“In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day.”
There’s a few moments in this novel where the shape of the idea comes through most clearly. One moment comes when the reclusive mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck, is described with his shaved head as a lookalike for Michel Foucault. In another, and more obvious clue comes from the title of the novel and section that shares that title in the novel, where debate over quantum physics between Heisenberg and Schrodinger breaks down to the language and models they’re using to understand the math, and especially from Heisenberg’s apparent need to not only prove the math, but be able to speak in the language of the math itself.
The novel is an accounting of several mathematical, physics, and chemistry discoveries, their discoverers, and the various waves these discoveries made in the world. The novel opens with the scene above of Goring’s nails, but continues through the discovery of “Prussian Blue”, the pigment of blue we recognize in Starry Night, for example, and how this discovery is part of a chain that also led to Zyklon B, mustard gas, and chemical fertilizers. From there we go to other moments like the story of Grothendieck, who completely abjured mathematics when he had a kind of spiritual awakening and especially feared the real world uses his work might bring.
The long section called “When We Cease to Understand the World” is about the development of quantum physics, which the book contends no one truly understands, not completely that is. The book is about the failure of the human brain to understand the infinite possibilities within the realm of the quantum, but more so, it’s about the failure of language to capture those same infinities, whether they are infinitely large or infinitely small. All novels are generally about impossibility of language to capture the world, but also the attempts to try anyway, but this book is especially an attempt to show what that looks like when turned to the implications of math and science in the 20th century especially, where engineering, industry, and scale were able to put those into production. It’s a devastating book in a lot of ways, and it stays away from some of the most deeply troubling moments of the 20th century as well.
