“Looking from the outside, I haven’t achieved anything significant too. But, looking from the outside” says one of the characters from Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. The precondition then for a true and conscious admiration of a thing is an utter understanding of the both outside view of it and as well as the inside. The world or people in general could never really appreciate what myriad of efforts, chances, courage, and nuances goes on behind and within a final product to appear: be it an invention, a letter, a kiss, a proposal, a mediocre achievement – a life.
And while we could never really, as people from the outside, arrive on the inside story on how something came to be, since those unbearable and sacred details are the assets of that person alone, we could at least curb the loneliness and fill in some empathy through patient imagination, from our own passionate experiences, about the other’s journey. How difficult it was for me to propose and thereby how painful it must’ve been for her/him to have been rejected; or how impossible it seemed for me to solve this math’s question, thereby how impossibly genius of that scientist to have discovered such an equation in the first place – we can only say that humble phrase: I can only imagine!
And that’s all we have to do: is to turn on our own torchlight of experiences and project it on to the imaginative canvas, where a fragment of the person’s portrait might form, along with everything that they might’ve been through. The brighter and stronger, had we burnt, the keener the hues of light, and the more visual the imaginations. Look within you to reach another person’s heart, might then be the saying of the wise.
And Labatut’s relentless little book is a robust example of it: the light it shines on our imaginative canvases brings to life, with acute emotions, awe-inspiring wonders, and gut-punching realizations, the geniuses of some of the most renowned and important scientists of the 20th century. From the very first line of the first chapter, which starts in the classic ‘mention the date and go’ manner, you can feel a force hitting both your mind and heart as the story keeps galloping on, getting intense, weirder, and more bizarre. Goosebumps, you’ll get generous amount of it, but the staying effects of such brilliantly sharp and striking writing will have a nightmarish impact that’ll last way longer than the hairs standing on your skin.
The first chapter is about an acidic and rarely colored pigment called the ‘Prussian Blue’, and it starts somewhere in the prologue where a scientist is going through a gas poison and in the world outside, which is during World War I, hell is broke loose and thousand of lives, soldiers and animals, are dropping dead because of this ‘green gas weapon’. The storytelling here is masterful: the way it starts on a specific date, somewhere prior to the climax, and then goes about its world-building and character introduction, with such rapid, intense, yet fulfillingly detailed pace, and then reaching that climax with a mighty force that just forces you to close the book, thump it the desk, and attend to your brain that has just been stormed with radical and unfathomable ideas.
The main chapter of this book, ‘When we cease to understand the world’, which is also the name of the book, is about quantum physics and the mechanics of the quantum realm, and how such an unprecedented idea pushed and broke the greatest minds of the 20th century. Writing about the lives of Schrodinger and his contemporary, Heisenberg, Labatut creates a series of explosions in the minds of the readers, that keep going off with more force and rigor, till it has propelled us to fully comprehend, if not the science, then the madness and genius of these great scientists.
Scientists, who in high school, were the most boring people to us, because our teachers themselves saw their worth only in terms of numbers, equations, and Nobel Prizes. Labatut reintroduces us to these great figures with more passion, life, detail, and genius. They become alive and more human afterwards. The last chapter, ‘The night gardener’, works as binder for the whole book, in that it combines both the beginning and the end of book. It explains how a night gardener from Labatut’s town introduced him to some of these mad geniuses and how by mentioning him in the last chapter, this book, which is so hard to strap, came to a calming end.
The atomic size of this book against the giants of literature makes for a nuclear explosion metaphor: for the explosion of ideas that this book starts will leave one beautifully devasted under its reverberating effects.
Ratings: 5/5 ***** (June 11,
2022_)