When We Cease to Understand the World

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

The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially create

To do so, however, its science must be raised to the heights already achieved by its philosophy and art, for “only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”

“What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time.” Grothendieck continued to push past the limits of abstraction. No sooner had he conquered new territory than he was preparing to expand its frontiers.

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.

An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down f

“A perspective is by nature limited. It offers us one single vision of a landscape. Only when complementary views of the same reality combine are we capable of achieving fuller access to the knowledge of things. The more complex the object we are attempting to apprehend, the more important it is to have different sets of eyes, so that these rays of

“When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless it reduces its mass due to fission, rotation or radiation, this contraction will continue indefinitely,” forming the black hole that Schwarzschild had prophesied, capable of crumpling space like a piece of paper and extinguishing time like a blow

“When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless it reduces its mass due to fission, rotation or radiation, this contraction will continue indefinitely,” forming the black hole that Schwarzschild had prophesied, capable of crumpling space like a piece of paper and extinguishing time like a blow