by Primo Levi
With regard to selective walls, the very windows of our houses contain a small but refined arsenal. Normal glass panes allow images to come through but act as a barrier to air and to the external temperature; louvered shutters, by contrast, let in air but not light; roll-down shutters let in neither air nor light; curtains let in light and some air but not images; frosted glass lets in light but neither images nor air; the iron grilles on the ground floor let in air, light, images, and even cats and outstretched hands, but not entire human bodies.
It is stimulating to think that our energy future, or, rather, simply our future, depends exclusively on the solution to a problem of containers. A machine for extracting energy from nothing (or almost nothing: from the hydrogen in water) already exists, not only on paper, and has shown itself to be tremendously efficient in hydrogen bombs. What’s still lacking, and it’s the “only” thing, is the bottle whose walls are resistant to the formidable temperatures the machine requires in order to function the way the Sun does. As for the gnomes in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Frascati, too, who are pondering this bottle, which will surely be incorporeal (a magnetic field), we wish them good luck, in our own best interest, and hope that their ideas will be successful but not too audacious. We don’t know what might happen if their bottle were to break, nor do we know if they know.
It appears that this will be the seal of our century. As makers of containers, we hold the key to the greatest boon and the greatest abuse: two doors side by side, two locks, but only one key.
July 28, 1985
1. From “Dei sepolcri” (“Of the Sepulchres”), by Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827).
2. The kitchen of the Castello di Fratta is described in Ippolito Nievo’s 1867 novel, Le confessioni d’un italiano (Confessions of an Italian).
The Wine of the Borgias
Among the many wishes of the daily newspaper reader there is one that might seem to be fairly inexpensive to satisfy. It would be nice if the reporter assigned to cover accidents or, better yet, disasters were to use an appropriate, precise language, as do his colleagues who report on the theater, sports, finance, etc. I have in mind two recent cases, as you may already have guessed: the Val di Fiemme disaster and the scandal of the Austrian wines.1
It would be foolish to expect the relevant stories to have been entrusted immediately to a geologist and an enologist respectively. It would be utopian to demand a reporter capable of rushing to the Val di Fiemme and promptly unmasking the lies told there, whether in good or bad faith, and resisting the pressure of local interests, which (as always in such cases) are enormous. Nevertheless, it would not have been difficult, even for a “generalist,” to question the local people, and to find out and describe how the two purification basins were built, how large they were, how long they had been there, what condition the embankment walls were in. We saw, in the days that followed, a photograph of the installation as it appeared before the disaster. Though not too clear, it was appalling: so the two banks on the valley side were extremely steep, almost sheer? And were they of packed earth, as was said? A local land surveyor, or a student, should not have had any difficulty giving us a quick description of it.
It’s not a request dictated solely by curiosity: the reader should not and does not want to be satisfied by interviews and by reports from the experts; he should and wants to judge for himself, and has to have the essential information to do so. If there is culpability, he has the right to be indignant, but he wants to be in a position to independently choose the quality and quantity of his indignation and (above all) at whom it should be directed. He distrusts, or should distrust, the barbaric institution of the scapegoat. He knows that the sentence will come, if it comes, at a distance of months or years, and that it will be written in a cross between the abstruse language of the judges and the equally abstruse language of the technicians. Therefore he wants to have the opportunity to shape his own opinion, even if it cannot take a legal form or have any legal effect.
He wants to understand, which is his right, and he also wants to have a say: it’s a meager satisfaction that shouldn’t be taken away from him. He will have his say in any case, but if he has been informed in a clear, accurate way, his opinion will acquire the weight conferred by at least a minimum of expertise.
The newspaper must strive to supply him with such expertise, as soon as possible. That way, it will avoid hasty acquittals or convictions; indifference, fatalism, or witch hunts; dangerous complacency or unjustified fears. It is just that those who are responsible be punished. But for such events not to be repeated, wide-ranging expertise must exist, which probably did not exist among the hundreds of people who, at all levels, had a hand in those embankments; and there are things that can be seen more clearly from below than from above.
The matter of the Austrian wine, for the time being at least, smacks more of fraud than of tragedy. There is word of only a single death, and, furthermore, its relation to the wine that was drunk is quite doubtful. It’s clear that, in this case, the Italian reporter had no choice but to repeat, as best he could, the news reported by his foreign colleague; but this colleague was hasty and inexact, more inclined to provoke scandal than to provide concrete facts.
To say that diethylenic glycol, or diethylene glycol (not “glycol diethylene,” which chemically makes no sense), is used as antifreeze for the water that circulates in car radiators is inaccurate: ethylene glycol, its younger brother, is normally used for this purpose. It costs less and, in equal concentration, has a better return. It is also more toxic, but it does not appear to have been found in the wines.
However, the fact that one or the other product may be used as antifreeze has no legal relevance: to insist on it, as all the European newspapers have, serves only to confuse people’s ideas. The reader wonders, rightly, what could have led those people to use a substance for such an unusual purpose, as if someone were to tie a salami with wire, or sweep the streets with a spade. If the adulterator had been a single individual, one might think of insanity, but there were many. . . .
What does have legal relevance, on the other hand, is the toxicity of diethylene glycol. It’s not very high; and besides, obviously no producer in his right mind would put a powerful poison in his own wine. Nevertheless, according to toxicology texts, it is approximately five times as toxic as ethyl alcohol, which is not so insignificant. In America in 1937, its imprudent use in a drug caused the deaths of sixty individuals who had ingested about ten grams a day for several consecutive days.
You can see that we’re on the edge of danger if it’s true that some Austrian wines contained sixteen grams per liter or even more. Besides, it’s always difficult to predict what effect two poisons will have (in this case, alcohol and glycol) when ingested simultaneously: they can strengthen each other or, vice versa, one can inhibit the other—all questions that these producers do not seem to have been concerned with.
The reason that glycol was used can be easily explained. In many countries, sweetening wines with sugar or glucose is prohibited. Glycol has a cloying taste that to me is decidedly unpleasant but that appears to simulate that of some esteemed wines. From the standpoint of a winemaker inclined to fraud, it has a considerable advantage: it’s a modest, not very conspicuous substance, whose presence does not leap out at either the chemical analyst or the consumer.
Now, the chemist is required to check if a product is in compliance with established regulations; he cannot be asked to ascertain that the product does not contain unexpected foreign substances, since there are millions of known chemical compounds. Apparently, a very shrewd but professionally rather dishonest Austrian enologist gave his many clients fraudulent advice. Do you want to sweeten your wines that are too “dry”? The law prohibits you from using sugars, which, besides, would not escape analysis. So add glycol, which is a little less innocuous and adds a little less sweetness, but which no chemist will think of looking for.
And, indeed, for who knows how many years, no chemist found
it; in fact, the chemist finds the compound that he’s looking for (when it’s there; sometimes, if he’s not very experienced, even when it’s not), but to find what he is not looking for he has to be extremely capable or outrageously fortunate.
It’s less easy to explain why, in certain wines, such a low percentage was found that it had no effect, either positive (sweetening) or negative (harming the drinker). But wine passes through several hands: it can’t be ruled out that unlawfully sweetened wine was mixed with authentic wine by some producer, perhaps unaware of the fraud. That is no reason that he should be held less responsible, nor will it, at this point, be easy for him to prove his innocence.
August 9, 1985
1. On July 19, 1985, a dam in the Val di Fiemme in Trentino collapsed, causing the deaths of 268 people. That summer, it was also discovered that hundreds of thousands of gallons of Austrian wine were apparently doctored with antifreeze (diethylene glycol).
Reproducing Miracles
I happened to read two books in succession (not very recent ones; when it comes to books it’s better to let them season a little) that dealt with more or less the same subject, while taking opposite positions. One is Viaggio nel mondo del paranormale (Journey into the Paranormal World), by Piero Angela, the learned gentleman whom all television-watching Italians are familiar with. The other is The Roots of Coincidence, by Arthur Koestler, the author who died a few years ago, and on whose novels a generation of Europeans were brought up.
The first book makes a clean sweep: paranormal phenomena do not exist. Telepathy, precognition, spiritism, astrology, psychokinesis, etc. are the product of skillful tricks or self-delusion. The backing that these phenomena have often received from illustrious physicists in the past hundred years does not prove anything: physicists are accustomed to the “good faith” of the facts that they observe, they themselves act in good faith, subtle when interpreting experimental data, ingenuous when it comes to the cleverness of charlatans. Uri Geller, the spoon bender, is a very skillful charlatan; Kirlian, the Soviet who photographs the “aura” that surrounds leaves, seeds, insects, and human hands, is a fanatical ignoramus.
There is no phenomenon on the lengthy list that a skilled illusionist is not able to reproduce. If he is honest, he will declare himself for what he is, namely, a professional trickster; if he is dishonest, he claims to possess superhuman powers. The best exegetes of the paranormal are not scientists but, precisely, illusionists, especially those who have reached the end of their career; but even they (and on this point Angela’s book is in dubious taste), out of professional solidarity toward their younger colleagues, refuse to reveal the key to their most amazing acts.
After the books that made him famous throughout the world, Koestler set out on a path that surprised many: waging war against the positions taken by official science. Though not a biologist or a physicist, he had always possessed an enviable polemical vitality. Thanks to his fame, he had access to sources (including personal ones) denied to most people and was a man of admirable culture. His thesis, in the book I’ve cited, is deliberately shocking: paranormal phenomena exist, we live surrounded by them, but, being one-eyed and, what’s more, confounded by established science, we do not realize it.
The case of Galileo is recurrent: we don’t want to look through the telescope; those who do look don’t want to see and therefore do not see; the neo-Aristotelians do all they can to gag or excommunicate clairvoyants. And yet modern physics is so strange that its strangeness should make us less incredulous. If we believe in the uncertainty principle, in the wave/corpuscle duality of particles, in the curvature of space, in the relativity of time, we cannot reject the equally strange facts that pour down on us from the world of the paranormal. If physicists are credulous, they do well to be so; skepticism is more an impediment than a filter.
I would declare Angela the winner of the competition, but just barely. Though he is right to help us clear our horizon of foolishness and shenanigans, it is imprudent to be so drastic. An often cited pronouncement by Prince Hamlet comes to mind, and a more recent one by Arthur C. Clarke, according to which, if an eminent scientist asserts that an endeavor is possible, he should be believed; but if he asserts that an endeavor is impossible, it is wiser to distrust him. For example: Angela denies that dowsers have any power; but an authoritative Swiss daily some years ago published the news that Roche (yes, the well-known drug company) pays a regular salary to two dowsers, and sends them all over the world to look for water for its new factories. The Swiss are people with their feet on the ground, and they do not like to waste francs; before hiring the water diviners they subjected them to serious examination, ascertaining that in certain conditions, which are easy to reproduce, dowsers unerringly find water.
That is precisely the point, the reproducibility. Koestler makes use of an expedient that rhetoricians have known for centuries: he accumulates an avalanche of facts, some well documented, others not so well, still others known only by hearsay. That is, he counts on a mass effect, but his “coincidences” are never reproducible. It would take just one single clairvoyant individual with proven skills to bankrupt the Lottery, Monte Carlo, and all the bookmakers in the world. Koestler’s line of reasoning on the strangeness of physics can impress only those who are naïve: the phenomena observed or triggered by today’s physicists are strange, yes, but reproducible. Any physicist who describes an experience that cannot be reproduced, in Europe or America or China, becomes a laughingstock.
And yet . . . and yet there are phenomena that are not reproducible: each of us has experienced them. The physicist rightly disregards them, because, just as science is not based on the individual, neither is it based on occasional and erratic facts. He does not forget them, however. He tries to purge them of every emotional ingredient and free himself of hallucinations and fallacious memories; he avoids wasting time explaining phenomena whose existence is doubtful, but year after year he constructs his own private mental museum in which, for future recollection, there are a number of indubitable facts that his science cannot explain. I have never been a physicist, but I have not forgotten thirty years of activity in lesser chemistry, and my private museum is not mental but material. It contains at least three objects that I will describe, and that await (so far in vain) someone who will explain their origin.
The first is fifteen years old and is not very pretty: it is a lump of semi-fused synthetic resin, hard as wood. It comes from a desiccator into which air at 65°C was introduced. The procedure had been carried out thousands of times with no ill effect: the resin exsiccated routinely at that temperature. Only twice in twenty years did the resin in just one corner of the desiccator spontaneously heat up to the point of fusion; once it actually became incandescent.
The second object is eighteen years old, and it’s a piece of enameled copper wire. The enamel, of a very common type, is blackish and does not adhere to the metal. So far, there is nothing strange about it, since the specimen comes from a continuous furnace in the shutdown phase, during which the progress of the wire is arrested, and it is left to burn safely in place. The strange thing is that only twice in my career as a wire coater did the enamel come off not in fragments but, rather, in the shape of a helix, with at least a hundred spirals, of a regular gauge, as if it had been made with a die.
The third object is very charming. Nearly forty years old (alas!), it is, or, rather, was, a small steel sphere approximately twelve millimeters in diameter. It was part of the load of a ball mill, that is, a large drum in which the components of a paint and special “balls” of pig iron, ceramic, or steel are randomly placed; the mill turns slowly, and the friction between the balls disperses the pigment in the paint. It was the postwar period, and for lack of anything better that particular load was made with ball bearings, perhaps discarded upon inspection. As usual, when the mill began grinding laboriously, the balls were taken out and replaced with new ones. Well, most of them were no longer spherical, but presented twelve quite regular penta
gonal faces; they were, in other words, pentagonal dodecahedrons with rounded corners. I’ve asked many of my colleagues, and it appears that this has never occurred in other mills or other factories. Why did it happen, and why just that one time?
If the three pieces of physical evidence—improbable but certainly not paranormal—were not there to prove by their obstinate presence that they exist, I would think that my recollection of the three events from which they came had been corrupted or exaggerated with the years, like the recollection of premonitory dreams.
September 15, 1985
The Hidden Player
I didn’t want any games: I can cite reliable witnesses. I’ve had a word processor for a year now: it has become almost a part of my body, the way shoes, glasses, or dentures do. It is indispensable for me for writing and filing; but I didn’t want it to take over and so I didn’t want to bring frivolous programs into the house. The computer was to be used for work and that’s all. Instead, the unpredictable (or predictable?) happened: I received a chess program as a gift and gave in to the seduction.
Of course, chess is not a frivolous activity for professional chess players, or in general for those who devote themselves to the game seriously and with passion; but for me it is. I play quite badly: I lack the fundamental aptitude, the ability to concentrate, the power of logic, the specific mentality and culture, the grit. But I play just the same, in a frivolous, reckless way, at long, irregular intervals, without bothering to learn the classical openings and endgame strategies. Whenever I get the chance (it happens more and more infrequently) I play an opponent of the right type, that is, one who plays more or less like me, in the same distracted, holiday spirit, and at a level not too different from mine; otherwise, if he’s too good, he crushes me like an ant, and if he’s too weak, my victory seems insipid or feels like bullying.