WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD - BENJAMIN LABATUT

I needed a shorter book and got this on a whim, mostly because I saw all the reviews about how strange of a book it is, and I’m always interested in strange. And this is indeed strange, a sort of new genre, the quasi-fictional essay. I suppose one could point to something like David Sedaris, where a personal essay has fictional elements (tho, the extent to which Sedaris in particular does this is obviously up to debate and not something I’m getting into here), but this is different. These essays present themselves and seem like normal non-fiction, essays about scientific discoveries and the lives of various mathematicians, physicists and scientists. Normally, one would assume that the author is presenting “true” information to the best of their ability, maybe the author would speculate as to the inner motives and monologues and desires of the people being discussed, but always in a way that the author felt was defensible through known facts. This book doesn’t do that. While it does try to remain true to the science of what is being discussed, it takes a lot of liberties with everything else. The back of the book has a page where he somewhat tells us what is truth and what is fiction (you can just wikipedia something that seems fictional) but it’s really besides the point. Labatut knows that you could look this up if you want to and that his skill set, what he can do, lies elsewhere. He’s interested in the human costs of all this stuff, how pure science, learning things for the sake of learning them, figuring out how the universe actually works, reacts when it hits the real world. So we get some meditations on Fritz Haber, the man who figured out how to pull nitrogen out of the air. About half of all the nitrogen in your body right now, the stuff that makes up your literal DNA, is the result of this process. The huge population boom in modern times is also a result of this process. He is also the father of chemical warfare and doomed hundreds of thousands to die terrible deaths in the trenches of WWI. He discusses Grothendieck, the greatest mathematician of the 20th century who also becomes tormented by how his ideas are used in the real world. Same with the group that invents quantum physics in the early 20th century. Each time we see the hubris that lies at the heart of all science as well as how you can’t create things in a vacuum. There’s no such thing as “pure research” ; it exists in the real world and has a use. And you don’t get to decide what the use is, since, as a scientist, you’re actually fairly low on the “who is important?” scale. Anyway, there was some pretty beautiful writing in this thing and I think it did a good job transmitting how strange and frankly unthinkable some of the quantum physics stuff is. The idea that physics (and that “hard” sciences in general) help us understand the world. From Newton on, so the thinking goes, we learn more about how things work and we can get better and better at predicting what is going to happen, and if we don’t know something, it is just because the instruments are subtle enough yet and we will eventually get there. QP says that this isn’t true, that there are totally unknowable things, by definition. And that these things sit at the base of everything, they are actually the ultimate base of reality. This book does a great job really digging into what that means and feels like, rather than just showing us the science and math that uncovered this. I’m excited by what else Labatut can cook up, I’m putting him on the list of living authors to follow. This genre is really interesting and exciting, more please.