When We Cease to Understand the World

Part 1, entitled “Night in Heligoland,” describes how Heisenberg arrives at his particle theory. In 1925, Heisenberg has a bad allergic reaction to pollen while working at the University of Göttingen. To treat his condition, he leaves Göttingen to go to an island called Heligoland in the north of Germany, where the climate is dryer. While in Göttingen, Heisenberg was trying to understand “the common root of all natural phenomena” (95). When he arrives in Heligoland, he stays at a small hotel where he allows himself to be taken care of, begrudgingly, by the proprietress, Frau Rosenthal. He goes on long swims to the point of exhaustion, much in the same way he pursues his research. While looking at the sea, Heisenberg reflects on his talks with his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who taught him that “the physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections” (97).

While recovering in Heligoland, Heisenberg develops his theory of subatomic particles by making a series of numerical matrices (complex tables of numbers). He goes on long walks around the island, thinking about his work. One day, while walking around the island, Heisenberg gets caught in a fog bank. While he waits for the fog to clear, he reviews his notes and decides his work thus far has been nonsense. Then he hears thundering in the fog and sees shapes moving. He tries to convince himself it’s the island’s wild horses, but when the fog clears, he doesn’t see any hoofprints.

Heisenberg is beset by fever and migraines. While in bed, he obsessively reads the West-Eastern Divan by German poet Goethe, which was inspired by a bad translation of the Persian poet and mystic Hafez. Heisenberg also continues his work on his matrices while in bed. He begins to hallucinate that he is having conversations with Hafez. Eventually, his fever breaks, and when he reviews his notes, he sees that he has solved his matrices, although he isn’t sure how he did it. The matrices “allowed him to describe the location of an electron from one moment to the next, and how it would interact with other particles” (106).

Heisenberg returns to Göttingen and shares his work with Bohr. Bohr is impressed and notifies Albert Einstein of the important work. In September 1925, Heisenberg publishes his work on quantum mechanics.

Chapter 4, Part 2, “The Prince’s Waves,” covers the story of the eccentric French physicist Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie, known more commonly as de Broglie. The chapter opens with Albert Einstein’s critique of Heisenberg’s work. He disapproves of how it breaks the rules of classical physics and purports that the subatomic world cannot be visualized. Instead, Einstein prefers the work of de Broglie.

Labatut gives a history of de Broglie’s life, beginning with his childhood. As a prince, de Broglie lived a sheltered, cloistered life and was doted upon by his sister, Princess Pauline. He was a very bright child, and while his family thought he would go into diplomacy, under the influence of his brother, the experimental physicist Maurice de Broglie, he became interested in science. The young prince proved himself talented at theoretical physics and soon isolated himself in his room, working on his theories. In 1913, de Broglie joined the military and worked as a telegraph operator in the Eiffel Tower during WWI, an experience that traumatized him.

De Broglie’s closest friend is the painter and collector Jean-Baptiste Vasek, founder of the art brut movement. Vasek collects the works of “psychiatric patients, mentally disabled children, drug addicts, alcoholics, perverts and sexual deviants” (112), on the theory that they are the true avant-garde. Vasek dies by suicide and, in his suicide note, asks de Broglie to protect and continue his work. De Broglie, who realizes he was in love with his friend, dedicates himself to this task, culminating in an exhibition at his palace called La Folie des Hommes (the Madness of Men). The exhibition receives mixed reviews, and when one reviewer criticizes Vasek’s paintings, de Broglie cuts himself off from the world for three months, living inside the palace/gallery. Eventually, his siblings break into the building, determined to take de Broglie to a mental asylum.

Two months later, de Broglie presents what he has been working on as a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne University in Paris. His work, entitled Research on the Theory of Quanta, claims that not only light but all matter exists simultaneously as both particle and wave. His thesis baffles his reviewers, and they send a copy of it to Albert Einstein for approval. Einstein eventually writes back that he approves of de Broglie’s thesis, describing it as “the first weak beam of light to penetrate the dilemma of the quantum world” (118).

Chapter 4, Part 3, “Pearls in His Ears,” details the history of physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In 1914, Schrödinger joins the Austro-Hungarian army, and he spends WWI stationed in a fort in the Italian Alps without seeing much action. One night, he sees lights and he thinks a large army is approaching the fort, but when he looks closer, he realized it is Saint Elmo’s Fire, a meteorological phenomenon that creates glittering blue lights. After the war ends in 1918, Schrödinger returns to Vienna, where he has few means and people are dying of starvation. His mother dies of breast cancer and his family’s linoleum factory shuts down. To earn money, he teaches classes at the University of Vienna, and in his spare time he studies the philosopher Schopenhauer and through him the Hindu philosophy of the Vedas.

He marries in 1920 to Annemarie Bertel. Although she makes more money than him as a secretary, he forces her to quit her job, and he travels to different poorly paid university positions around Germany and Switzerland. After getting bronchitis, which later turns out to be tuberculosis, he goes to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to recover. By 37, he is working as the head of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, but he has become increasingly frustrated with his mediocre output and his growing resentment of his wife’s lover, the Dutch physicist Peter Debye. It is then that he discovers and is inspired by the work of de Broglie.

Soon after, he suffers another bout of tuberculosis and returns to the sanatorium of Dr. Otto Herwig in the Swiss Alps. While there, he stays in the room next to Dr. Herwig’s daughter, who has suffered with tuberculosis from the age of four. Strangely, when Dr. Herwig’s daughter is doing well, the other patients at the sanatorium do well, and vice versa. Miss Herwig, only 16, is exceptionally bright and reads many books while she convalesces. Upon his arrival at the sanatorium, Dr. Herwig asks Schrödinger to give his daughter private lessons, but he refuses and instead works in a fugue state. When he comes to, he finds that he has written out the equation he needed, but he has no idea how he arrived at it. That afternoon in the cafeteria, while Schrödinger stares transfixed at the people disfigured by their ailments, Miss Herwig brushes up against him and he becomes fascinated by her. He agrees to give her private lessons.

Schrödinger is erotically attracted to her but he focuses on the lessons and is impressed with her intelligence. After the first lesson, Schrödinger reviews the equation he made, “which seemed to capture perfectly the movement of an electron inside an atom” (132). He still can’t make sense of it. The next day, he has another lesson with Miss Herwig, during which she tells him about her insect collection, and then they go for a walk along the frozen lake. During their walk, they talk about theoretical physics and Hindu philosophy. Schrödinger slips upon returning to the sanitorium and sprains his ankle. Miss Herwig takes care of him while he recovers in bed. Schrödinger tells her about a recurring dream he has of the goddess Kali sitting on his chest while rubbing his groin, and then finally cutting off his head and eating his genitals. Miss Herwig tells him this is a good dream: “The castration Schrödinger suffered at the Dark Mother’s hands was the greatest gift he could receive, a mutilation necessary so that his new consciousness could be born” (137).

Schrödinger continues to work on his equations. On Christmas Eve, while the residents of the sanitorium celebrate, Miss Herwig comes to Schrödinger’s room and gives him pearls to put in his ears to muffle the noise. Schrödinger confesses his fascination with her. In response, she tells him about how she lost her childhood fear of the dark and leaves the room. Schrödinger masturbates to her image. After Christmas, his illness and Miss Herwig’s worsens, and he spends his time convalescing, listening to her cough in the next room. Around New Year, Dr. Herwig comes to his room and asks if he will give one last lesson to his daughter. Miss Herwig is close to death. Schrödinger tells her about a central problem of his equation, the symbol ψ (the Greek letter psi), which is immeasurable. Eventually, Miss Herwig falls asleep and Schrödinger molests her while she sleeps. Suddenly, he has a vision of Miss Herwig as Kali, and he runs away, terrified.

Chapter 4, Part 4, “The Kingdom of Uncertainty,” covers Heisenberg’s dispute with Schrödinger at the conference in Munich and its aftermath. It opens with Schrödinger’s return to Zurich, whereupon he publishes the research he completed at the sanatorium. When presenting his work in Munich, he is interrupted by Heisenberg, who claims that it is “a dead end, a blind alley leading them away from true comprehension” (150). For the next two years, Heisenberg sustains his critique of Schrödinger’s work. However, Schrödinger seemingly gets the upper hand when he publishes a paper showing that both Heisenberg’s and his own method produce the same results. Heisenberg at this point is living in the attic of the Bohr Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. Bohr, his mentor, embraces both Heisenberg and Schrödinger’s work in a process he describes as “complementarity” (152). Bohr feels that subatomic particles could manifest as either as particles or as waves, depending on how they are measured. This leads to long arguments between Heisenberg and Bohr.

Late one night, Heisenberg winds up at a bohemian bar in Copenhagen. There, he meets a mysterious man who forces him to drink. The man tells him that all of the catastrophes of the modern world are due to people like Heisenberg. He says, “Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?” (157), and then passes out on the table. Heisenberg runs away and has a hallucination in the forest in which trails of lights appear to jump from place to place. A group of indistinct figures made of ash appear to reach out to him until they are vaporized by a flash of light. He runs on, literally afraid of his shadow.

Later, Heisenberg tells Bohr he has realized that electrons exist in many places at once and with different velocities. The more accurately one measures the exact location of an electron, the less one knows about its velocity, and vice versa, because it is multiple things at once. The subatomic elements that make up all things are essentially unknowable. To celebrate the discovery, Heisenberg and Bohr have a few drinks and Heisenberg tells him about the hallucination he had that inspired this insight, although he does not mention the crowd of people who had reached out “as if wishing to warn him of something” (163).

Chapter 4, Part 5, “God and Dice,” gives an account of the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. At the conference, Einstein, de Broglie, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Bohr all present their theories of quantum mechanics. First, Schrödinger presents his wave theory, but he is unable to persuade the crowd because it relies on six-dimensional modeling. Then Heisenberg and Bohr present their theories, which are now known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. They explain that “physics ought not to concern itself with reality, but rather with what we can say about reality” (166), because subatomic particles are immeasurable. Albert Einstein rejects Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and spends the next three days arguing with Bohr, trying to disprove it. While he is unable to do so, Einstein continues to insist, “God does not play dice with the universe!” (168)

The Epilogue of Chapter 4 describes what happens to Einstein, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg after the conference. Despite encouragement from Einstein, de Broglie gives up on his vision, embraces the Copenhagen Interpretation, and becomes a university professor. Einstein spends the rest of his career attempting to unify relativity theory and quantum mechanics, without success. Schrödinger develops his famous thought experiment, that of a cat in a box that is both alive and dead, to exemplify how ridiculous Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is, but to his dismay the thought experiment is instead adopted as a good example of why the theory is correct. He spends the rest of his career making contributions to many other scientific disciplines before dying of tuberculosis. Heisenberg receives the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his contributions to quantum mechanics and is the lead scientist of the Nazi nuclear weapons program, although he wrongly concludes that such a weapon is outside the realm of possibility. As the narrator puts it, “his uncertainty principle has never been disproved” (171).