Benjamín Labatut’s writing is difficult to classify, but creates a sense of excitement that is not usual in run-of-the-mill history of science. After all, it is not really history of science— Labatut writes about real scientific figures and real events, although not all of it is true. Neither is it science fiction—it is entirely distinct from that genre which asks us to imagine what the world could be like. It dares us to ask, how is the world, really? And what part has science had to play in shaping this world?
In “when we cease to understand the world”, Labatut intertwines the old familiar faces – Schrödinger and Einstein – with entirely new ones. Not many, for example, have heard of the mathematician Grothendieck, who had a huge part to play in the direction and interests of modern mathematics. Grothendieck died in a mountain village in France, horrified, in the wake of the second world war, at the prospect that science could produce destruction on the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book though contains as many antiheros as heros: we hear about Fritz Haber, a chemist who helped to develop chemical weapons during the second world war, and who almost killed himlsef "when the wind changed direction during a field test". There is, I think, somewhere in there, Arendt's concept of the banality of evil: that what makes evil all the more shocking is that it is commited by everyday people.
The book manages to maintain a comic undertone throughout despite the often unpleasant endings of these figures. This undertone is surprising, not because of this, or even because science should be taken seriously, but because the message in the book, in the end, is not a light-hearted one. The narrator meets a night-time gardener, who leaves the reader with an apocalyptic foreboding—and science is at the root of it. The gardener tells us of how lemon trees die: “their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.”
These questions ring truer than ever, it seems, in today’s climate: technology seems to be accelerating at an unprecedented rate, and we start to wonder, once again, what price there is to pay for curiosity. And I do not necessarily mean curiosity of a nation, or a group, but oftentimes it is curiosity of an individual. There is a scene in “The thinking game” documentary, where Demis Hassabis speaks of his desire to create artificial general intelligence, and how that lead to the founding of the company Deep Mind. There is something attractive in the childish innocence of his curiosity, in his quest to achieve something unthinkable in his lifetime. There is also though something quite horrific about it. Horrific, because the entire human race has been propelled into Hassabis’s dream, which oftentimes feels a bit like a fever dream.
This is not to say that science is not beautiful, only that its ramifications are more real than we dare to realise. This has been shown in history time and time again. Labatut’s message is perhaps that it is not the politicians we should fear, not the criminals, and certainly not the ‘other’ (other classes, other races, other nationalities), but the scientists, who are continually behind the scenes reshaping how reality plays out.