Benjamín Labatut > Quotes

“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. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, because it leaves behind a gaping hole, much like the hollow that the Spirit left when it abandoned this accursed world. But by their very nature, those god-shaped voids demand to be filled with something as precious as that which was lost. The choice of that something—if indeed it is a choice at all—rules the destiny of men.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will--millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space--unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible but was actually taking place. . . . He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing we could do about it. Because the singularity sent out no warnings. The point of no return--the limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pull--had no sign or demarcation. Whoever crossed it was beyond hope. Their destiny was set, as all possible trajectories led irrevocably to the singularity. And if such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“For Heisenberg, it was no longer possible to speak of any subatomic phenomenon with absolute certainty. Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter, as for him deriving a result by logical means was never enough: “That is like dancing on one leg,” he would say, “when the essence lies in recognizing connections, meanings and associations in every direction.” For Ehrenfest, true understanding was a full-body experience, something that involved your entire being, not just your mind or reason.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more dreadful. Literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the Earth in a critical way. This is the maturing crisis of technology. In the years between now and the beginning of the next century, the global crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say. It is a very small comfort to think that the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind. Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Hsbd-iryt, the original colour of the sky—the legendary blue used by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods. Passed down across the centuries, closely guarded by the priests of Egypt as part of their divine covenant, its formula was stolen by a Greek thief and lost forever after the fall of the Roman Empire.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“He was almost consumed by his passion for logic, and during his entire life, that strange gift of his let him see things with remarkable clarity, granting him a vision so blinding that to others, whose focus is smeared by emotional considerations and prejudices, his point of view seemed completely incomprehensible.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“yielding a world that would turn in on itself like an ouroboros:”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea's deranging expanses”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Gödel had shown him that if someone succeeded in creating a formal system of axioms that was free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions, it would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that—while being undeniably true—could never be proven within the laws of that system.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“with time, the planets would escape from their orbits, the gaseous giants would engulf their neighbours, and Earth itself would be expelled from the solar system to roam, like a wandering star, until the end of time, unless the form of space were not planar.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“He lamented the attitude of his younger students, who “no longer noticed that their heads had been turned into relays in a telephone network for communicating and distributing sensational physics messages” without realizing that, like almost all modern developments, mathematics was hostile to life: “It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.” His already excruciating self-criticism and inferiority complex became truly unbearable, for although he knew mathematics, it was not simple for him. He was not a computer.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The Maniac

“The philosophical implications of Gödel’s logic were astonishing, and his incompleteness theorems, as they later came to be known, are now considered a fundamental discovery, one that hints at the limits of human understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Significant phrases, witty points and dialectic are all at his disposal in an extraordinary manner. He knows how to make the most difficult things concrete and intuitively clear.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“They had already put together an entire committee to choose the best targets, but it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn’t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself—six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Schwarzschild complains of something strange that has begun to grow inside him: “I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“he confessed that he could not understand how he had learned to ride a bicycle—a veritable feat of balance, equilibrium, and coordinated motor function—without once having had to use his reason. How could his body think by itself? How could it figure out the complicated motions that it had to execute so as not to fall flat on his face? These simple activities, in which you actually had to stop thinking to fully accomplish them, would fascinate him for his entire life, and even though he loved sports when he was a boy, he avoided all forms of physical exertion when he became a man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“one of the essential insights gained by Turing as he observed his “children” was that if machines were ever to advance toward true intelligence, they would have to be fallible: they would need to be capable not only of error and of deviation from their original programming but also of random and even nonsensical behavior. Turing believed that such randomness would play an important part in intelligent machinery, because it allows for novel and unpredictable responses, creating a large variety of possibilities among which a search program could then find the appropriate action for each particular circumstance.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will - millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space - unleash something comparable to the singularity?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World