When reality broke

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It's Unexplainable.

I'm Noam Hasenfeld.

Every month, Vox culture writer Constance Grady interviews an author for the Vox Book Club.

And last month, she told me about this book they were reading.

It's called When We Cease to Understand the World, and it's gotten all kinds of attention.

It was shortlisted for the National Book Award, one of the Times Best Books of 2021.

It even made it onto Obama's booklist.

The book is about a few different moments in the 20th century when new scientific ideas burst onto the scene.

Ideas like black holes, chemical weaponry, quantum theory, that threw science into disarray.

It's about the scientists who came up with these ideas and their struggle with genius or madness.

These stories, they've been told before, but according to Constance, the author found this really unusual approach, a way of blending nonfiction and fiction in order to grapple with the unknown and unknowable parts of science.

So this week we're going to do something a little different.

I spoke with Constance about this book and the central question it grapples with.

How do we deal with the uncertainty of modern science?

Could fiction help us make sense of things that just don't seem to make sense?

Here's Constance.

So the book is called When We Cease to Understand the World.

It's by Benjamin Lapatut.

He is a novelist.

He lives in Chile and he is not a scientist, but he's interested in really

big, confusing ideas.

And part of what he said to me when I talked to him for the book club was that he feels like you can't just lay out the sort of scientific principles that he's exploring in this book in this kind of flat, dry textbook way.

He says that if you do that, the ideas will consume you.

There are very dangerous ideas in the world that if they just touch you, these ideas are sort of like radioactive.

If you walk towards them,

they can change who you are.

What does that mean?

Basically, that they're so abstract that you won't understand

how like incredibly brain-meltingly weird they are.

So the main thing that is a little bit controversial with this book is that it's kind of mixing fiction and non-fiction together.

So the ideas are all real, but sometimes the ways that Labatoud presents them is through a sort of semi-fictional lens.

And he doesn't always tell you when he's stepping off of the historical record into this more fantastical realm.

You have to sort of parse that out yourself as you go.

So what's an example of the kind of dangerous or complicated ideas that he's talking about that you can't actually describe fully unless you're using fiction?

So I think we should zoom in here a little bit on one of the chapters in the book, which is about quantum mechanics.

Okay.

So that's a really big break in how scientists thought about science itself and about reality.

But before we get into any of the fiction, I just want to start with the basics of what actually happened.

And to be super clear, I'm just a book critic.

I'm not a physicist or someone with expertise in these concepts.

So I reached out to Priyanata Rajan to help me.

I'm an astrophysicist and I'm a professor at Yale, appointed in the departments of astronomy and physics.

So our history here starts in the early 20th century and we are at a major turning point for science.

So before this, science operated under something called determinism.

There is a deterministic cause, deterministic effect.

Isaac Newton's ideas, right, can just as well describe the motion of the apple falling from the tree as the planets held in the solar system.

So we're talking about like the basic high school physics stuff here, right?

Like force equals mass times acceleration, object in motion will tend to stay in motion, all that stuff.

Exactly.

So this is a world where the causality is very, very clear.

So if you change one thing, something else is going to change in a measurable, predictable way.

And the scientist who is measuring all of these things, they are a neutral observer who can measure these things and plug them into tidy equations that fundamentally make sense.

The whole world fundamentally makes sense.

Then comes along quantum mechanics.

This is around the 1920s.

Scientists are starting to study smaller and smaller things, not apples anymore, but atoms and electrons.

Okay.

And as they're looking at these tinier and tinier things, that is when this previous way of thinking about science where cause and effect were always really clear, this is when it all falls apart.

How does it fall apart?

So there are a bunch of different things happening here, but we are going to focus in on one physicist.

His name is Werner Heisenberg.

And specifically, we're going to look at this thing he comes up with that is called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Remind me what that is?

So Heisenberg says that if you want to measure an electron,

you can either measure its velocity or you can measure its current placement, but you cannot measure both.

You cannot say that this particle actually is sitting here and it exists in this location with this velocity simultaneously.

So there's a limit to how precise you can be in the measurement.

That's the uncertainty principle.

Why can't you actually measure both?

Why can't you measure where it is and how fast it's going?

Well, what Heisenberg has figured out is that when you are measuring reality, you are also affecting it.

So an electron exists only as a possibility until you observe it and measure it.

And once you measure it, you have changed it.

And that is the collapse of this neat separation between the observer and the observed.

All of science is premised on the fact that you have a neutral observer not actually altering the reality that exists that you are quantifying.

And because we can never know everything about an electron without changing it, we can't predict things like we used to with, you know, object in motion will stay in motion, object at rest stays at rest.

We can't do that anymore.

If we look at the future, we can only say what will probably happen.

And what is

so radical about it is this necessarily shifts that out of a deterministic worldview into a probabilistic worldview.

How could it possibly like this sounds like you're backed into this logical corner and then you have to come up with a way of saying I can only think about things in terms of probability or the electron only exists as a possibility or it doesn't even exist until I measure it.

But that just doesn't really make sense.

Yeah, it kind of doesn't make sense to anyone, right?

It's really impossible to imagine that this is true, but there has been a lot of work done in the decades since Heisenberg first came up with this idea that supports it.

And it really seems like it is true.

On the scale of the atom, Newtonian physics kind of just doesn't apply.

And that means that the world that we think we live in, right, that we can sort of observe with our senses and make sense out of with our human brains, that is not the whole truth of the universe at all.

It just that it's kind of mind-bending to think that the entire world works a certain way at a certain size.

And then when it gets down to a tiny little size, it just completely changes.

Yeah.

And we have to remember, right, the entire universe is made up of atoms.

So this is not just like a weird little thing that we can kind of hand wave away.

This is fundamental and it is everywhere in every single thing.

It's a giant break with everything that we thought about the world before.

So just to make sure I got all this straight, Heisenberg realizes we can't measure electrons without affecting them.

So once we're looking at things at the quantum scale, like smaller than atoms, we can't predict things using precise cause and effect like we used to.

And since atoms are the building blocks of everything, that means that at a certain level, maybe

everything operates differently from how we thought.

Exactly.

So when Heisenberg is putting all this forward in the 20s and 30s, how do scientists react?

A lot of scientists are kind of flustered by this.

There's a big, famous set of debates between Einstein and Heisenberg's mentor, Niels Bohr.

But eventually, things kind of settle into acceptance and people are sort of like, okay, well, this does seem to accurately describe the way the universe is behaving.

The math checks out.

So it's like a bumpy ride, the introduction of this like, everything you may have thought is fundamentally true is not.

That's kind of a bumpy moment, but it sort of settles down eventually.

Exactly.

So you get that famous line from Einstein: God does not play dice with the universe, which he says sort of in response to this new theory.

But eventually, this becomes consensus.

Essentially, people come to say, okay, you know what?

It seems like it's correct.

It's weird, but it's correct.

And so researchers start finding ways to apply their new understanding of the atom to doing other things like

building nuclear bombs.

There is a line from the work that Heisenberg and other people are doing in understanding the atom to

the nuclear bombs that are used in World War II.

Yeah, that feels like a huge deal, but it also feels like this reaction here of kind of quickly accepting this into the realm of science feels a little anticlimactic, right?

Like I would expect more scientists to be just freaking out about the idea that reality doesn't operate the way we thought.

Yeah, I think that's the big emotional takeaway from this, right?

And this is where

Benjamin Labatut, the author of When We Cease to Understand the World, this is where he kind of rebels.

So he doesn't really seem to feel like this reality of this scientific debate is necessarily big enough or wild enough for how huge of a break it is.

He

wants to make you feel it more deeply than just reading through the debates could bring you to feel it.

So he makes some stuff up.

He just makes some stuff up?

Yeah,

and we will talk about that after the break.

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Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

This man is an author.

He has just finished writing a story.

He thinks many people will like to read it.

So he must have the story made into a book.

Let's watch how this is done.

On Unexplainable.

We're back here with Constance Grady.

Hey.

So before the break, Constance, you were telling me about this enormous break in just the fundamental way that science works, works, where suddenly scientists are questioning whether it's possible to measure things without affecting them or whether reality exists in the same way that we thought it did.

But even though this seems like an enormous, like earth-shattering deal, the real story, the actual history is that scientists kind of came around to it.

But you're saying that Benjamin Labatut, the author of this book, When We Cease to Understand the World,

he tells a different story.

Yeah.

So I think Labatut Labatut wants his story to make you really, really feel on a fundamental level just how immense a break from the past this theory was and the ways that it just really breaks down the way you think about reality and ushers us into a new era of the world.

And his argument here is that to really understand

how big a deal it was, you can't just think about it.

You almost need to just feel how wild these ideas are.

So you have to make them real.

They have to become flesh.

And because flesh implies pain, pleasure, you know, I like to find ways that these overly philosophical things,

that you can feel them with your body.

In order to make you feel something, he can't just present you with dry debates or math.

The ideas of quantum mechanics are so abstract that I couldn't just write it as as non-fiction because nobody would have read it and nobody would have understood it.

So what I did then was, okay, fiction had to keep creeping into the text so that you would understand.

So that, so that I would understand.

So how does Labatout actually use fiction to help people understand how big a deal all of quantum mechanics is?

So he imagines the time where Heisenberg is developing this theory of the uncertainty principle.

And we know from historical fact a little bit about how that worked.

Heisenberg was in this town, he was really sick, and he was just like feverishly doing all of this math from his sick bed.

And so then Labatut sort of embellishes on that a little bit.

He has Heisenberg start to hallucinate.

He sees all of these figures, they're covered in ashes,

and

they're surrounding him.

He's trying to take the hand of a baby, but just as he tries to reach for it, this explosion happens

and there is nothing left of the people there.

So what he's imagining here is essentially the effects of dropping the nuclear bomb.

That's what his vision is showing him.

Right.

Of course, in real life, there's no way to know that Heisenberg saw anything like this or even hallucinated while he was doing this work or that he knew the nuclear bomb would eventually be a consequence.

So it doesn't exactly seem like the most plausible hallucination.

Yeah, like it's unlikely that anything like this happened, but the moment gives you the emotional intensity that you want from this moment.

It is showing you how much reality is splintering apart because of what Heisenberg is imagining, and it's showing us the ways that he is going to actually splinter reality apart.

This is the feeling of science changing forever, maybe in some fundamental way breaking our understanding of the world, and it makes you feel the stakes of what's happening.

So if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle ultimately raised this question of whether we can ever be certain about reality,

it feels like Labatud is almost doing the same thing with the format of his book, right?

He's blending fiction and non-fiction so that the reader isn't really sure what's real.

Yeah, exactly.

The book is kind of throwing you off the track.

It makes you question which

ideas that you're reading about are real and which are not.

And in a way, this is sort of

making you experience the same thing that, you know, the scientists he's writing about may be feeling as they are sort of beginning to realize that maybe reality, the way we think about it, isn't really real.

Okay, so that feels like a nice idea.

It also feels kind of dangerous, right?

It also feels like it's taking stuff that really happened

and changing it.

And you could walk away from this book thinking that this is the real history.

Do you feel like this is okay?

I mean, I think that if it were presenting itself as pure nonfiction, that would be an issue, right?

And this this book is not, you know, a physics textbook that you would use to study for your AP test.

I would not recommend doing that.

It is very straightforward about being partially fictionalized.

At different points, Labatude has said that it's like, oh, the fiction goes, the amount of fiction scales up throughout the book, or else he said, like, it's entirely fiction.

He kind of just likes to have fun there, I think.

And it's an approach that I think some people have found really frustrating.

Some of them have found irresponsible.

For me, it was really exciting as a way to get to the emotional truth of these philosophical ideas.

And what the book is able to do that is fundamentally what I think is most impressive about it just as a literary accomplishment is that these ideas become

sort of cosmically overwhelming and awe-inspiring and maybe, you know, even terrifying in some places.

That can't be the only way to approach

the unknowability of science, right?

There must be, I don't know, it can't just be fear, right?

Yeah, so I asked this astrophysicist, Priya Nadarajan, about this and about how she sort of copes with this idea that reality is maybe not knowable.

I actually don't find that worrisome.

Why should we expect being able to find an explanation for everything given our cognitive capacity, which I think has limits?

Because, you know, the brain is, you know, cantaloupe-sized, gelatinous thing sitting in our skulls.

Why should it be able to understand everything in the universe and itself?

I mean, it's unclear to me why.

One of the things she agrees with the book about is that you do need something beyond just straightforward traditional Western science for making sense of the world.

So there's lots of different traditions that sort of suggest that the way that we measure something can affect it and that there isn't an objective reality.

That's kind of not new necessarily to Heisenberg.

It's just new to science.

For example, in Indian philosophy, there's this notion of Maya, of illusion, right?

What is the illusion?

The illusion is that, you know, you think you are separate from the infinite and the universal, but you're not.

You're very much part of it, right?

So for me, that is fascinating, fascinating.

She says that one of the things that she finds exciting about the limitations of science and of the human brain is it allows her to open herself up to this understanding of the world and other people and into other philosophical traditions that are maybe not as segregated as Western sciences in the ways that they approach the world.

Reality is extremely complex and it's beautiful.

It's the complexity that makes it so beautiful and rich.

And to me, that invites me to be extremely open-minded in every possible way when it comes to my science and ideas, but also to people.

So in a sense, this idea that we can never really be certain about reality or that we affect reality by measuring it.

It doesn't necessarily have to be this big, scary rupture if we just step outside the limits or the confines of Western science.

Yeah, exactly.

There are all of these other ways of thinking about the world that can really help us there.

So I think, in a way, both Puya Nadarajan and Benjamin Labatud are landing in pretty similar places, right?

They're both sort of saying that something outside of Western science, potentially fiction, potentially other traditions, is what we need in order to untangle ourselves from this sort of knot that we've made of our understanding of the world and come to terms with it.

Yeah, there's clearly an agreement here that

we are limited, that we can't understand everything that's going on, and it's just up to us to determine whether that is an exciting thing or a terrifying thing.

You might say that there are things in the world that are unexplainable.

No.

Drop the music!

Constance Grady is a culture writer at Vox, and she runs the Vox Book Club.

If you want to read more about Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, you can find Constance's article and further discussion questions at vox.com/slash bookclub.

This episode was produced by Bird Pinkerton and me, Noam Hasenfeld.

It was edited by Catherine Wells with help from Meredith Hodenot and Brian Resnick.

Richard Seema checked the facts, Christian Ayala was on mixing and sound design, and I wrote the music.

Meredith Haggerty is the editor in charge of Vox Book Club and helped us out a bunch on this episode.

Tori Dominguez is our fellow, and Manding Wynn is the best.

If you have thoughts about the nature of reality, please email us.

We're at unexplainable at Vox.com.

And if you can, leave us a review or a rating.

It's a super helpful thing for the show.

Unexplainable is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.