The Book Page -- March 27, 2025

Locator: 48382BOOKS.

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The Good Soldier

Arrived today.

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, Ford Madox Ford, c. 1915.

The Guardian: "One of the 20th century's most remarkable novels." 

Wiki entry.

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MANIAC

Interestingly, this book, MANIAC was part of my Summer Reading Program, 2023.

• The Maniac (John von Neumann), Benjamín Labatut, c. 2023.

By Dan Rockmore, an essay on two books by Benamin Labatut, in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, April 10, 2025, pp 34 - 36:

• The Maniac, 354 pages -- a challenging read
  
• When We Cease To Understand The World, 189 pages -- a very, very challenging read
  

Wiki entry for this author, Benjamin Labutut.

The writer of The New York Review article: 

Dan Rockmore is the William H. Neukom 1964 Professor of Computational Science at Dartmouth. He is also a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. His most recent book is Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis, which he co-edited with Michael Livermore. (April 2025) 

From The [London] Guardian, July 13, 2024, by Sam Leith:

I agree. I didn't have a panic attack but I found his premise disturbing. 

The lede:

The Faustian bargain is a spiritual form of a conservation law: nothing good happens without something bad happening too. In the modern version, as depicted in books and movies, the message is that geniuses see far beyond their contemporaries, but often at the expense of lasting relationships and happy families. In our preoccupation with the image of the mad scientist, one can’t help but sense a bit of anti-intellectual schadenfreude lurking in the background—solace for all of us “normals.”

Stories of genius don’t have to take this form, but they often do. It’s an organizing principle for the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut in his widely praised collection of loosely linked stories, When We Cease to Understand the World—the first of his books to be translated into English—and also in his latest, The MANIAC, which he wrote in English. Both are unsettling, often violent books based on some of the twentieth century’s great ideas of chemistry, physics, and mathematics, told as stories of individual obsession and militaristic madness.

Absolutely fascinating:

At the center is the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who came upon his idea for “matrix mechanics”—a mathematical encoding of quantum phenomena in spreadsheets of infinite extent—during a brief stay on the small island of Heligoland, “Germany’s only outlying island, so dry and inclement that trees barely rise from the ground and not a single flower blossoms amid its stones.” This is a historical fact, but for Labatut this and the other facts that ground the tale are—by his own admission—just starter materials. In his stormy telling Heisenberg hikes all about the windswept island, becoming ill from the exhaustion of nonstop physical and mental exertion. He returns to his hotel, and in a nightmarish fog of fever and physics, amid a dark, delusional encounter between the poets Goethe and Hafez, he creates his groundbreaking mathematical formulation: 

He felt his brain split in two: each hemisphere worked on its own, without needing to communicate with the other, and as a result his matrices violated all the rules of ordinary algebra and obeyed the logic of dreams…. Too weary to question himself, he continued working until he had reached the final matrix. When he solved it, he left his bed and ran around his room shouting, “Unobservable! Unimaginable! Unthinkable!” until the entire hotel was awakened. Among the consequences of these calculations is the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which codifies the limits of measurement in the subatomic realm. Heisenberg later realizes this while walking the streets of Copenhagen, in a vision darkened by a foreshadowing of the nuclear weapons whose invention can be traced directly to the discovery of quantum mechanics: he sees a dead baby at his feet and finds himself surrounded by “thousands of figures” who looked as though they wanted to “warn him of something, before they were carbonized in an instant” by a “flash of blind light.”

For me, it was a difficult read. I'll have to go back and re-read The MANIAC. 

That opening line -- 

"In his stormy telling Heisenberg hikes all about the windswept island, becoming ill from the exhaustion of nonstop physical and mental exertion. He returns to his hotel, and in a nightmarish fog of fever and physics, amid a dark, delusional encounter between the poets Goethe and Hafez, he creates his groundbreaking mathematical formulation."

That reminds me of James Watson telling us how he and colleagues discovered the molecular and 3-D structure of DNA; and, Friedrich August Kekulé, who discovered the Kekulé (naturally) structure of benzene. 

By the way, speaking of "3-D structure of DNA," the other day I ran across a short blurb that explained the difference between geometry and topology. Absolutely fascinating. The difference described in two sentences, each less than a dozen or so words long. If I can find that blurb again, I'll post it. But I can explain it to Sophia even if I can't write it out on the blog. Google: geometry vs topology the difference. I think one could construct an IQ test based on topology alone. 

By the way, as long as I'm rambling, I assume "everyone" has at least heard of Goethe. Hafez? Unlikely. Highly recommend that if you've read this far, to click on to the "Hafez" link above. Fascinating. I've lived a very, very insular life.