A Terrible Greening

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

The Spanish title of Labatut’s book is Un Verdor Terrible – roughly, A Terrible Greening

NB: This is an astonishing piece of writing, at once simple and deeply thought-provoking. The style is reminiscent of Borges, and the philosophical citation that comes to mind is this one from Leo Strauss: The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things. It also reminds us that truth is far stranger than fiction; and that the most brilliant minds cannot escape the inscrutability of evil and the presence of eternity. The true knowledge of the souls, and hence of the soul, is the core of cosmology.. DS

An extraordinary ‘nonfiction novel’ weaves a web of associations between the founders of quantum mechanics and the evils of two world wars.

John Banville

God does not play dice with the world, Albert Einstein famously declared, to which Benjamín Labatut would surely retort: perhaps not – but the devil does. In fact, Einstein himself had a lifelong niggle of doubt about mathematics, the discipline that we suppose keeps the Lord away from the gaming tables. How is it, he wondered, that an intellectual tool invented by humans can comprehend, account for and even manipulate so much of objective reality? That the physical world should be amenable to something we made up seemed to him suspect.

Is it perhaps that we register only as much of the world as our figurings can encompass? Wittgenstein had already conjectured that the limits of our language are the limits of our knowledge; could this be the case also, but more radically, with mathematics and the branches of science on which it is based? We see only that which we are capable of seeing: how much is beyond us?

About quantum mechanics, the development of which was as bold and momentous a feat as the formulation of the theory of general relativity, Einstein had more than a doubt – he loathed it, refusing to accept a version of physics that replaced Newtonian certitude with a haze of probabilities. He spent the last 30 years of his life attempting to bring about a synthesis that would transcend quantum theory, and failed. Outlandish hypotheses put forward in the late 1920s by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, the originators of the Copenhagen Interpretation of how atoms work, today underpin the science that guides the exploration of the farthest reaches of space and the workings of the mobile phone in your pocket.

Books of popular science usually celebrate the wondrous achievements that applied mathematics has wrought in the realms of physics, chemistry and cosmology. Labatut, born in Holland and resident in Chile, will have none of it. When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West) is his ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing “work of fiction based on real events”, though it might have been better to call it a nonfiction novel, since the majority of the characters are historical figures, and much of the narrative is based on historical fact….

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut-review-the-dark-side-of-science

++++++++++++++++

The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb

Socrates, the soul and the cosmos

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

A Lying World Order

Cynical Theories

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The Industrialization of the Mind

The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil

Simone Weil The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940) (archive)

Evil: The Crime against Humanity. Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism

Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)