There are two ends of science. At one end is a great lumbering machine where equations and numbers are fed in, and bullets, nerve gas and nuclear warheads come out. At the other end is an undeniable truth about the universe and our place within it.
BenjamĂn Labatut thinks we should be terrified of both.
is a novella that explores what happens when science unravels its own core conceit: that we can understand reality. It combines the Lovecraftian terror of descending into the abyss of scientific truth and finding something utterly alien staring back with the absurd, Kurt Vonnegut-like possibility that the descent reveals nothing to hold onto at all – no meaning, no structure and no purpose.
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There could hardly be a better stage for Labatut’s masterpiece, translated by Adrian Nathan West, than the eerie calm that enveloped the planet after its two world wars. For decades, humans had tried to outcompete each other to come up with new and interesting brutalities they could inflict upon one another – with gas, with metal, with radiation. But for Labatut, science wreaks a different kind of violence. The huge revolutions in our understanding of space-time and the quantum world destabilise the logic with which we make sense of our brief lives.
Labatut’s characters are all real mathematicians and scientists. From Fritz Haber – the father of fertilisers and modern chemical warfare – to Werner Heisenberg, who pioneers quantum mechanics by abandoning ordinary human experience, the book weaves its plot across these biographical vignettes.
Again and again, Labatut returns to people who push discovery so far that it can only become dangerous to them. And the picture he paints is ghastly: science will bring people to the point of real enlightenment, but that enlightenment is something profoundly anti-human.
Quantum mechanics supplies his richest material. The theory does more than replace a clockwork universe with one governed by probabilities. In its more unsettling interpretations, it seems to deny any ordinary picture of what’s happening underneath our measurements. Quantum theory appears to suggest that physicists might instead be relegated to magicians: able to summon astonishing predictions from an arcane formalism while never quite grasping what, if anything, is really taking place underneath.
Labatut takes impressively few liberties with discussions of chemistry, mathematics, quantum mechanics and the “singularities” of general relativity. The book’s depth and rigour make it completely convincing to even the most seasoned physics enthusiast. He has done his research so well that fact and fiction become difficult to distinguish.
I know, for instance, that the mathematical visionary Alexander Grothendieck – one of Labatut’s key characters – revolutionised algebraic geometry before becoming a recluse. I don’t know whether his hermetic life was provoked when he glimpsed the “heart of the heart”, the object lying at the deepest centre of mathematics. Labatut imagines this revelation as something like confronting a beautiful, horrifying, many-eyed angel.
This book will haunt you.
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