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

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Intersection of “Madness” and Genius

The notion that genius and creativity are generated by or provoke a form of mental pathology is a very old idea dating to the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. It experienced a resurgence in the 19th and early 20th century (Robinson, Andrew. “Genius and Madness.” Genius: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2011). While contemporary research disputes this association as a scientific fact, it is explored here in a poetic, literary sense. The scientists in When We Cease to Understand the World demonstrate varying degrees of “madness,” ranging from eccentric behaviors to hallucinations and visions that inspire their work.

Many of the scientists are described as having unusual compulsions that revolve around an obsession with their work. As a child and young adult, Schwarzschild is so single-minded that he doodles astronomical equations in the margins of his school books and gets nerve damage in his hands from taking off his gloves to make notes in the freezing cold. As a student, Mochizuki spends days without food or sleep reading the work of Grothendieck, prompting “incoherent babbling” about the “heart of the heart” of mathematics (66). Both he and Grothendieck have a single-minded focus on their work as adults with few outside interests. Grothendieck, for example, “did not read newspapers, watch television or go to the cinema” (67). Heisenberg likewise is compelled to work himself to extreme exhaustion. Further, Heisenberg’s hallucination of light particles jumping between states inspires the uncertainty principle. In the case of Grothendieck, the implications of his discoveries eventually lead him to completely break with reality and live in isolation where he claims to be visited by a two-faced woman, along with other erratic behavior. These forms of “madness” propel their work and are emblematic of their genius.

The “madness” often takes the form of ecstatic religious or mystical experiences. The text references religious ascetics such as Sufi mystic Hafez and French Catholic mystic Marthe Robin, who pursued extreme acts of fasting to achieve the state of mind necessary to communicate with God. The scientists Heisenberg and Grothendieck identify with these figures and mirror their extreme self-abnegation in the pursuit of accessing higher truths. Some scientists, like Schrödinger and Heisenberg, enter a fugue state where they act as quasi-mystical mediums channeling these insights without their conscious understanding of them.

The text implies that it takes a certain amount of “madness” to reach the insights that these scientists achieve, and that “madness” may also result. Both Grothendieck and Schwarzschild are haunted by their knowledge.

The Impact of Scientific Discovery

When We Cease to Understand the World is highly pessimistic about scientific discovery; the text describes how even seemingly neutral scientific advances are used to create weapons of mass destruction. The opening chapter references Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an early text that “warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science […] the most dangerous of all human arts” (19). Many of the scientists foresee the damage their discoveries will have upon the world and are consumed by guilt or seek to suppress their own work.

One scientist, Fritz Haber, is unmoved by the deaths his chemical weapons cause. His discovery of how to capture nitrogen from the atmosphere provides one of the central examples of the dangers of scientific discovery. Haber developed the method to ensure that Germany could create gunpowder and explosives for WWI. It was also used to create artificial fertilizer that “addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century” (27). Fertilizer that staves off famine may seem like an example of the benefits of scientific discovery. However, the text takes this impact one step further in stating that the availability of artificial fertilizer “provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years” (28). In Chapter 5, this growth is described in negative terms as “overpopulation” (181). Thus, even the seemingly beneficial aspects of scientific discovery have their own negative results.

Another key example of the impact of scientific discovery is seen in the way that advances in astronomy and quantum mechanics are deployed during WWII to create the atom bomb. In seeking to illuminate the foundational structures of the world, scientists produce seemingly neutral work that is ultimately used for destructive ends. Schwarzschild and Heisenberg both have visions that warn them of this eventuality. While Schwarzschild dies soon after his vision, Heisenberg lives to see his vision fulfilled by the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.

The night gardener in Chapter 5 explicates this theme by stating:

We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light, and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines, and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world (187).

The insights of scientific discovery are essential to the technology that shapes the modern world, but no one fully understands their destructive power.

The Price of the Quest for Knowledge

Achieving knowledge and understanding comes with costs to the health and well-being of the novel’s protagonists. As in the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, when the scientists discern the foundational truths of the universe they experience deprivation, loss, and psychic injury. Due to their ambition and hubris, the scientists learn things that may, the novel suggests, be better left unknown.

As noted in the discussion of The Intersection of “Madness” and Genius, many of the scientists pursue their work with single-minded interest, intellectually and socially isolating themselves from the rest of humanity. De Broglie, for example, shuts himself away in his house for three months with barely any contact with the outside world while he works, “los[ing] his mind” in the process (116), even as it leads him to an important insight about the dualistic properties of all matter. Schwarzschild experiences physical injury to his fingers and eyesight because he is incapable of thinking of anything but his work. Like de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Grothendieck, Heisenberg isolates himself but takes his self-denial one step further: He “refused to masturbate: he was convinced that all his body’s energies must remain bottled up so that he might devote them to his work” (104) This leads to nocturnal emissions and may have contributed to his erotic visions of Hafez and Goethe. In each case, the single-minded pursuit of knowledge takes a toll on the scientist’s personal life.

In some cases, the results rather than the process of the scientist’s work prove destructive. Fritz Haber’s wife dies by suicide in disgust over the hundreds of deaths caused by his chlorine gas. While he does not feel guilty about his wartime actions, he is haunted by her death and tries to avoid thinking about her by throwing himself into his work. Chapter 1 also discusses the case of scientist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the scientist who first isolated cyanide and who also created an arsenic-based pigment. Scheele “died with a ravaged liver, his body covered head to toe in purulent blisters, paralysed by the build-up of fluid in his joints” (20), likely a result of arsenic poisoning. Ultimately, his own invention may have killed him. Chapter 3 provides another example of the personal cost of knowledge. Fearful of how his work may be used by others, Grothendieck leaves the academy and, by the end of his life, completely cuts himself off from society.

In the end, When We Seek to Understand the World posits that sometimes it is better not to seek new understandings. As the night gardener says to the unnamed narrator in the final lines of the novel, the only way to know how long a tree has to live is to cut it down and look inside its trunk, “but, really, who would want to do that?” (188). Gaining knowledge requires destruction, which is too high a price to pay.