Bands of wild horses crossed it at a gallop, shaking the ground beneath their hooves. Heisenberg could not imagine how they survived in such a wasteland. He followed their tracks to a gypsum quarry and whiled away his time cracking open stones to see if he could find one of the fossils for which the island was famous all over Germany. He spent the rest of that afternoon throwing rocks into the abandoned quarry, where they would shatter into a thousand pieces, foreshadowing the violence the British would unleash on Heligoland after the end of the Second World War, when they piled up all their unused munitions, torpedoes and mines and detonated the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in history, right in the middle of the island. The shockwaves of Operation Big Bang shattered windows sixty kilometres away and crowned the island with a column of jet-black smoke three thousand metres high, pulverizing the hillside Heisenberg had scaled twenty years earlier to see the sunset.
When he was almost at the edge of the cliffs, a dense fog covered the island. Heisenberg decided to go back to his hotel, but when he turned he realized that the trail had vanished. He cleaned the lenses of his glasses and looked around, trying to find some reference point that would lead him safely away from the precipice. As the fog thinned, he thought he recognized a huge boulder he had tried to scale the afternoon before, but no sooner had he seen it when the mist enveloped him once more. He was utterly disoriented. Like any good alpinist, he knew dozens of stories of simple hikes that had ended in tragedy: one misplaced foot could break your skull. He tried to keep calm, but everything around him had changed: the wind howled, blowing dust up from the ground and stinging his eyes, and the sun could not penetrate the haze. The few things he could make out alongside his feet—a seagull’s skeleton, the wrinkled wrapper of a cough drop—seemed strangely hostile. The cold gnawed at the skin of his hands, though only minutes before it had been so hot he had had to remove his coat. Unable to advance in any direction, he sat down and leafed through his notebook.
Everything he had done up to that point struck him as senseless. The restrictions he had imposed on himself were absurd: it was impossible to illuminate the atom by darkening it in such a manner. A wave of self-pity had begun to well up inside him when a gust of wind parted the fog, revealing the path down to the village. He jumped up and ran, but the fog returned as quickly as it had dispersed. I know where the trail is, he told himself, I just need to get a little closer, pay attention to the smallest details of my surroundings, ten metres to that broken stone, twenty to those shards of glass, a hundred to the twisted roots of that tree; but a single look around sufficed to convince him there was no way of knowing whether he was approaching the road or walking straight towards the abyss. He was about to sit down again when he heard a dull thundering all around him. The noise shook the earth and grew in intensity until the gravel at his feet began to dance as though it had come alive. He thought he could distinguish a group of swiftly moving shadows on the edge of his field of vision. It’s the horses, he said to himself, trying to calm the pounding of his heart; it’s just the horses running blind through the fog. But when he looked for them once the sky had fully cleared, he could not find a single hoofprint.
In the days that followed, he worked tirelessly, closeted in his room, not even stopping to brush his teeth, and he would have continued in that way had Frau Rosenthal not burst in and pushed him out, saying that the room had begun to stink of death. Heisenberg walked down to the port, sniffing at his own clothes. When was the last time he had changed his shirt? He walked staring at the ground, so intent on his efforts to avoid the glances of his fellow tourists that he almost ran into a young woman who was trying to get his attention. He had spent so long without talking to anyone save for the hotel’s owner that it took him a moment to realize that the girl with the bright eyes and curly hair was trying to sell him a little token for the poor. Heisenberg reached into his pockets; he did not have a single mark to offer her. The young woman blushed and told him not to worry, but Heisenberg’s heart sank in his chest. What was he doing on that godforsaken island? He gazed at the woman until she was surrounded by a group of drunken dandies strolling with their arms around their girlfriends, and he realized he was probably the only single man on the entire island. He turned away, and was overtaken by a feeling of uncontrollable strangeness. The shops along the promenade looked like carbonized ruins left behind by a massive firestorm. A multitude of strangers thronged around him, their skin charred by a fire only Heisenberg could see; small girls ran with their pigtails ablaze, couples laughed as they burned together like kindling on a funeral pyre, their arms interlaced, flames licking their bodies and stretching up into the heavens. Heisenberg walked away, trying to control the tremors in his legs, but a deafening shriek pierced his eardrums as a ray of light shot through the clouds and drilled a hole into his brain. He ran back to the hotel, practically blinded by the aura that heralded one of his migraines, trying to resist his nausea and the agonizing pain spreading from his forehead to his temples, which felt as if someone were trying to split his head in two. When he finally dragged himself upstairs and fainted over his bed, he was quivering from fever.
Although unable to keep down his food, he refused to give up his walks around the island. He would shit squatting down as if he were a dog marking its territory, and then root around for stones to cover his filth, imagining that at any moment someone might surprise him with his trousers around his ankles. He was convinced his hostess was poisoning him with the tonic she forced him to drink; the more weight he lost from the vomiting and diarrhoea, the bigger the spoonfuls she gave him. When he was no longer capable of climbing out of his bed (in which he could barely stretch out his legs), he put on as much of his clothing as he could fit over his body and covered himself with five blankets, pulling them up to his neck, intending to “burn out” the fever, a home remedy he had learned from his mother and to which he submitted without question, convinced that any discomfort was preferable to handing himself over to a doctor.
Sweating from head to toe, he spent the day memorizing the West-Eastern Divan, a book of poems by Goethe that a previous guest had left behind in his room. He read the poems aloud, over and over, and certain verses echoed from his room and through the empty hallways of the hotel, to the bafflement of the other guests, who heard them as if they were the whispers of a ghost. Goethe had written them in 1819, inspired by the Sufi mystic Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known simply as Hafez. The German genius encountered the great Persian poet of the fourteenth century in a bad translation published in his home country and came to believe he had received the book at the behest of the divinity. He identified with him so closely that his voice changed completely, melding with that of the man who had sung the glories of God and wine four hundred years before. Hafez had been a drunken saint, a mystic and a hedonist. He devoted himself to prayer, poetry and alcohol. When he turned sixty years old, he traced a circle in the desert sand, sat down in its centre, and swore not to rise until he had touched the mind of Allah, the one and only God, mighty and sublime. He spent forty days in silence, tormented by the sun and wind, and when he broke his fast with a cup of wine given to him by a man who had found him on the verge of death, he felt a second consciousness awaken within him, superimposing itself over his own. That other voice dictated more than five hundred poems to him, helping Hafez to become the pinnacle of Persian literature. Goethe also had help writing his Divan, but his inspiration was not divine, rather the wife of one of his friends, Marianne von Willemer. She was as fanatical an admirer of Hafez as Goethe himself, and they wrote the book together, revising the drafts in letters rife with eroticism, in which the German poet imagines biting her nipples and ejaculating in her mouth, while she dreams of sodomizing him, in spite of the fact that they met only once, and there is no evidence they were able to fulfil any of their fantasies. Marianne composed the songs to the East Wind in the voice of Suleika, lover of Hatem, but she kept her co-authorship a secret until the night befor
e she died, reciting those same verses Heisenberg read aloud, quaking with fever: Where is the colour that might tame the sky? / The grey mist leaves me blind / the more I look, the less I see.
Heisenberg insisted on working on his matrices even when ill: while Frau Rosenthal covered him in cool compresses, hoping to lower his temperature, and tried to convince him to call a doctor, he would rant about oscillators, spectral lines and harmonically bound electrons, convinced he need only hold out a few more days for his body to overcome the illness and his mind to find the way out from the labyrinth in which he had imprisoned it. Although he could hardly turn the pages, he continued reading those verses of Goethe, and each of them seemed an arrow aimed directly at his breast: I only treasure those who long for death / in flames love has embraced me / in ashes every image of my mind. When he managed to fall asleep, Heisenberg would dream of dervishes spinning in the centre of his room. Hafez pursued them on all fours, drunk and naked, barking at them like a dog. He threw his turban at them, his glass of wine, then the empty jug, trying to dislodge them from their orbits. When he could not wake them from their trance, he pissed on them one by one, leaving a trace of yellow spots on the pale fabric of their tunics, a pattern in which Heisenberg thought he could glimpse the secret of his matrices. Heisenberg stretched out his hands to grab them, but the spots became a long chain of numbers that danced all around him, girdling his neck in a tightening circle until he was scarcely able to breathe. Those nightmares were a welcome respite from his erotic dreams, which grew more intense as his strength failed him, and made him stain his sheets like an adolescent. Though he tried to prevent Frau Rosenthal from changing them, she would not let a day pass without cleaning his room from top to bottom. The shame he felt was nearly unbearable, but Heisenberg refused to masturbate: he was convinced that all his body’s energies must remain bottled up so that he might devote them to his work.
Most nights he fell prey to insomnia. In his delirium, his mind would establish strange connections that allowed him to achieve direct results, forgoing any intermediate steps. 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, where one thing can be many: he was capable of multiplying two quantities together and obtaining different answers depending on the order in which he proceeded. Three times two was six, but two times three might be eight. 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. Frau Rosenthal entered in time to see him collapse on the floor and recoiled at the stench of his soiled pyjama bottoms. When she managed to calm him, she put him back to bed and ran off to fetch a doctor, paying no attention to his complaints, as he was passing in and out of his hallucinations.
Sitting at the foot of his bed, Hafez offered him a glass of wine. Heisenberg took it and drank it in long gulps, letting it run over his beard and chest, before realizing it contained the blood of the poet, who was now masturbating furiously while bleeding from his wrists. All this food and drink have made you fat and ignorant! Hafez hissed. But if you give up sleep and nourishment, you will have one more chance. Don’t just sit there thinking. Go out and submerge yourself in God’s sea! Wetting a single hair won’t bring you wisdom. He who sees God doesn’t doubt. His mind and his vision are pure. Woozy and confused, Heisenberg tried to follow the ghost’s instructions, but his fever had flared up again, and his teeth would not stop chattering. He recovered his lucidity only to feel the prick of a needle and to hear Frau Rosenthal crying on the doctor’s shoulder while he assured her that everything would be all right, that it was nothing more than a badly neglected cold, yet neither of them could see Goethe there, straddling the corpse of Hafez, now drained of all its blood, and yet still capable of maintaining a glorious erection, which the German poet attempted to invigorate with his lips, like a man blowing on the embers of a dying fire.
Heisenberg woke in the middle of the night. His fever had broken and his mind was exceptionally clear. He stood up from the bed and dressed mechanically, feeling himself totally alienated from his body. He approached his desk, opened his notebook and saw that he had finished every one of his matrices, though he did not know how he had constructed half of them. He took his coat and walked out into the cold.
There were no stars in the sky, only clouds lit by the moon, but his eyes had become so used to darkness after long days shut away that he was able to proceed with absolute certainty. He followed the route towards the cliffs, immune to the cold, and when he reached the highest point of the island, he saw a soft glow over the horizon, even though dawn was hours away. The radiance came not from the sun, but from the earth itself, and Heisenberg thought that perhaps it was the glare of an enormous city, but he knew the nearest one was more than a hundred kilometres to the west. There was no way for that light to reach him, and yet he could see it. Sitting with his face exposed to the wind whipped up from the sea, he opened his notebook and reviewed his matrices, so nervous that he committed one error after another, and had to start over again from the beginning. When he proved that the first was coherent, he could feel his body again. During the second, his hand shook from the cold. His pencil left tiny marks on the paper above and below his calculations, as if he had resorted to the symbols of an unknown language. His matrices were all consistent: Heisenberg had modelled a quantum system based wholly on direct observation. He had replaced metaphors with numbers and discovered the rules governing the inner phenomena of atoms. His matrices allowed him to describe the location of an electron from one moment to the next, and how it would interact with other particles. He had replicated in the subatomic world what Newton had done for the solar system, using only pure mathematics, with no recourse to imagery. He had no idea how he had arrived at his results, but there they were, written in his own hand; if he was correct, science could not only understand reality but begin to manipulate it at its most basic level. Heisenberg thought of the consequences knowledge of this nature might have, and was struck with a feeling of vertigo so profound that he had to restrain the impulse to throw his notebook into the sea. He felt he was looking past atomic phenomena towards a new sort of beauty. Too agitated to sleep, he walked towards a boulder jutting directly over the water. He climbed to the top, and sat down to wait for the sunrise with his legs dangling over the edge, listening to the waves beating against the rocks down below.
On returning to the University of Göttingen, Heisenberg fought to shape his epiphany into a publishable article. The final paper struck him as flimsy, if not downright absurd. Its pages spoke of neither orbits nor trajectories, of positions nor velocities; all of that had been replaced by a complex web of numbers governed by a set of mathematical rules so convoluted as to appear repulsive. The simplest calculation required a titanic effort, and, even for him, it was practically impossible to decipher the connection between his own matrices and the real world. And yet they worked. Too insecure to publish the paper, he handed it to Niels Bohr, who left it on his desk for weeks.
The Dane began to leaf through it one morning when he had nothing better to do, then reread it again and again, his fascination growing all the while. Soon Heisenberg’s new discovery occupied his mind so fully that it kept him up at night. What the young German had achieved had no precedents: it was like deducing all the rules of Wimbledon—the number of sets, the length of the grass, the tension of the nets and even the mandatory white that players have to wear—from the few balls that flew out of the stadium, without ever having witnessed what takes place on the court. Hard as he tried, Bohr could not tease out the strange logic that Heisenberg had employed in the creation of his matrices, but he knew the young man had hit on something fundamental. The first thing he did was notify Einstein: “Heisenberg’s latest paper, soon to be published, appears rat
her mystifying but is certainly true and profound and will have enormous implications.”
In September 1925, Heisenberg published “On a Quantum-Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations”, in Issue 33 of the Zeitschrift für Physik, the first formulation of quantum mechanics.
II
THE PRINCE’S WAVES
Heisenberg’s ideas left people stupefied.
Although Einstein himself took to the study of “matrix mechanics” as if it were a map to a buried treasure, there was something about the ideas of the young German physicist that he found truly repulsive. “Heisenberg’s theory is the most interesting of all recent contributions,” he wrote to his friend Michele Besseo, “a devilish calculation that incorporates infinite determinants and uses matrices instead of coordinates. It’s quite brilliant. And its cursed complexity insulates it from being easily disproven.” But what Einstein abhorred was not the formulae’s hermeticism, but something far more important: the world Heisenberg had discovered was incompatible with common sense. Matrix mechanics did not describe normal, albeit unimaginably small objects, but an aspect of reality that concepts of classical physics could not even name. For Einstein, this was not a minor problem. The father of relativity was a great master of visualization: all of his ideas about space and time had been born of his capacity to imagine himself in the most extreme physical circumstances. For this reason, he was unwilling to accept the restrictions demanded by Heisenberg, who seemed to have gouged out both his eyes in order to see further. Einstein sensed that if one followed that line of thinking to its ultimate consequences, darkness would infect the soul of physics: if Heisenberg triumphed, a fundamental aspect of the laws that governed the physical world would remain forever obscure, as if chance had somehow nested in the heart of matter and become inextricably bound to its most fundamental constituents. Someone had to stop him. Someone had to smash the box in which Heisenberg had trapped the atom. And for Einstein, that someone was a peculiar young Frenchman, as shy as he was extravagant: Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie.
When We Cease to Understand the World Page 8