When We Cease to Understand the World

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Verdure

Verdure is a term that describes green, flourishing vegetation, particularly grass. This term is used in the Spanish title of When We Cease to Understand the World, Un Verdor Terrible, which roughly translates to “A Dreadful Verdure.” Verdure is one of the central motifs of the text.

Its meaning is revealed in the letter Fritz Haber writes to his wife at the end of Chapter 1. Haber has developed a fertilizer that will stave off famines and prompt population growth. However, he worries that:

[T]he 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 (33).

While nitrogen fertilizer may seem like an unambiguously beneficial scientific discovery, the “terrible verdure” is emblematic of the way that even seemingly neutral or positive scientific innovations fundamentally change the world and may have unintended, negative consequences. This motif reappears in Chapter 5 in a passage that expresses concern about a “vegetable plague” and in the night gardener’s reflections on plant life and its relationship to death. Here, too, the motif highlights the theme of The Impact of Scientific Discovery, hinting at the hidden dangers of seemingly positive advances.

Structure of the Universe

The structure of the universe is a recurring motif. All the scientists discussed are obsessed with understanding the foundational elements of matter, life, and the universe, whether through the lens of mathematics, physics, astronomy, or chemistry. They work with single-minded focus on this goal, to the detriment of their mental health and physical well-being. One example of this motif is found in the story of the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild. Schwarzschild is “convinced that mathematics, physics and astronomy constituted a single body of knowledge” but that “only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe” (43). Another example is Grothendieck’s work on the motive, “a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object” (74). De Broglie’s theory that explains how all matter is both particle and wave is likewise an attempt to identify the structure of the universe at a subatomic level. The structure of the universe is a motif for The Price of the Quest for Knowledge, underscoring how the scientists’ hubris and ambition leads them to uncover truths that are better left unknown.

Dreams, Hallucinations, and Visions

Many of the scientists in the text experience dreams, hallucinations, and visions that either inform their work, warn them about its consequences, or both. Dreams, hallucinations, and visions are symbolic of the way that seemingly rational scientific progress is spurred by irrational, unscientific experiences. These are portrayed as otherworldly moments that give the scientists visions of the future, insight into the past, or contact with deities like the Hindu goddess Kali.

These dreams, hallucinations, and visions appear to the scientists in different ways. For example, Schrödinger has a recurring dream of the Hindu goddess Kali sitting on his chest, arousing him, then cutting off his head and eating his genitals. This dream, as interpreted by Miss Herwig, is a blessing in which “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). Heisenberg, while suffering from a fever, hallucinates the Sufi mystic Hafez offering him a glass of wine that is really “the blood of the poet, who was now masturbating furiously while bleeding from his wrists” (105). This vision is an encouragement to pursue his work at all costs. He later has another hallucination of light jumping from point to point, “glittering like a parade of fireflies” (157). Later in this hallucination, he sees “countless men and women with slanted eyes, their bodies sculpted of soot and ash” reaching out to him (157). This image is symbolic of the Japanese people killed by the nuclear bombs Heisenberg’s research helped make possible. More broadly, it symbolizes the impact of scientific discovery.