When We Cease to Understand the World

Chapter 2 opens with theoretical physicist Albert Einstein opening a letter from Karl Schwarzschild that contains “the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity” (37). Einstein is shocked because Schwarzschild was able to calculate how the mass of a star changes the space and time around it. Einstein responds to the letter, but Schwarzschild is already dead.

Schwarzschild’s calculations are accurate for ideal stars, but it troublingly indicates that for collapsing stars space-time 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 […] permanently cut off from the rest of the universe” (39). This phenomenon is called the Schwarzschild singularity.

When Schwarzschild initially makes this discovery, he can hardly believe it because it defies all known laws of physics. While fighting in WWI, Schwarzschild obsesses over the dark hole of the singularity. Later, he is diagnosed with pemphigus, an autoimmune disease that may have been triggered by a gas attack and that ultimately kills him. Schwarzschild volunteered to fight for Germany in WWI, even though he was 40 years old and the director of the Astrophysical Observatory in Potsdam.

The narrative then describes Schwarzschild’s childhood and his early fascination with astronomy. Schwarzschild went to a Jewish day school, where he would doodle planetary calculations in the margins of his schoolbooks. He went on to earn a doctorate in astronomy and then worked as an intern at the Kuffner Observatory in Vienna, where he studied dying stars. At 28, he became a professor and then director of the Göttingen Observatory. At 32, he traveled to Algeria to watch a total eclipse, but he looked at the sun for too long, creating a permanent hole in his cornea.

Schwarzschild is an obsessive and reckless personality, once getting nerve damage from the cold during a hiking trip because he keeps taking his glove off to work out calculations. Schwarzschild is very awkward around women, but he marries Else Rosenbach, with whom he has three children, one of whom later dies by suicide to avoid Nazi persecution. Schwarzschild is particularly worried that “physics would be incapable of explaining the movement of the stars, or of finding order in the universe” and so tries to map out all of the stars and their movement in order to solve the three-body problem (48). He also discovers that stars have different colors with the help of a Jewish porter at the university.

Schwarzschild volunteers to fight in World War I and sees heavy action in the Argonne as part of the 5th Army artillery regiment. While at the Western Front, he continues his scientific work. Later, he is transferred to the Eastern Front, where the horrors of war shock him. When he develops the symptoms of pemphigus, he is taken off active duty and put on furlough. While suffering acute pain from the ulcers, he continues to work on his singularity equations. Eventually, he discovers the Schwarzschild radius, the point at which a black hole would suck something in.

Mathematician Richard Courant meets Schwarzschild in the military hospital. Schwarzschild tells Courant of his discoveries and how much they haunt him. Courant is the last person to speak to Schwarzschild before he dies. For years after Schwarzschild’s death, Einstein, who eulogized Schwarzschild, challenges the notion of the Schwarzschild singularity. However, in 1939, scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder publish an article that confirms Schwarzschild’s findings.