Exploring the liminal space between fact and fiction in a frighteningly ingenious manner, Benjamin Labatut leaves his readers enveloped in a sense of extreme enervation. A fatigue brought on by a hitherto employed combination of exhilaration and perplexity. When We Cease to Understand the World begins with an arresting narration of facts and concludes with a stupendous bout of fiction. In between can be found a Byzantine concoction that challenges the intrepid to unspool the threads of reality from the tapestry of imagination.
Labatut attempts to reprise the bewildering origins of Quantum mechanics, an esoteric concept that held the entire scientific community in thrall during the first few decades of twentieth century. A bunch of maverick theoretical physicists transformed the staid world of Newtonian mechanics into a teeming, throbbing and pulsating microcosm of abstract probabilities that threatened to upend the very understanding of Physics. Labatut wades into this period with gay abandon and attempts to explore the minds of some of the protagonists in the Quantum mechanics theatre.
Labatut begins his book with a story titled “Prussian Blue.” Labatut refrains from engaging in extensive literary licenses as he elaborates on the facts leading to the discovery of Cyanide. Ironically, one of the pioneers of the discovery of chemical weapons, Fritz Haber also had the distinction of discovering a process that isolated nitrogen from air and thereby expediting the production of fertilizers – a discovery that handed Haber a Nobel Prize.
The dizzying experience for the reader begins with the second story, “Schwarzschild’s Singularity.” Reminiscing about the tragic life of German polymath Karl Schwarzschild, Labatut attempts to penetrate the mind of this genius whose obsession with the notion of singularity kept him occupied with abstruse equations even as he was left grappling with a deadly and terminal skin disorder courtesy chemical attacks experienced in the trenches of the First World War. Labatut wonders if Schwarzschild, while working on the Einsteinian equation of general relativity had any prescience about the horrors that singularity would wreak, “in the eyes of dead horses buried in the muck, in the bullet wounds of his fellow soldiers, in the shadowy lenses of their hideous gas masks,” ……
At the core and crux of Labutat’s collection of stories, is the experience of Werner Heisenberg, as he embarks on his now immortal Uncertainty Principle. The reader is forced to go the extra mile, and beyond, in trying to separate events from fantasies. While competing with yet another brilliant, albeit eccentric German physicist Erwin Schrödinger in codifying the limits of measurement in the subatomic realm, Heisenberg retreats to the extraordinarily isolated and desolate landscape of Heligoland. Walking the beaches of this windswept sliver of land and navigating its cliffs, Heisenberg is plagued by visions almost fictional realism and is confined to his room with a ferocious bout of fever. His landlord, unnerved by both his physical and mental states summons a doctor before Heisenberg deteriorates into a medical state of worrying proportions.
Labatut portrays Schrödinger to be embroiled in his own set of psycho-spiritual afflictions. Admitting himself into a sanatorium, Schrödinger gets himself entangled in a platonic relationship with the young daughter of the owner of the Sanatorium. Lapsing into auto-erotic fantasies, the physicist works himself into a manic state by working on his equations like a man possessed when he is not fantasising about the young patient occupying the adjoining room.
Yet another Nobel laureate, Prince Louis de Broglie, finds himself closeted in a Gaudí-Esque mansion, and producing phenomenal degree of mathematical output. De Broglie is obsessed with a personal museum of curated by his recently deceased artist lover. One of the possessions of the museum represents a gargantuan replica of Notre Dame made totally from excrement.
Every story exacerbates the fictional quotient attached to it and the more the reader immerses herself into the piece, the more exaggerated her task of making sense of the phantasmagoria that leaps out of the pages with unbridled ferocity.
When We Cease to Understand the World – an agglomeration that defies genre.