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

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.

“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.

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.

Heisenberg was tormented by what he considered a fundamental flaw in the groundwork of the discipline:

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.

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.

“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

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