As with all books purporting to be historical fiction, one can either struggle with trying to decipher what is fact and what has been invented or one can just go along for the ride. Labatut, in the acknowledgements, reveals that the book veers more and more towards the speculative in its later chapters. Whatever you want to call this book, the whole is mystical and engrossing. It can be read in one sitting, but the scientific themes demand to be pondered at leisure.
Labatut describes the enigma of the Schwarzschild singularity, “At a certain distance from Schwarzschild’s idealized star, the equations of general relativity went mad: time froze, space coiled around itself like a serpent. At the center of that dying star, all mass became concentrated in a single point of infinite density…. With alarm, he realized that if his singularity were ever to exist, it would endure until the end of the universe. Its ideal conditions made it an eternal object that would neither grow nor diminish, but remain eternally as it was. Unlike all other things, it was immune to becoming and doubly inescapable: in the strange spatial geometry it generated, the singularity was located at both ends of time.” Schwarzschild, himself, mused, “Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe…. We would be faced with a fairyland geometry, a hall of mirrors whose horrifying perspectives would be more than the civilized mind could bear, as it abhors and flees from all it cannot comprehend…. We have reached the highest point of civilization. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.”
The main section of Labatut’s book focuses on the debate between Heisenberg and Schrodinger on the realities of quantum physics. However, Labatut begins with Louis de Broglie, who would pioneer the alternative pilot-wave theory. Labatut quotes at length from de Broglie’s dissertation defense, “For more than a century, we have divided earthly phenomena into two fields: atoms and particles of solid matter on the one hand, and the intangible waves of light, propagated through the sea of the luminous ether, on the other. But these two systems cannot remain separate; we must bring them together in a single theory that explains their multiple interactions…. We are talking here about the most precious object of physics, light, which allows us not only to see the forms of this world, but shows us the stars that adorn the spiral arms of the galaxy and the hidden heart of matter. But this object is not always singular—it is double. Light exists in two different ways. Thus, it transcends all the categories with which we have tried to encapsulate the myriad forms of nature. As wave and as particle, it inhabits two distinct orders and is possessed of identities as opposed as the two faces of Janus. Like that Roman god, it expresses the contradictory properties of what is discrete and what is continuous, what is local and what is spread out…. All matter is possessed of such dualism! Not only light but each of the atoms with which the godhead has constructed the universe is subject to this twofold nature.”
Labatut describes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and how his mentor, Niels Bohr, and he tried to reconcile Heisenberg’s convoluted mathematical matrices with Schrodinger’s elegantly simple equation in the Copenhagen Interpretation. “It is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.” Heisenberg had posited, “When we speak of the science of our era, we are talking about our relationship with nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a game between man and the world. Science can no longer confront reality in the same way. The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations: these arise from the fact that its interventions alter the objects it proposes to investigate. The light science shines on the world not only changes our vision of reality, but even the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks.” Einstein could not prove the Copenhagen Interpretation wrong, although he remained skeptical. “This theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts.” To the end, Einstein remained convinced, “God does not play dice with the universe!”
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