The Ever-Present Threat of Terrible Verdure

To Octavio Vinces

The seductive and hypnotic text is
Un verdor terrible, by the Chilean Benjamín Labatut
, (Anagrama, Barcelona 2025, 217 p.) about science and especially physics, which begins by recounting the fortuitous discovery of Prussian Blue in a time when “chemistry had not separated from alchemy,” as a prelude to the great discoveries that followed. When questioning a scientific discovery, it inevitably escapes any moral boundary: its judgment will be defined by its use, possession, and fate. Humanity owes to the chemist Fritz Haber in 1907 and to the Haber–Bosch partnership (which earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918) that he managed to extract nitrogen from the air for the production of fertilizers that made possible the world population to rise from 1.6 to 7 billion people in a hundred years. At the same time, Haber created a gas to exterminate humans on a large scale. His drama was familial and domestic: his wife, the chemist Clara Immerwahr, the first woman to obtain a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Breslau, learned of the mass deaths caused by her husband’s gas in the Battle of Ypres, reproached him, argued heatedly with him over his contribution to mass murder, went out into the garden of their house and with the captain Haber’s standard pistol, a Luger P08 9 mm semi-automatic, pointed to her chest and ended her life at the age of 44 in the early hours of May 2, 1915. His son Hermann and his granddaughter Claire pursued the same route of suicide years later after failing to overcome the family shadow. The tragedy did not morally deter Fritz Haber, who continued his research, from which emerged a gas pesticide called Zyklon A, which evolved into Zyklon B and was used by the Nazis in the extermination camps of Poland to gas Jews, though Haber was no longer involved in that phase of the research.
Haber was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, but who had to flee Germany with the rise of the Nazi plague. He died in Basel without knowing that the gas he invented would evolve in such a way as to become the deadly tool for the Final Solution of the fate of European Jews in the genocidal Holocaust in which many relatives of Haber himself perished.

The captivating journey of Labatut makes stops at the great milestones of twentieth-century science: in the same year, 1915, Albert Einstein received a letter from the German-Jewish physicist from Frankfurt-am-Main, Karl Schwarzschild, with the exact solution to the equations of his theory of relativity, which defined what we today know as black holes. As our writer notes, Karl Schwarzschild “believed that Germany had the capacity to become a civilizational power comparable to ancient Greece, but for that it was necessary to raise its science to the height already attained by its philosophy and its art, since ‘only a vision of the whole, as seen by a saint, a madman, or a mystic, will allow us to decipher the way the universe is organized’.” (Labatut, 50). Here there are two fundamental things to understand the German character: the civilizational saga that that society set out for itself, and the ultimate meaning of that vision of the whole. From the eighteenth century, during the years of the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, Germany—though an archipelago of principalities, kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics, and free commercial cities—developed a spirit of pursuit and building its own paideia and areté, based on the Greek ideal. That had consequences in every creative domain—its literature, its art, its music, its philosophy, its education, its universities, its books. Germany took its civilizing role very seriously in continuing the Greek example. Let us recall Henry Miller’s line about Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi: “In Greece there is the conviction that genius, not mediocrity, is the norm. No country has produced, in proportion to its population, so many geniuses as Greece. In a single century, this tiny nation has given the world nearly five hundred brilliant men.” Naturally, this drive to build a culture that started from imitation of Greece (Thomas Mann asserts in Considerations of a Nonpolitical Man that the essence of a German is tied to culture) collided with the destructive catastrophe that was World War I and the rise of Nazi tyranny. The militarism of the Prussian Junkers was a contradiction in these compositions of the spirit. Not for nothing did Voltaire say that Prussia was an army that had a nation. The second half of the Schwarzschild quote is what concerns us most for the purposes of this book, “to decipher the way in which the universe is organized”. Because in relation to finding the basic principle, Schwarzschild himself points out: “Is there anything at rest, around which the rest of the universe is built, or is there nothing to cling to in this endless chain of motions, in which everything seems trapped? Realize how deeply we have fallen into insecurity, if human imagination cannot find a single place to drop anchor and no stone in the world has the right to be considered immobile!” (Labatut, 56).

The foregoing line is fundamental in formulating a primordial hypothesis that anticipates all that follows. The lofty flight of this Labatut text ascends to the common metaphor linking the pursuit of the great scientists of the twentieth century, particularly physicists and mathematicians, in their struggle to approach the germinal source of the universe. If this book, though written with the elevated prose it displays, were solely a chronicle of what the world ended up becoming with scientific splendor, it would lose much of the universal alchemy it offers as a path to understand the origin of all that we are. In the manner of Genesis, in which in the beginning was the word, Labatut describes each of these great makers of science and traces from them the concern to reach the question of whether there is a moment when everything was unleashed and why. Alexander Grothendieck, a German-born, Jewish and French mathematician, sought to reveal the “structures that underlie all mathematical objects.” The Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, accused by some of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the supposed creator of Bitcoin, read Grothendieck’s “colossal and intimidating” work in Princeton and was found at midnight delirious with his papers after days without food or sleep, talking about the existence of a “heart of hearts” that justified the very nature of mathematics. Grothendieck’s frenzied pursuit of his mathematical mysticism led him to spurn his family and cut all ties with society; he became a hermit, a fakir who rejected all comfort and only felt at ease among the poor, the young, and the marginalized. At the end of his life he came to say: “I have the irrefutable and blasphemous feeling of knowing God more intimately than any other being in this world, even though He is an incognizable mystery, infinitely vaster than any fleshly creature ever created.” (Labatut, 97).

One of the book’s most endearing chapters is “When We Stopped Understanding the World,” which portrays the inner struggles and nearly fatal clash of ideas between Austrian Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg in the depths of the subatomic realm and the quantum physics inaugurated by Max Planck. Labatut notes the pull of the original path: “Heisenberg was tormented … because the laws that had worked so well for the macroscopic world since Isaac Newton onward were losing validity inside the atoms. Heisenberg wanted to understand what elementary particles were and to unearth the root that linked all natural phenomena.” (Labatut, 108) His connection to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr is fascinating because it opens a new door to understanding wholeness. Before this, let us recall Johann Gottfried Herder, who said that poetry is humanity’s mother tongue. On the other hand, the master Borges freely referred to Roger Bacon, recalling one of his phrases that God had written two books: the one of nature and the one of metaphors. Bohr suggested to Heisenberg that to speak of atoms the language should be that of poetry, which leads us to Bacon’s metaphors and Herder’s mother tongue. The division of the atom is linked to the origin of the universe and to poetry itself. Labatut writes about the matrices created by Heisenberg described in a quasi-mystical article that testifies to the explanation of the birth of the world: “Heisenberg had modeled a quantum system solely in terms of what could be observed directly. He had replaced metaphors with numbers and discovered the rules that governed what happened inside the atoms.” (Labatut, 121)

No es fácil entender este corpus de ideas. El sistema ideado por Heisenberg del mundo subatómico está basado en ondas lineales, mientras que el de Erwin Schrödinger crea ondas sinusoidales y tridimensionales alrededor del átomo. Estos gigantes estaban viendo el alma de la creación con unas ondas diferentes y de allí sus encarnizadas hostilidades. Se asomaron a espiar cómo los dioses hacían su trabajo y de qué palabras disponían para nombrar el mundo. Más adelante, Niels Bohr hablaría de complementar ambas tesis. Labatut lo explica para integrar las dos posiciones: “… la ecuación de Schrödinger … era capaz de hilvanar los infinitos de una partícula, todos sus estados, todas sus trayectorias, en una sola trama, la función de onda, que los mostraba superpuestos. Una partícula tenía muchas maneras de atravesar el espacio, pero elegía una sola. ¿Cómo? Por puro azar. Para Heisenberg, ya no se podía hablar de ningún fenómeno subatómico con certeza absoluta. Donde antes había una causa para cada efecto, ahora existía un abanico de posibilidades.” (Labatut, 185) Nuestro autor también se refiere a la Conferencia de Solvay en 1925, en la que Heisenberg y Bohr explicaron la Interpretación de Copenhague por la que los sistemas físicos existen en estados de probabilidad hasta que una medición los obliga hacia un resultado definido. Dice Labatut al respecto: “Como la luna en el budismo, una partícula no existe; el acto de medición la vuelve un objeto real”. También esto nos lleva al famoso gato de Schrödinger que está y no está simultáneamente.

The Labatut book is a literary work, not to be forgotten, but a text capable of settling in amicably with science and explaining it with the virtues that the creative aesthetic boasts. In The Odyssey, Homer recounts that whenever a god confined himself with a mortal or a goddess, there was no sterility. The fecundity of this tale allows those of us who are charmed by science to understand or imagine the foundations that ignite and give life to what surrounds us. The author also devotes his initial paragraphs to the war’s madness in which Luftwaffe aviators consumed methamphetamines like Pervitin to bomb with euphoria and not tire during flight missions. It was also very popular among Wehrmacht soldiers. The image Labatut recalls of Göring, drugged, disguised as Nero, with nails painted carmine, makes us return to asking whether we have ensured that the fate of humanity tied to science and its use depends on who possesses it and for what ends they dedicate it. We face the same question with artificial intelligence today, given that the control of these systems is now in the hands of unrestrained plutocrats. In a posthumous letter found among Fritz Haber’s papers, he did not regret having contributed to mass murder, but regretted extracting nitrogen from the air. Haber thought he had altered the laws of the universe. That the future could belong to plants if the world population diminished significantly, with which they would fill everything with a terrible verdure. Hence the book’s title. The same happens with AI and its potential problems of a singularity to which Raymond Kurzweil refers, the triumph of machine over man, the dictatorship of transmission, nanotechnology, posthumanity in short. I cannot stop recommending this book by Benjamín Labatut. It happens that after finishing it we are irresistibly tempted to reread its illuminated passages.