When We Cease to Understand the World

"You’re right that it has a very innovative form. It’s a series of linked pieces, each one part-essay, part-story, part-biographical account of great minds, geniuses, who—according to this account—seem always on the verge of collapsing into madness as they unlock the secrets of the universe. It’s set in the 20th century, up until the present, and the book gently leads us in with the first essay—or story , or however we’re going to describe it—which is called ‘Prussian Blue.’ It’s about the invention of a dye, which leads on eventually to the invention of the poison used in the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps . Each further piece then seems to go further and further away from conventional nonfictional narrative—becoming more imaginative, strange, more compelling, more interesting, more emotionally charged. “We, English-speaking readers, are so lucky to be given access to these amazing authors whom we don’t already know” We are talking about great intellectual inventions. These people—people like Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Niels Bohr—they’re the great scientific thinkers of the 20th century. What they were doing was not so much scientific research as reimagining the world. And what Labatut is telling us, or what I took away from this book, is a new understanding that mathematics and physics , like language, are symbolic systems. And none of those systems are really capable of containing the strangeness of the actual substance, the matter, of the universe. All that a scientist can do, and all that a creative writer can do, when grappling with what Labatut calls “the dark heart” of the physical world, is create a kind of poetry. So that’s what the great minds were doing with their formulae. And that’s what Labatut himself has done in this dazzlingly clever book. There are a lot of books in this undefinable genre, an increasing number. Biography used to be so tedious, formally. However interesting its content was—and I’m going back two generations now—the biographer would start with the subject’s birth and go plodding through all the way to their death. But I think it’s generally recognised now that even when you are conveying information in a nonfiction work, you should try to engage the reader in the same way that a novelist does. You can use techniques like flashbacks and flashforwards, you can use pacing, points of view… all those things that are completely commonplace in fiction but have taken a while to be adopted by writers of nonfiction. And as that has happened to nonfiction , I think there’s a kind of corresponding movement in writers of fiction. Novelists are looking towards the tremendous richness of material offered by history, or travel writing , or scientific understanding – all the different ways you can think about reality – then using this as raw material for stories."