my stricken friend faced. At the conclusion of this strange fugue state, I heard God’s voice say, “You will lose your reason,” but, the voice continued, cling to Christ and “don’t be afraid, for the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed.”

You will lose your reason. What? And what is this Lion and Root stuff? I figured they must be messianic titles, but as a man new to the faith, I couldn’t be sure. I phoned my friend, told him what had happened, and he thanked God for this sign, which he believed told him what to do. A few minutes later, shaken by what had happened to me—it was the first such episode and, as of this writing, the last—I sat on the couch of my Washington, DC, apartment reading one of the Gospels, which were all fresh to me then.

Though it was the dead of winter outside, and the windows were closed, a puff of air blew softly across my left cheek and seemed—I know this is weird—to pass through my mind. It left the words “Revelation 5:5” there. Startled by this, I turned to that verse and read these words: “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.’”

A surge of electricity shot up my spine! I could not have known that verse. This confirmed that the vision I had experienced while praying had not come from the overheated imagination of a new convert but had been real.

That was more than thirty years ago. I have lived to see specific things foretold in the vision come true. In recent years, as our common culture has gone morally insane, I believe now I understand God’s warning about the loss of reason. He wasn’t talking about me personally; he was talking about humanity. It was only in completing this book that I came to grasp the purpose of that prophecy. In a time of general madness and perhaps coming persecution, our last and best hope is found only through a strong and robustly countercultural faith, one rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and a creed that roars out the good news, and in defiance of the world’s wisdom: that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has already won the victory.

At this stage in my life, old as I am, and having been through all that I’ve been through, I don’t really care what people think. I’m just telling you what happened.

Anyway, Cease. The stories that follow fictionalize the discoveries of Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg — again, presenting them as deriving from moments of mystical insight, usually coming after periods of prolonged suffering. Anyone familiar with the literature of Christian mysticism will recognize this. At one point — this is certainly fictionalized — young, tormented Heisenberg stumbles late at night into a louche pub, where the prostitutes, drug addicts, and the wretched of the earth gather. A dark and dangerous stranger visits him at his table, and engages him in conversation. He says to Heisenberg:

“Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?”

The drug the man gives to Heisenberg grants the young physicist a vision that reveals to him a fundamental truth of quantum physics — what we all today know as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

Analysing Schrödinger’s mathematics and his own, he had discovered that certain properties of a quantum object, such as its position and quantity of motion, were coupled, and the relationship between 3 them evinced strange properties. The more precisely the one was identified, the more uncertain the other became. If, for example, the exact location of an electron was established with certainty, arresting that particle in its orbit like an insect impaled on a pin, then its velocity became utterly undefined; it might be immobile or moving at the speed of light, and there was no way of knowing which.

The opposite was true as well. If the electron was endowed with a set quantity of motion, its position was so indeterminate that it might be in the palm of your hand or at the other end of the universe. These two variables were mathematically complementary: establishing the one dissolved the other.

His original intuition had been correct: it was impossible to “see” a quantum entity for the simple reason that it did not have a single identity. Illuminating one of its properties necessarily obscured the other. The best description of a quantum system was neither an image nor a metaphor, but rather a set of numbers. They left the park and plunged into the city streets while they discussed the consequences of Heisenberg’s discovery, which Bohr saw as the cornerstone upon which a truly new physics could be founded. In philosophical terms, he told him as he took his arm, this was the end of determinism.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. Those hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.

Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.

I wish Labatut had included a chapter based on Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, which demonstrate the mathematical impossibility of proving all things. Another way of saying it is that mystery and faith are built into the structure of reality. We can know with mathematical, rational certainty that there is no way to know all things with mathematical, rational certainty.

We are getting here into the world of speculation covered exhaustively by Iain McGilchrist in his fantastic, massive volume, The Matter With Things, which I believe will come to be regarded as one of the seminal texts of the century. What McGilchrist discusses, as a scientist and a literature scholar, is the limits of rational knowledge, but also the aesthetic and intuitive way of knowing reality. What we in the West don’t really understand about reality is that it is meant to be known, ultimately, in relationship. Orthodox Christianity tells us that knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. Yes, we can know many things about God, but the only way to know God deeply is through relationship. When Kierkegaard said, “Truth is subjectivity,” this is what he was talking about. Not that truth is relative, but that the deeper truths of existence can only be known through passionate inner appropriation of objective truths.

In this sense, a barely literate monk like St. Silouan the Athonite can “know” reality more completely than a quantum physicist. Why? Because he exists in passionate relationship to its source, God. He is more completely integrated into reality through a process called theosis. All of us, from the scientists to the ditch-digger, are called to theosis. It is possible for all of us, but only through a life of prayer, fasting, refusing evil and choosing good.

One lesson I take from reading Cease, then, is that quantum physics gives us a rational justification for mysticism as a way of knowing. And not only mysticism, but other non-rational ways of knowing: art, poetry, dance, and other forms through which reality presents itself to us. As McGilchrist writes so powerfully, these are means of knowledge that the brain’s right hemisphere apprehends. Only the domination in our time and place of the left-brain way of knowing causes us to think of these things as secondary to science, mathematics, and formal reason.

Going back to the Heisenberg passage from Cease, it seems to me that the lesson for everyday life that we can take is that if you decide to understand reality as a “particle”— that is, a fixed truth — you will inevitably diminish your complete understanding of it. Yet if you decide to experience it as a “wave” — as a flow of intuition and feeling — you will also diminish your complete understanding of it. You cannot have both at the same time.

Or can you? I am thinking about Kierkegaard’s three modes of existence: the Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious. I need to go back to reacquaint myself with the details here, but if memory serves, Kierkegaard wrote about those who live Aesthetically, going with the flow of things, bound by no real ethics, seeking pleasure and diversion. For them, boredom is the root of all evil. The Ethicist, by contrast, rises above mere feeling, and lives by a fixed set of moral rules that take him outside of himself.

I’m thinking that there might be an analogy between the Aesthetic/Wave, and the Ethical/Particle. For Kierkegaard, though, both modes are insufficient. They can be gathered together and transcended in the Religious mode. In the Religious mode, one understands oneself as a Self only in relation to God. To be precise, the Religious man exists in absolute relation to the Absolute, and in relative relation to the Relative. In concrete terms, only God is god; everything else is meaningful only in its relationship to God.

If I’m right, the wave-particle distinction, in everyday life, can be understood as aesthetic-ethical, and transcendent-concrete, as eternal-temporal. Only in God can the paradox be resolved. Only through the Absolute Paradox — Kierkegaard’s word for Jesus Christ, the eternal made temporal, the God as man — can we exist in right relation to reality.

Lots to think about today as I’m puttering around my city. I look forward to your thoughts. Tell me, readers, has anybody ever written anything exploring Kierkegaard’s thought in light of quantum physics? If not, maybe that should be my next book. But I will have to do some brain-breaking reading and thinking if so. Don’t know if I can write such a book without spending a couple of years along in that cottage by the sea.

Anyway, I hope you will pre-order Living In Wonder. I have a feeling it’s going to kick off a lot of different conversations. I hope you will also read When We Cease To Understand The World. When I finished the book this morning, I understood better that mysterious line in my 1993 vision: “You will lose your reason.” An echo of it is in the dark stranger’s question to Heisenberg: “Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?”

We can no longer understand this world of ours through reason. It has gone quite mad. But we can understand it through faith in Christ. But what we mean by “understand” is not what the rationalists say it is.

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