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The Quantum Chaos of Literature

Benjamín Labatut’s writing—dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics—blurs the line between truth and imagination.

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.” Another Nobel laureate, Prince Louis de Broglie, produces reams of mathematics while holed up in a Gaudí-esque mansion, living amid a personal museum of art brut curated by his artist lover, recently a suicide, that includes a gigantic replica of Notre Dame made from excrement. His early mathematical achievements earned him a position in 1933 as one of the founding faculty members of the Institute for Advanced Study ( IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and he became part of the first wave of the 1930s diaspora of Eastern European intelligentsia who fled the Continental rise of fascism and antisemitism and reshaped intellectual life in the United States.

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