WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

Finished: April 13, 2022

pp: 193
Author: Benjamin Labatut
Translator: Adrian Nathan West
Other books: Nothing in Translation
Rating: So good!
Some thoughts:

The intersection of art and science can be dicey. For every Thomas Pynchon novel, there’s a Benedict Cumberbatch movie about a tortured scientist/mathematician/marine biologist/et al.. The new Cormac McCarthy book(s) explore “esoteric ideas about math, physics and the nature of consciousness." They could be great! They could also be stinkers. It’s part of the appeal and fundamental silliness of a movie like Interstellar. At its release, there were breathless stories about how visual effects artists worked with mathematicians to create computer models capable of generating for the first time an accurate representation of a black hole. But the plot of that movie also hinges on the idea that nothing escapes a black hole except love. It’s a movie of some depth, but that depth is filled with Mountain Dew. The ease with which something can tip into either impenetrable self seriousness or flubber makes it all the more impressive when an author is able to find the right balance of the two.^[1]

One of the things I love most about WWCTUTW is how it navigates that tension, and how it changes over time: moving from mostly straightforward reporting to what ends up feeling like a Bolaño short story by its end. That transition is also wrapped up in and reinforces the ideas Labatut is working through. Each section seemingly tackles its subjects from a different perspective and literary tradition, allowing Labatut to take things on from different angles in order to more fully explore them.

The first section of the book is the least novelistic. It reads like an episode of Radiolab written by Annie Dillard, and it rips. More importantly, it serves as an introduction for some of the themes the book is interested in: the unintended consequences of scientific discovery, the relationship between art, science, and violence, and how the metaphors we use to tell stories about the world actually end up shaping our understanding of the world. It ends up being really useful that your first exposure to these ideas is so down-the-middle because you need that foundation in order for the more abstract sections later on to really hit.

As the book goes on, each section becomes more and more novelistic, dives deeper and deeper into the imagined lives of the mathematicians at its center. The slow burn of fiction being added ends up mirroring the plot (as much as there is one). What starts as a high-octane history of blue paint shifts to a story about the world of physics in the 20th century, and as I understand it (and I don’t really understand it), that is a story about our ability to see but not describe, to witness but not understand.

After Einstein published his general theory of relativity, physicists sought to make that theory specific. Einstein provided a broad framework for how the universe could work, and scientists, physicists, and mathematicians took that framework and began poking at the edges of it to test how accurate it was. Real scientific method type stuff. Hypotheses and whatnot.

All of that work, including Einstein’s, was an attempt to describe the world in a way that was both comprehensible and accurate. Now this was a real pickle because quantum mechanics is neither comprehensible nor, strictly speaking, measurable. Therefore their work was a search for the right metaphor. One of the reasons the book packs such a punch is that their effort is ultimately unsuccessful. It’s about failed art, and specifically a failure that’s rooted in the fundamental unknowability world you’re trying to describe. One of the reasons I love the high modernism of Faulkner and Woolf (who were writing at the same time as the mathematicians this book describes) is because their work contains a lot of the same tensions.

It’s hard to overstate how the scientific and technological discoveries of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century affected literature. Our ways of seeing the world shifted. Photography allowed us to replicate the world precisely; X-rays showed us inside our bodies; airplanes allowed us to see the ground from unthinkable heights. The novels of that time period wrangled with those changes - about what it meant to live in a world that you could see better but understand less. What was the point of art in a world where there were more accurate methods of depiction than paint or words? What is the point of science when we reach the limits of our understanding? By increasingly focusing on the interior lives of these physicists and mathematicians, WWCTUTW becomes more and more about the psychological toll of those conundrums, and less about the math that governs them.

I really love how slowly that transition happens, the slow reckoning that you’re in a very different-feeling book than the one you started. It’s almost jarring when you realize how far you’ve strayed from the stylized but straightforward reporting of the first section, but the shift allows you to start thinking more about living in the unknowable world that the first few sections of the book lays out. After the grounded beginning of the novel, the general lack of mooring in the later sections destabilizes you as a reader in a way not unlike the novel's subjects. That’s especially true in the highly novelistic third section. It describes a physics rivalry between Schrödinger^[2] and Heisenberg^[3] and their warring attempts to describe what happens inside atoms. Both of these guys are destroyed by their quest. The more time they spend trying to find a way to describe the true nature of the world, the less capable they are of existing in this one.

Some imagined snoot might take issue with the book’s descent into fiction, but those are people you should avoid. To them I would say, who gives a shit? I’m not going to understand the math either way. Moreover, as this book points out again and again, we’re all operating at the limits of our understanding here. It’s more of a Mitski song about math than it is a textbook. So chill out, snoots.