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Like Sebald, Labatut sees historys patterns as cyclical rather than linear, crossing similar terrain again and again as they wend their way toward disaster. But he is focussed equally on the question of what happens once we become aware of the enormity of the destruction that humankind is capable of inflicting on the worldand whether our brains are wired to cope with that fatal understanding. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

For Schwarzschild, the key to the universe lay in astronomy. Born in Germany in the late nineteenth century, he built his own telescope as a child and published his first astronomy paper at sixteen. By twenty-eight, he was the director of the observatory at the University of Gttingen. Like many German Jews, he was deeply patriotic: as Labatut tells it, he believed that Germany could someday rise to the height of ancient Greece in its ability to civilize the world, but first its scholarship in science must equal its achievements in philosophy and art. 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, Labatut quotes him as writing.

When, late in 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, Schwarzschild was serving in the German Army. Within a month, he had solved Einsteins field equations, and what he found profoundly destabilized his own conception of the organization of space. According to Schwarzschilds calculations, when a star is in the throes of collapse, it compresses, its density increasing until the force of gravity distorts space and time around it. The result, in Labatuts words, is an inescapable abyss permanently cut off from the rest of the universe, at the center of which lies the singularity, where the notions of space and time themselves became meaningless.

By now, the concept of the black hole is familiar. But at the time it seemed a harbinger of chaos and destruction. Inside the void his metrics predicted, the fundamental parameters of the universe switched properties: space flowed like time, time stretched out like space, Labatut writes. If a hypothetical traveler were capable of surviving a journey through this rarefied zone, he would receive light and information from the future, which would allow him to see events that had not yet occurred. A person who stood within the singularityimpossible, since gravity would tear him to bitscould see both the entire future evolution of the universe at an inconceivable pace and the past frozen in a single instant. The singularity itself is surrounded by a barrier marking a point of no return, beyond which nothing can cross without getting sucked in; the dimension of this boundary is now known as the Schwarzschild radius.

I worry that my birth plan and the babys birth plan arent in synch.

Cartoon by Barbara Smaller

Up to here, this chronicle of Schwarzschilds life is largely verifiable. Now Labatut takes matters a step further. Not only was Schwarzschild terrified by his discovery, in Labatuts telling, but he became obsessed with it. He supposedly confessed to a colleague who visited him in the military hospitalhe was suffering from pemphigus, a painful and disfiguring autoimmune disease primarily affecting the skinthat the true horror of the singularity was that it was a blind spot in the universe, fundamentally unknowable. If the physical world was capable of generating such a monstrosity, what about the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human willmillions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic spaceunleash something comparable to the singularity? In Schwarzschilds mind, such a thing was taking place at that very moment in Germany. He had visions of a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world. By the time people became aware of it, it would be too late:

The singularity sent forth no warnings. The point of no returnthe limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pullhad no sign or demarcation.... If such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?

The gravitational pull of fiction in this book works in a similar fashion. The dividing line between reality and imagination is not marked; it is only after several paragraphs or pages that we realize we have crossed it. We know, for instance, that Heisenberg did indeed travel to Helgoland in 1925, seeking relief from his allergy to pollen (the microscopic particles that were torturing him), and there reached his understanding of the behavior of elementary particles, discovering a way to describe the location of an electron and its interaction with other particles. But did the frenzy of his intellectual energy combine with fever to generate nightmares in which the Sufi mystic Hafez appeared in his bedroom, offered him a wineglass filled with blood, and masturbated in front of him before receiving oral sex from Goethe? We assume not, but the boundary is obscured by the gothic fervor of Labatuts narration, in which even mundane details are relayed with heavy melodrama: Heisenbergs allergies transform him into a monster, his lips swollen like a rotten peach with the skin ready to come off.

Likewise, we know that the physicist Erwin Schrdinger spent time in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, but Labatut seems to have invented a fantasy romance for him there, involving the teen-age daughter of the doctor who runs the institution. Herself a TB patient, she distracts herself from her illness by experimenting with a type of aphid that gestates while still in utero, resulting in three generations nestled one inside the other. She separates them and exposes them to a pesticide thatsure enoughstained the glass such a striking shade of blue that it seemed as though she were looking at the primordial colour of the sky. Like those aphids, the stories in this book nest inside one another, their points of contact with reality almost impossible to fully determine. As the layers of patterns and affinities accumulated, I realized that I was no longer compulsively Googling, instead allowing the stories to flow.

There is liberation in the vision of fictions capabilities that emerges herethe sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, evennightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news, more and more people feel entitled to make our own reality, as Karl Rove put it. In the current American political climate, even scientific factthe very material with which Labatut spins his webis subject to grossly counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two?

Labatut seems to gesture toward a justification for his mode of narrative in his long section on Heisenberg and Schrdinger, which gives the book itsEnglish title. (In Spanish, it is called Un Verdor Terrible, which might be translated as something like A Terrible Greenness, a reference to another nightmarish vision, this one supposedly experienced by Haber, of plants taking over the world.) Heisenberg argued that quantum objects have no intrinsic properties; an electron does not occupy a fixed location until it is measured. In Labatuts telling, Heisenberg, following this idea to its limits, reflects:

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Benjamn Labatuts When We Cease to Understand the World, Reviewed - The New Yorker

A new quantum radar developed by a team of Chinese scientists could detect stealth aircraft creating a small electromagnetic storm, informs South China Morning Post.

Almost no aircraft can circumvent radars, as it reflects electromagnetic waves. However, a stealth plane exhibits low reflection to radar waves, making them cancel each other thanks to their design, which absorbs the signal.

According to the media, the Chinese invention, which has been developed by a team of scientists from Tsinghua University, will have a design in the shape of pistol, unusual for traditional radars, which will allow you to accelerate electrons to a speed similar to light.

Once the radar is activated, the electrons pass through a tube where an extremely strong magnetic field is applied to them, generating a microwave vortex that will travel like a horizontal tornado. The researchers found that the spiral momentum affecting the particles did not decrease with time or distance, which, according to them, is explained by the law of quantum physics, despite being physically impossible according to Albert Einstein.

The new radar, which will operate in the microwave range, instead of using a laser beam that gets weaker with distance, you could detect targets that are invisible to traditional radars from long distance or in unfavorable weather conditions. As the scientists explain, particles with quantum properties in normal microwaves must be generated by means of a high-voltage superconducting electron accelerator.

For now, the researchers have already piloted a prototype on a reduced scale, while continuing to seek industrial partners to build a full-size radar.

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Chinese scientists claim to have created a quantum radar that detects stealth planes by means of an electro... - Market Research Telecast

In 1905, Albert Einstein showed in his Special Theory of Relativity that space is intimately connected to time via the cosmic speed limit of light and so, strictly speaking, we live in a Universe with four dimensions of space-time. For everyday purposes however, we think of the Universe in three dimensions of space (north-south, east-west, up-down) and one dimension of time (past-future). In that case, a fifth dimension would be an extra dimension of space.

Such a dimension was proposed independently by physicists Oskar Klein and Theodor Kaluza in the 1920s. They were inspired by Einsteins theory of gravity, which showed that mass warped four-dimensional space-time.

Since were unable to perceive these four dimensions, we attribute motion in the presence of a massive body, such as a planet, not to this curvature but to a force of gravity. Could the other force known at the time (the electromagnetic force) be explained by the curvature of an extra dimension of space?

Kaluza and Klein found it could. But since the electromagnetic force was 1,040 times stronger than gravity, the curvature of the extra dimension had to be so great that it was rolled up much smaller than an atom and would be impossible to notice. When a particle such as an electron travelled through space, invisible to us, it would be going round and round the fifth dimension, like a hamster in a wheel.

Kaluza and Kleins five-dimensional theory was dealt a serious blow by the discovery of two more fundamental forces that operated in the realm of the atomic nucleus: the strong and weak nuclear forces.

But the idea that extra dimensions explain forces was revived half a century later by proponents of string theory, which views the fundamental building blocks of the Universe not as particles, but tiny strings of mass-energy. To mimic all four forces, the strings vibrate in 10-dimensional space-time, with six space dimensions rolled up far smaller than an atom.

String theory gave rise to the idea that our Universe might be a three-dimensional island, or brane, floating in 10-dimensional space-time. This raised the intriguing possibility of explaining why gravity is so extraordinarily weak compared with the other three fundamental forces. While the forces are pinned to the brane, goes the idea, gravity leaks out into the six extra space dimensions, enormously diluting its strength on the brane.

There is a way to have a bigger fifth dimension, which is curved in such a way that we dont see it, and this was suggested by the physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum in 1999. An extra space dimension might even explain one of the great cosmic mysteries: the identity of dark matter, the invisible stuff that appears to outweigh the visible stars and galaxies by a factor of six.

In 2021, a group of physicists from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, proposed that the gravity of hitherto unknown particles propagating in a hidden fifth dimension could manifest itself in our four-dimensional Universe as the extra gravity we currently attribute to dark matter.

Though an exciting possibility, its worth pointing out that theres no shortage of possible candidates for dark matter, including subatomic particles known as axions, black holes and reverse-time matter from the future!

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Our Universe may have a fifth dimension that would change everything we know about physics - BBC Science Focus Magazine

NASA has sometimes been scrutinized for spending billions of dollars on space exploration and travel. The argument goes like this, why do we need to spend billions of dollars and the energy of the most creative people on space explorations when we can actually send that capital and mental energy to solve problems on Earth.

According to a Space News report, an opinion poll on completing 50 years since Man stepped on Moon revealed that only 27% of people think that expeditions to Mars are important.

By the looks of it, it does look like a valid, well-intentioned argument. However, there are glaring gaps in it, which brings it to the brink of being an absurd question. In reality, space explorations and space-related research have immensely benefitted people on Earth.

Be it technology, medicine, health, roads, shoes, NASAs research projects have given birth to numerous tools and techniques that have made peoples lives easier than ever.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist, once extensively discussed the same argument in a podcast with Joe Rogan. He claimed that the third of the worlds GDP comes from computing and the Information Technology sector, the origin of which could be traced back to Quantum Physics, discovered in the 1920s.

He then mentions about one of his professors, who was an avid observer of the universe. He was researching on detection of gas clouds between stars, which led him to discover a new phenomenon in Physics called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

This phenomenon, when came under the observation of a medical technologist, gave birth to the Magnetic Resonance Imager (MRI), which is one of the most important inventions in medical science. This goes on to prove how exploring space, which, to a layman taxpayer, looks trivial, holds utmost significance.

Technologies like GPS, power tools, things like athletic shoes, memory foam, scratch-resistant glass, smoke detectors, and safety grooves on roads all came from space-related researches.

Space not only solves the problems of the present but also maps the road to solutions to future problems. Do you still think space exploration is a waste of capital and human energy?

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'Need for Space': How Have Humans Benefited From Exploration of the Universe? - News18