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Ruth Franklin New Yorker
There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true?
Prussian Blue
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. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany’s production of the drug at the end of the Second World War.
Troopers used drugs to stay awake, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria.
“An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane,” a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war.
A wave of suicides swept through Germany in the final months of the war. In April 1945 alone, three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin.
Goring committed suicide by cyanide when he found out he’d not be hung but executed by firing squad. His remains were scattered late at night in the waters of the Watzenbach, a small brook chosen from a map at random.
A Collector:
man spent twenty-six thousand euros on the copper and zinc cylinder that had once concealed the glass vial Göring ground between his teeth on October 15, 1946.
Hitler did not trust the pill’s dosage. He asked his personal doctor to give it to his German shepherd Blondi.
The effects of cyanide are so swift, but there is one account of its flavor - left by 32 year old Indian goldsmith who managed few lines before dying
Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life.
Cyanide’s authentic origins: a by-product isolated in 1782 from the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue.
Swiss pigmenter and dyer Johann Jacob Diesbach discovered Prussian Blue. He did so by accident: his aim had been to mimic the ruby red made by crushing small parasitic insects.
He thought he had discovered hsbd-iryt, the original colour of the sky—the legendary blue used by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods. Passed down across the centuries, closely guarded by the priests of Egypt as part of their divine covenant, its formula was stolen by a Greek thief and lost forever after the fall of the Roman Empire.
rel:Trapped Projects
Frisch himself included this procedure in an appendix to his magnum opus, an eighteen- tome work to which he dedicated the last twenty years of his life; these books catalogue, with a scrupulousness bordering on madness, the three hundred species of insect native to Germany. The final volume details the complete life cycle of the field cricket, from its nymph stage to the courtship songs of the males, a chirrup as shrill and piercing as the whistle of a train.
The chemist who discovered cyanide experienced this danger first- hand: in 1782, Carl Wilhelm Scheele stirred a pot of Prussian Blue with a spoon coated in traces of sulphuric acid and created the most potent poison of the modern era. He named this new compound “Prussic acid” and was immediately aware of the enormous potential of its hyperreactivity.
He did not know, 200 years after his death: Cyanide: into the twenty-first century, its industrial, medical and chemical applications would be such that, each month, a sufficient quantity would be manufactured to poison every person on the planet.
Cyanide takes your breath away
Medical literature calls this the audible gasp that precedes tachycardia, apnoea, convulsions and cardiovascular collapse.
Turing used Cynaide - he’d chant the Snow White couplets “Dip the apple in the brew / Let the sleeping death seep through” while he worked.
Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.
Schwarzchild’s Singularity
Schwarzchild writes to Einstein with solutions to his recently published equations. Einstein, astonished, writes back to the now dead man.
According to Schwarzschild’s calculations, in such a case, space-time would not simply bend; it would tear apart. The star would go on compressing and its density would increase till the force of gravity became so powerful that space would become infinitely curved, closing in on itself. The result would be an inescapable abyss permanently cut off from the rest of the universe.
They called this the Schwarzschild singularity.
His imagination had fallen prey to the pull of his discovery: with alarm, he realized that if his singularity were ever to exist, it would endure until the end of the universe. Its ideal conditions made it an eternal object that would neither grow nor diminish, but remain eternally as it was. Unlike all other things, it was immune to becoming and doubly inescapable: in the strange spatial geometry it generated, the singularity was located at both ends of time: one could flee from it into the remotest past or escape to the furthest future only to encounter it once more.
“I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”
From that moment onwards, he underwent a change that would even affect his manner of note-taking. His handwriting became smaller, to the point of becoming practically illegible.
According to Schwarzschild, the most frightful thing about mass at its most extreme degree of concentration was not the way it altered the form of space, or the strange effects it exerted on time: the true horror, he said, was that the singularity was a blind spot, fundamentally unknowable. Light could never escape from it, so our eyes were incapable of seeing it. Nor could our minds grasp it, because at the singularity the laws of general relativity simply broke down. Physics no longer had any meaning.
The Heart of the Heart
NOTE
This one seems to be on Shinichi Mochizuki (possibly dadaist? performance?)
“Impossible to understand.” rel:Expression Marguerite’s Theorem
Prominent mathematicians gather. On fourth day, everything collapsed. At this point, no one was capable of following the proof’s arguments any further.
Felt as though studying a paper from the future: “Everybody who I’m aware of who’s come close to this stuff is quite reasonable, but afterwards they become incapable of communicating it.”
“If researchers want to apprehend my work, they must first deactivate the thought patterns that they have installed in their brains and taken for granted for so many years,” Mochizuki wrote on his blog.
Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory - Mochizuki has created a complete universe, of which, for the moment, he is the sole inhabitant.
Alexander Grothendieck’s curse.
He spoke of the “heart of the heart”, anentity Grothendieck had
discovered at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely
unhinged him. rel:Trapped Projects
One of his greatest strokes of genius was expanding the notion of the point. Beneath his gaze, the humble dot was no longer a dimensionless position; it swelled with a complex inner structure. Where others had seen a simple locus without depth, size or breadth, Grothendieck saw an entire universe.
Part of Grothendieck’s brilliance was to recognize that there was something grander hidden behind every algebraic equation. He called this something a scheme. Each individual solution to an equation, each shape, was nothing but a shadow, an illusory projection that flashed forth from the general scheme, “like the contours of a rocky coast illuminated at night by the rotating lamp of a lighthouse”.
The ideas turn in circles. The author returns to the same arguments over and over, aspiring to total precision.
He wishes to unmake his influence, to dissolve into silence, to erase the last trace of his existence. “Make it all disappear, at once!”
NOTE
The ending of this one is a little too cutesy for me. I pray this is fabricated “According to her, Grothendieck refused to see his family and received only a single visitor, a tall, timid Japanese man too shy to enter the room until she invited him in.”
When We Cease to Understand The World
Heisenberg leapt up, walked to the chalkboard before the astonished eyes of all present, and shouted that electrons were not waves and that the subatomic world could never be visualized. “It is far stranger than you can imagine!”
Heisenberg had glimpsed a dark nucleus at the heart of things. And if that vision was not true, had all his suffering been in vain?
… Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.
The physicist—like the poet— should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections.
That aspect of nature required a completely new language.
…who seemed to have gouged out both his eyes in order to see further.
In practical terms, this meant that a part of the wave his equation described escaped the three dimensions of space. Its crests and troughs travelled through multiple dimensions in a highly abstract realm that could only be described by pure mathematics. Beautiful as they were, Schrödinger’s waves were not a part of this world.
One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death. In the course of a life, there is nothing but the rise and fall of material and mental forms, while the unfathomable reality remains. In every creature sleeps an infinite intelligence, hidden and unknown, but destined to awaken, to tear the volatile web of the sensory mind, break the chrysalis of flesh, and conquer time and space.
The more precisely the one was identified, the more uncertain the other became. If, for example, the exact location of an electron was established with certainty, arresting that particle in its orbit like an insect impaled on a pin, then its velocity became utterly undefined; it might be immobile or moving at the speed of light, and there was no way of knowing which. The opposite was true as well. If the electron was endowed with a set quantity of motion, its position was so indeterminate that it might be in the palm of your hand or at the other end of the universe. These two variables were mathematically complementary: establishing the one dissolved the other.
Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears. Before being measured, it has no attributes; prior to observation, it cannot even be conceived of. It exists in a specific manner when it is detected by a specific instrument. Between one measurement and the next, there is no point in asking how it moves, what it is, or where it is located. Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.
None of these limits were theoretical: they were not a failure in the model, an experimental limitation or a technical difficulty. There simply existed no “real world” outside that science was capable of studying. “When we speak of the science of our era,” Heisenberg explained, “we are talking about our relationship with nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a game between man and the world. Science can no longer confront reality in the same way. The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations: these arise from the fact that its interventions alter the objects it proposes to investigate. The light science shines on the world not only changes our vision of reality, but even the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks.” Scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.