When We Cease to Understand the World

On the morning of August 31, 2012, the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published four articles on his blog. Those six hundred pages contained a proof of one of the most important conjectures in number theory, known as a + b = c.

Clara Immerwahr—the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry at a German university—had not only seen the effects of the gas on animals in the laboratory; she had also nearly lost her husband when the wind suddenly changed direction during one of his field tests.

when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry.

These perspectives were mutually exclusive, antagonistic, and at the same time complementary: neither was a perfect reflection, and both were models of the world. Combined, they gave a more perfect notion of nature.

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.

Heligoland—the

“He fought against the problems from which others fled. He loved discovering the relations between multiple aspects of nature, but what drove his search was joy, the pleasure an artist feels, the vertigo of the visionary capable of discerning the threads that weave the fabric of the future,”

he had learned Mongolian chant and could intone multiple notes simultaneously.

Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims