To Understand the World…

When We Cease to Understand the World (originally published in Spanish by Anagrama, Un Verdor Terrible)

by Benjamín Labatut

Rather simplistically, Amazon’s Google link blurbs Benjamín Labatut, a Chilean writer born in the Netherlands but now living in Santiago, Chile, as someone obsessed with “the dark side of science” (Amazon.UK, re: The Maniac, Labatut’s latest book, accessed 27/5/25). He is, I believe, more probing than that. In the case of Verdor Terrible/When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut mildly states, “This is a work of fiction based on real events.” (Acknowledgements, 342 e-book version.) And, yes, its subject is science and scientists.  No, we are not talking biography, either about the human beings so depicted in the book, nor of the subject matter, quantum physics as upended by some of those persons.^[1] There are biographical elements in this work, and Labatut’s work is a more unique merger of fiction and non-fiction. Or, no, perhaps it is a challenge to such attempts to put writing in such distinct categories; for he has asserted that “Anything that comes out of a writer is fiction.”

My own interest in the book was, I admit, not sparked by my wanting to read fiction, but by my curiosity about things astronomical; for Labatut spins several convincing tales about those who brought quantum physics into the limelight and into serious scientific debate. Interestingly, he himself is not a physicist: in fact, he says, “I’m not even an amateur physicist—I’m just fascinated by it. I understand about as much physics as you can without understanding mathematics.” (Physics Today, accessed 15/6/25).When We Cease to Understand is made up of five short stories one—the “When We Cease to Understand the World” of the book’s title—longer, beginning with a primarily factual tale and progressing onto those more and more fictional, with the last completely so.  Without the ponderousness of academic discussion, ideas about the nature of the universe, of reality, gravity and so on, are engaged by Labatut’s fictionalized, but genuinely having existed, physicists and scientists; and two things in particular came to the fore.  One was the obsessiveness—even apparent madness—of those on the path of discovery; and second was the explanation of various mathematical/physics concepts which, for an interested amateur like me, were completely understandable as well as fascinating. Indeed, most of my highlights dealt with the explanation of the physics.  

The first tale does indeed seem to zero in on the dark side of science. In the largely factual “Prussian Blue,” readers meet chemistry in the form of some horrific uses: Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s “prussic acid” the derivative of Prussian blue, the intense and stunning blue which so captivated artists in lieu of the far more pricey lapis lazuli. Otherwise known as cyanide, Nazi top dogs used it to commit suicide upon their defeat in WWII, as did Alan Turing, British codebreaker when the government he helped defend condemned him for his homosexuality. Labatut goes on to chronical the work of the chemist, German Jewish Fritz Haber, who, in the 1920s, helped develop the hydrogen-cyanide based gas, Zyklon B, as a pesticide but later used, post Haber, to kill Jews in the Nazi concentration camps. Haber also developed the toxic mustard gas used in WWI, which led to his being declared a war criminal by the Allies at the Armistice of 1918.  Also in this first tale, Labatut gives us an account of Haber’s far more humane discovery of how to extract nitrogen from the air which led enabled millions of people “…who until then depended on such natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre [sic] for their crops ” to avoid death “from lack of nourishment.” (35) Up until that discovery, the alternative acquisition of large-scale fertilizers sounds strange to us now:

[When] English tomb raiders… exhausted the reserves in continental Europe…they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion. On the other side of the Atlantic, the craniums of more than thirty million bison slaughtered on the plains were scavenged by poor Native Americans and peasant farmers, picked up one by one and sold to the Northwestern Bone Syndicate of North Dakota, which stacked them into a pile the size of a church before sending them to the carbon works that ground them to produce fertilizer and “bone black”, the darkest pigment available at the time. (44-45)

Mind, the success of raising more food crops, Labatut avers, meant feeding the troops and prolonging of the war, during which time a young recruit, first rejected as ‘too weak to bear arms’ but one who later that year wrote to “King Ludwig III of Bavaria, petitioning him for the right to serve as an Austrian in the Bavarian army. His permission arrived the next day.” (45) He went on to become der Fuhrer of Nazi Germany. (ibid)

From the next tale, “Schwarzschild’s Singularity,” we readers plunge on into the world of quantum physics.  Another patriotic Jewish German, “Karl Schwarzschild, [was an] astronomer, physicist, mathematician and lieutenant in the German army.” (58) He was also one of Germany’s most eminent scientists who, via a letter sent to Einstein in December of 1915, came up with “the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity.” (ibid) Unfortunately, as the astonished Einstein marveled at Schwarzschild’s solution, sat down, wrote and sent off a letter to Schwarzschild, the latter had died.^[2]

In the case of the singularity of the Schwarzschild tale, in scientific terms it refers to “…a point in space-time where matter is infinitely dense, and a function takes an infinite value, often at the center of a black hole.” (AI overview, Google, accessed 29/5/25) I am oversimplifying, for the original idea of a black hole was first announced by John Michell, an English country parson, who said in 1783, “A black hole is a volume of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.” (https://www.amnh.org, accessed 29/5/25) Then, in the 20th century—and though both he and Einstein had their doubts—Schwarzschild was one whose work returned to the possibility of their existence.   

As noted above, Labatut does not give us a dry academic discussion of  his subject, let alone Schwarzschild’s work, which essentially took Einstein’s theory of relativity to its next step. Imagine: Schwarzschild continued his research while serving in WWI and, yes, he died of a horrid necrotizing illness, Pemphigus. But he left behind what subsequent minds simply could not let alone. Indeed, as the subsequent “The Heart of the Heart,” “When We Cease to Understand the World,” and “The Night Gardner” testify, fictionally in terms of narrative and character, but without besmirching the scientific facts—as these tales testify, our human curiosity and subsequent drivenness to understand the world, the universe, in which we live will not let out minds alone.

Science is something we humans have developed, the product of increasing necessity, discipline, of having to pay careful attention to the world in which we live and are part of. And being fascinated by it and its creatures/creations. It is not ‘out there,’ to be discarded when it makes us uncomfortable. Even here, Labatut’s tales bring in the fallible human element and even the human difficulty of many brilliant minds accepting new ideas, however well demonstrated.  In that, we could say Labatut does a masterful job of “character development.” But that term risks reducing Labatut’s work to a class in fiction writing, rather than a series of tales in which readers cannot help but be lured into a world of brilliant, fallible humans.  

Do read the book.

— Bronwyn Mills

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^[1] Not, however, by Albert Einstein, however, who stubbornly refused to be convinced with the veracity of this new ‘version’ of physics.

^[2] And, let us not forget that a great deal of all this has to do with understanding gravity at its most potent.  Interesting discussion for those who get BBC radio, channel 4, Jim Al Khalili’s interview with Claudia de Rham who has pioneered in the field of massive gravity and ideas of why the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. 

N.B. For British readers, a clip from The Sky at Night on black holes. For a summer read see N.B. Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? Bookshop.org in US and in UK.