When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

It’s fiction. You should know that. 

[Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg] could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

Fiction.

Tired of walking, [American mathematician Leila Schneps] spent several days sitting on a bench in front of the only organic market in the region, hoping to see Grotheendieck appear, and finally she saw an old man buying green beans, in a monk’s habit, leaning on a cane. His face was obscured inside his hood and his features hidden behind an unkempt beard, long as a wizard/s, but she recognized his eyes.

…His isolation was neither an escape nor a rejection; he had done it for the protection of mankind. Grothendieck said that no one should suffer from his discovery, but he refused to explain what he meant when he spoke of “the shadow of a new horror.”

Beautiful fiction.

“I still remember the first time I received a telephone call. As soon as I heard the ring, I picked up the receiver and pressed my head against the speaker, giving myself over to the voice emerging from it, and there was nothing that could mitigate that violence. Impotent, I suffered as I saw how my consciousness of time was destroyed, my resolve, my sense of duty and proportion! And to whom do we owe this magnificent inferno if not to you, to people like you? Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?”

But fiction nonetheless.

I wonder how a scientist or mathematician or even a writer of non-fiction writer views the stories of this collection.

“Surely it is clear that these tales are too interwoven—too tightly plotted—to represent reality.”

“Surely the average reader recognizes there is no way to know what is going on in the heads of these historical titans.” 

“Surely the reality of history is not so easily supplanted in the minds of raders by compelling characterizations and literary license.”

fiction

The unfortunate news is that, no, I doubt intensely how much consciousness the average reader brings to the text. I, myself, had to look at the library of congress delineations five pages in to make sure of what I was reading.

Stories that incorporate known history feel like they uncover an aspect of truth, rather than invent points of interest. Perhaps this is an intentionally eerie parallel to the nature of scientific discovery–the entwined natures of invention, creation, and observation are foregrounded in When We Cease; when the practical structures of the novel match the conceptual tension in the text, there is a unique friction—fiction and non-fiction collapse into a singularity, at once both and neither—a new category of writing. 

His matrices were all consistent: Heisenberg had modelled a quantum system based wholly on direct observation. He had replaced metaphors with numbers and discovered the rules governing the inner phenomena of atoms. His matrices allowed him to describe the location of an electron from one moment to the next, and how it would interact with other particles. He had replicated in the subatomic world what Newton had done for the solar system, using only pure mathematics, with no recourse to imagery.

Heisenberg may have been able to create models without any imagery, but the text is not mathematics. It is replete with metaphor:

What [Heisenberg] had achieved had no precedents: it was like deducing all thee rules of Wimbledon–the number of sets, the length of the grass, the tension of the nets and even the mandatory white that players have to wear–from the few balls that flew out of the stadium, without ever having witnessed what takes place on the court.

We aren’t used to reading about scientists–not only their work, anyway. More often we find quirks of their personalities or personal lives, and, through fictional retellings, remake them as human. That math is a fundamentally confusing false structure, superimposed on our world, makes it function similarly to a fantasy novel’s magic system. But, in reality, math needs to relate to something—to point to some underlying structure of the cosmos—to be consistent. It has to tie to some underlying process, unless it is solely solipsistic, and therefore functionally worthless in application. Consistency in the real world is power.

The a + b = c conjecture reaches down to the roots of mathematics. It proposes a deep and unexpected relationship between the additive and multiplicative properties of numbers. If it is proven, it will become a formidable tool capable of dispelling, as if by magic, a vast quantity of long-standing enigmas.

One of the enigmas of When we Cease is the fascination with Schrödinger’s priapism—perhaps there is a metaphor I am missing? Heisenberg’s absinthe trip is a similarly puzzling detour that seem to add nothing to the text didactically nor through literary merit. Perhaps these jaunts are a joke, a taunt, a goof—perhaps the collective image for Schrödinger becoming not the cat in a box—

His intention was to demonstrate the ridiculous character of this manner of thinking. The proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation told Schrödinger he was absolutely right: the result was not only ridiculous, but paradoxical. And yet it was true. Schrödinger’s cat, like any elementary particle, was alive and dead (at least until it was measured), and the Austrian’s name would remain associated forever with this failed attempt to negate the ideas he himself had helped give rise to.

—but his turgid member amuses the author. It leads one to wonder, and not for the first time in this book, what is real and what is storytelling? Reframing the box and cat from the popular conception of Schrödinger’s public-facing opus to this absurdist contrarianism—is it true? Did Schrödinger push back against quantum mechanics, or is that a literary invention of When we Cease? Most online sources cite…this book in a casual “today I learned” style. Is this an uncovered truth that will infect the public consciousness, or simply a literary invention accepted as a more interesting version of events?

The beauty of literary historical fiction is the uncertainty it creates. What is real and what is not must exist together, bound up in the pages and in the minds of the reading public. Without outside research, whatever happens within the book must be assumed both real and fictional, and remains so until directly observed.

What a wonderful application of a principle Schrödinger might, or might not, have hated.