“If just a speck of dust contains billions of atoms, how could one speak meaningfully about something so small?” Danish scientist Niels Bohr asked German Werner Heisenberg as they climbed a mountain. The physicist should not discover facts, he said, but strive to create metaphors and mental connections. Like a poet.
The scene, present in “When We Stop Understanding the World”, by Chilean BenjamÃn Labatut, encapsulates something that seems to be the book’s central effort: to show that science and literature, in fact, are not separate things.
“If science studies the speed of light, literature is concerned with the speed of the shadow, but both are ways for human beings to make sense of their experience”, describes the author in an interview. “What they share is a Luciferian freedom: neither science nor literature recognizes limits.”
Finalist for the International Booker Prize and considered one of the best of the year by The New York Times, Labatut’s book creates five narratives, hybrids of essays and short stories, starring scientists painted as geniuses who have expanded human knowledge. And all the while it highlights what’s tragic about it.
“The world is condemned to an existence that suffers from an inevitable and painful duality”, says the author of a book taken by the vertigo of catastrophe. “Matter and antimatter, pleasure and pain, life and death come together and sustain each other.”
The first story already explains, with a metaphysical whack, what he means. Account of the German chemist Fritz Haber, responsible for creating the Zyklon B gas, a weapon that exterminated entire battalions of soldiers in the First World War and, later, multitudes of innocents in Nazi concentration camps.
If it wasn’t ironic enough that Haber was Jewish, he was also the first to be able to extract nitrogen from the air, allowing plants to grow without resorting to fertilizers. The process is seen as a fundamental part of the population explosion that followed, as the availability of food increased dramatically.
The Haber described by Labatut, in pages of admirable brevity, is a harbinger of both death and life. Which reveals scientific progress as a gray area, which serves to shake up certainties and moralities.
In fact, Professor Pedro Paulo Pimenta, who researches the history of philosophy at the University of São Paulo, says that “the essence of scientific discovery is to open a new field of the unknown”. “It’s the subversion of truths that existed before. And the ones you put in place are only provisional.”
Labatut also reinforces that science “has doubt stuck in its heart”. “You don’t have to believe in it, just know it. It’s a very private path that asks you to believe something if there is evidence and consensus, but tomorrow you must be willing to abandon that truth if our gaze grows sharper.”
It is no exaggeration to say that there is something artistic in scientific work, which is highlighted in the Chilean writing. Bohr describes Heisenberg’s work as “the work of a mystic”; one disciple claims that mathematician Alexander Grothendieck “had an extraordinary sensitivity to the harmony of things”; the inspirations of scientists often refer to the trance, the bizarre and even the divine.
Pimenta recalls that in the past, during the Italian Renaissance, for example, the figure of the artist and the scientist were inseparable. “Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were plastic artists, but also astronomers, mathematicians, physiologists. Art consummated some kind of truth about the world.”
In later periods, the functions were divorced, with a reunion during the Enlightenment, when science ceases to be written in Latin and goes to the current languages, so as to be accessible to a wider audience than the specialists.
“Naturalists, physicists and chemists also become writers, due to the requirement to formulate science in a language that everyone knows”, he points out. “To democratize knowledge, one has to be interested in what you are talking about, for the pleasure of understanding. Natural history treatises then become exercises for the imagination.”
It’s something that speaks to another recent release, “The Twenty Thousand Leagues of Charles Darwin”, an adaptation by Leda Khartoum and Sofia Nestrovski of their eponymous podcast, produced by a partnership between Quatro Cinco Um and Megafauna. The aim of the authors, who have a master’s degree in letters, is to read Darwin’s writings as literature.
“A common characteristic between the scientist and the writer is to look at the world with a lot of curiosity and legitimate interest”, says Khartoum. “Darwin is interested in unraveling the mystery of mysteries, as he puts it, and that’s what artists want too and know they won’t get.”
“Reading scientists as authors is also reading the influences on their writing, listening to other voices within an individual voice, a learning that comes from our training in literature”, says Nestrovski, who emphasizes the “infinite creativity” of the father of the theory of evolution. , evident in the multiplicity of his experiments—and something also found in great artists.
It is significant that literature so steeped in scientific thought emerges at a time when obscurantism is thriving like a plague. As Labatut points out, “ignorance has always favored power, and science has always been in the interest of a few.”
“People are proud to question the knowledge of experts, and that’s fine, but the problem is that they don’t recognize their own limits,” he says. “It’s not enough to question everything and be proud of being against the current. You have to carefully build a sense of the broader, finer, more human world. And that requires humility and subtlety, it requires knowing how much you know and always having one foot in uncertainty.”
Leda Khartoum says that she has already heard of creationists who listened to Darwin’s life on the “Vinte Mil Léguas” podcast and liked it. A good narrative disarms, points out the author, who ends by quoting the Israeli Amós Oz. “The medicine to cure the fanatic is to tell stories.”
