REVIEW OF WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD BENJAMIN LABATUT

 BY TOM WELLS

When We Cease to Understand the World is a 2020 collection of five increasingly fictionalized short stories that became all the rage when Barack Obama included it in his Summer 2021 reading list. If there is a unifying theme it appears to be that the single-minded pursuit of scientific truth leads to individual madness and global destruction. Happy days. 

The first story—which Labatut notes is barely fictionalized—chronicles the yin and yang of scientific discovery. As one example, Labatut describes the discovery by Fritz Haber of the synthesis of ammonia from the nitrogen that makes up 78% of our air. This scientific leap led to the mass production of fertilizer that enabled crop output previously restrained by manure and guano availability. A few years later, Haber made a discovery of quite a different stripe when he invented the mustard gas that killed or crippled hundreds of thousands of World War I combatants. Meanwhile, over the course of the last 125 years, it has transpired that ready access to nitrogen may have provided a bulwark against famine but it has also—as the Night Gardener in the book’s final instalment points out--driven the Earth’s population to an unsustainable eight billion persons.  Yin and yang, indeed.  

By the fourth installment of the collection, the stories have become more fictionalized, the writing more fanciful and the destruction more palpable, as it dramatizes the intellectual battle between the quantum disciple Werner Heisenberg (he of the Uncertainty Principal) and the more classical Erwin Schrödinger (he of the Cat) with a mixture of argument, hallucination and icky suppuration. Heisenberg’s hypothesis about the immeasurable dual states of electrons—they can be both particle and wave--may have led to the modern computer age but it also, as Heisenberg himself sees in a frenzied vision, fostered the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

“Countless men and women with slanted eyes, their bodies sculpted of soot and ash, were stretching out their arms to try and touch him. They thronged around him…, humming like a cluster of bees caught in an invisible web.” 

Which, in the minds of Labatut and those who have praised this book, is a far more horrific reality than the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Osaka and countless other strategic Japanese cities that would have otherwise occurred. 

Without the scientific leaps of the 20^th century, the world would have certainly seen less mass death from chemical poison and nuclear fusion. Instead, it would have seen time-honored population control from those two stalwarts, famine and disease. I, for one, would have been dead from pleural pneumonia before I turned twenty-one. I may not understand the world, but I do understand where I’d be without 20^th C. scientific advancement.  

**½