When We Cease to Understand the World (2020)

That the early 20th century should coincide with the discovery of the unconscious, the foundations of nuclear physics and mechanized slaughter on a scale never-before-seen, seems, in hindsight, like the perfect nightmare; too bad to be true. Thanks be to the unconscious that I don’t have to think about it too much—or is that the pre-conscious? Uh…. history, as they say, is the best movie: character, landscape, costume, intrigue, sex and violence: in short, a work of the imagination. This super-readable novelized account of the madness of 20th century physicists is case in point. Spoiler alert: the universe is unknowable. I am puzzled as to why Obama included it among his favorite books of 2021; it is not a hopeful book. The Spanish title is Un Verdor Terrible—roughly translated: A Terrible Green. This is a far better title than its current English one and I can only guess that Obama (and the New York Review of Books imprint) believes in Science and the return to an understandable world? Patrolled by killer drones no less. Anyhow the book suggests through a series of biographical sketches of actual mad scientists—Schwarzschild, Schrödinger, Heisenberg etc—that the math that proves the existence of blackholes is the blackhole; that, like the abyss that “stares back,” the absurd mathematical proofs by which we justify insane cosmological phenomena is itself abyssal and subsequent to mental breakdown. Math, physics, chemistry and neuroscience (that den of spiders) each herald a dream of progress towards a known world even while producing clockwork worlds of bloodshed, terror and psychosis; ie modernity. This is not to say that science can’t know something of our reality (climate change) or improve it (we all own refrigerators) but rather to say, as this book does, that perhaps reality itself is at base—or on the surface—cryptic and terrifying? I don’t make the rules. Or follow them. I also don’t blame anyone for going crazy thinking about atomic particles too much. Nor all the bloodshed of the “modern” 20th century for that matter.