The world is understood when you stop thinking you have already understood it. I’ve always been a slow reader, and I’ve always taken twice as long as anyone else to finish a novel. I confess that even the reading time at the end of the articles Vanity Fair it always made me a little anxious. However, it took me less than an afternoon to finish When we stopped understanding the worlda book by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut published by Adelphi. It is not a novel, it is not an essay and it is not even a series of short stories. Rather, it’s a flow of stories that works like a mirror or a treasure mapsomething in which everyone sees or finds what they want, what they need, what they don’t know to get back to understanding the world.
The book ended up in my hands thanks to a friend, Alessio, who had been recommended by another friend, Jacopo. I have to thank both of them.
In about two hundred pages, the birth of modern science is narrated through the paths, always outside the box and conventions, of some scientists famous for their revolutionary discoveries. Among the many narratives, I was won over by the epic of the German physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, a genius who formulated a very, very complex theory capable of describing a world of possibilities, not certainties. Because, writes Labatut, “quantum mechanics… is the gem in the crown of our species, the most precise, most beautiful, and most far-reaching physical theory that has ever been conceived. It underpins the Internet, cell phones, and offers the premise of digital power comparable only to divine intelligence. It has transformed the world until it is unrecognizable. We know how to use it, it works for some sort of miracle, and yet there is not a single soul on this planet, dead or alive, who truly understands it. The mind is unable to untangle its paradoxes and contradictions. It seems that this theory has fallen to Earth as a monolith from space, and we go around it on four legs like monkeys, playing with it, throwing stones and sticks at it, but without real knowledge ».
Now, what has quantum mechanics to do that drove even Albert Einstein crazy with this number from Vanity Fair dedicated to the summer, to the shows that finally come back live and to other stories that you will find in the next pages? Quantum mechanics is the realm of possibilities, not rules. It changes constantly according to the moment or the point of view from which you look at it. Unlike the famous Einstein equation that explains everything (E = mc2), is on the contrary «the daughter of the whim of a goddess with many arms who plays with chance».
Here, this summer I wish you to rely on the possibilities the case in the quantum mechanics of your lives rather than trusting the rules that have explained everything to you up to now.
Go out, go to concerts, travel where you’ve never been (no need to go far). Give chance, fate, call it what you want, the chance to surprise you. And listen to others. In this job, one of the most boring things I’ve discovered are those celebrities who only talk about themselves. To joke, we call them “Hi, how am I”, because they are always focused on themselves. Do exactly the opposite: at dinners, aperitifs, on the train, on trips, at the seaside, in the mountains, you ask: hello, how are you? And then listen, open up to what you don’t know. S.Only in this way the new “summer of life”, as we wrote on the cover, I am sure it will amaze you.
Enjoy the reading
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Source: Vanity Fair
