Ibeg you, don’t be ashamed. Not you. It wasn’t Professor von Lindemann’s little dog you were running away from in 1920, but the messenger, somewhat grotesque and repulsive as demonic creatures always are, that fate had chosen to call you sharply to order and put you back on the path that was yours, the path it wasn’t up to you to choose even though you risked losing your soul there in a fool’s bargain. In Arnold Sommerfeld’s theoretical physics seminar, nobody barked angrily at you, nobody looked down on you, nobody tried to humiliate you. You had come home, where for a long time I myself was ashamed to follow you, since it was your fault that I experienced the worst humiliation of my life.
As far as I know, what comes first in the order of things is everything we have to learn. Traditions, laws, a whole history of mistakes and triumphs. The work of beloved masters, the living, the dead, those who want to survive in you, those who accept that you will surpass them. We must take our place in the patient construction of an infinite edifice, the common work of men, living and dead, hoping perhaps to leave, in our turn, something worthy of being learned. We must acquire enough strength to go into battle when fire threatens and we have to rebuild it anew, saving what can be saved.
But you began with the battle, in a field of ruins.
You began with the fire.
In the sphere you had chosen, nothing could be saved. All the attempts at rebuilding led to rickety, unsteady theoretical constructions that seemed straight out of the mystic visions of a madman, and yet it was impossible to cling to a past that had been reduced to ashes. Ever since Max Planck had discovered the universal action quantum, that ill-fated constant h that had, in a few years, contaminated the equations of physics with the malign speed of an ineradicable virus, nature seemed gripped by madness: small cracks fissured the old continuity of the flows of energy, light swarmed with strange granular entities, and at the same time, as if that weren’t enough, matter began radiating wildly in a ghostlike halo of interferences. Borders that had once been thought inviolable blurred then shattered into pieces. Depending on the experimental framework to which it was subjected, the same phenomenon appeared now like a wave, now like a corpuscle, even though, of course, nothing in the world could be both one and the other, and the more time passed, the more obvious it became that this appalling duality wasn’t in any way the exception but the rule, a rule that nobody could understand. All that remained was the depressing certainty that the atom wasn’t a miniature solar system within which friendly electrons peacefully pursued their orbit around an easygoing nucleus: the atom transformed all dreams into nightmares, even the most venerable, the dreams of Leucippus and Democritus, the dreams of Anaxagoras and Lord Rutherford, it was a concentrate of nonsense and heresy, a swamp into which reason sank, and yet it was on this swamp that a new home had to be erected, one in which it would again be possible to live.
So the sacred transmission of knowledge, assuming there was still anything to transmit, had ceased to be a priority for Arnold Sommerfeld. In these exceptional circumstances, the students were no longer to be treated merely as novices but considered, if not as colleagues, at least as assistants whose forces, however faltering and indecisive, had to be mobilized to deal with the disaster. And so it was that Arnold Sommerfeld immediately entrusted you with a mass of experimental results, the word of the master of Delphi, who neither speaks nor hides his meaning, gathered in the laboratories by countless Pythias, a silent word, made up of abrupt scintillations, tiny droplets shining through the fog, spectral lines torn from the secret core of things, which it was your mission to explore in order to flush out the mathematical regularities from which the miracle of meaning might emerge—and then that would be the end of all this chaos, but in the meantime, Sommerfeld assured you, without the slightest trace of irony, that it was as enjoyable an exercise as doing crosswords, and to fill the gaps in your knowledge of physics, he would casually refer you to your fellow student Wolfgang Pauli.
No doubt friendship, if this was indeed friendship, is also an enigma. Pauli was extremely brilliant. Modesty not being his primary characteristic, he didn’t stoop so low as to pretend he was unaware of his own value or to assume, even out of simple politeness, that others, starting with you, might not be totally devoid of it. He did concede, though, that in those days of ruins and fire, your complete ignorance of physics had to be considered an advantage: at least your mind wouldn’t be cluttered with knowledge that had become pointless, which meant that one couldn’t in all honesty rule out the tiny possibility that a new idea might germinate miraculously in that uncultivated soil. You sometimes wondered if he was being sincere or simply pulling your leg, because he didn’t spare anybody, not even Sommerfeld, whose demeanor he impertinently compared to that of a retired colonel of hussars, and he had no qualms about shocking you with his irreverence. But at night, he would go to bed as late as possible in order to avoid the dreams that would haunt him all his life and that he hadn’t yet begun to note down in order to submit them to the wisdom of Dr. Jung. He would wander all night between his desk and alarming dens of iniquity in which you would never set foot, roaming from one alleyway to another until exhaustion brought him back, as it does all of us, to the pitiless dreams from which no loving embrace can ever save us.
In those dreams, made all the more terrible by the gray light of dawn, he never saw his mother, nor the familiar figures from his childhood.
On high blackboards, in a vast deserted amphitheater, he would watch with terror as equations he should have understood and which he knew he would never see again were erased, and however hard he tried to imprint them on his mind, all that remained of them was the vague memory of silent signs sucked back into nothingness, as if a perverse God had yielded him the secrets of his omniscience only for the pleasure of taking them away from him forever.
From the stony mouths of stern masters fell nonsensical maxims he didn’t want to hear, in all the languages of the world.
Long golden cobras slithered in the dust, in the shimmering starlight, and he watched the fruit rot on the branches of the tree of knowledge.
Early in the afternoon, he would join you at the University, where you’d arrived early in the morning while he was still moaning in his bed. He would greet you with nonchalant affection, trailing in his wake the odor of alcohol and tobacco and fallen women, all those things that only existed for you in their evanescent form as scents. You were such an utterly wholesome young man, a boy scout eager for fresh air and honest camaraderie, so full of enthusiasm and innocence that you imagined you and your friends in the youth movement were working to bring about a better world, as if hiking, gathering around the campfire in manly and ascetic good humor, and leading a clean and spotless life were enough to redeem the world. You also loved everything that’s alien to me, everything I don’t understand, and that should have been enough for me to hate you, even though the young man I’m forced to recognize as myself still doesn’t know, on this day in June 1989, the extent of the humiliation he will soon suffer because of you, while he’s still waiting to be called to take his final end-of-year oral exam.
I’ve just heard that I’ll have to comment on a passage from Physics and Philosophy, which of course I haven’t read, occupied as I’ve been in indefinitely prolonging my adolescent crisis, overdosing on English cold wave music and incense. There in front of me is your book, whose cover illustration, so drastically ugly it could only have been premeditated, depicts a horrible orange polygon on a black background, as if the publishers, fearing that quantum mechanics wasn’t sufficiently off-putting in itself, had tried to discourage hypothetical buyers by every means possible, even the most underhand—unless they considered ugliness an unquestionable guarantee of scientific seriousness. I hear the candidate before me babble laboriously on, I see his quivering back, his bent neck, and, facing him, the young female assistant professor listening with a slightly tense smile and tapping her fingertips mechanically on the table. I think she’s beautiful, and I now regret not having set foot all year in the classes she devoted to you, but I’m not thinking about you, I’m probably being stupid, indulging in vague erotic fantasies, and I’m not scared. I’ve learned to comment on texts I haven’t read and don’t understand, when it comes down to it that may even be the one indisputable skill I’ve acquired after four years of study. A few popular articles, the right methodological jargon, and my own brazen arrogance have so far allowed me to successfully conceal my laziness. So I know that you were responsible for the uncertainty principle, which stipulates, apparently, that it’s impossible to determine simultaneously the position and speed of an elementary particle, and I also know that, in the controversy which for a long time divided physicists in the 1920s, for reasons that escape me as totally as they bore me, you, along with Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, were an opponent of Einstein, Schrödinger, and the Prince de Broglie—and this meager baggage seems to be quite sufficient to confront the young assistant professor, who’s now signaling to me to join her. I advance with the unmistakable smugness of ignorance because, basically, I don’t know a thing, I don’t know you, I don’t want to join you on a desolate island, you’re still nothing to me but one more German name on an endless list of German names, I know nothing of the joys and sorrows of the life of the mind, I carefully chop up texts into sections and subsections, like cuts of meat, until nothing is left alive, I don’t know your unforgettable moments of grace, looking at the North Sea, and I don’t know that the unforgettable moments of grace don’t solve everything.
No sooner is it glimpsed than the light disappears.
And yet, when you submitted the results of your calculations on Heligoland to Pauli, he didn’t greet them as the ravings of a fool, and even deigned to find them “interesting,” which, coming from someone who described Einstein’s propositions as “not completely stupid,” could only be interpreted as a remarkable display of enthusiasm. You were convinced you’d just taken a crucial step on the only road that was still open, the only one leading out of the terrible labyrinth in which you’d all been wandering so sadly for so many years. All you had to do was give up insoluble questions, those that revolved around a physical reality that nobody could observe or conceive, forget all those stories of waves and corpuscles, orbits and trajectories, free yourself painfully from your nostalgia for images, and take one giant leap across the abyss and into the refuge of mathematical forms, because it’s there that reason has always had its home—and it was once again the summer night in the courtyard of Prunn Castle, with the notes of the chaconne rising from a solo violin and snatching you from your pain by revealing that the world wasn’t just the chaos it seemed to be, that great broken body, with its pointless deaths, its lost souls, its vain hopes, its ruins, its indistinguishable resentment and anger, the humiliation of its diktats, and that it was still possible to have faith in what you didn’t call God but a central order, within which everything had its place. Yes, you’d found the right way, the only way, that much was certain, and for a moment, I suppose, you had no doubt that you would convince the community of physicists.
But of course, nothing happened the way you wanted it to.
When you explained the peculiarities of your matrix mechanics to Einstein, he accused you, not entirely unreasonably, of leading physics into a dangerous terrain by abandoning the ideal that had always been his, the objective description of nature. Then, a little later that same year, 1926, Erwin Schrödinger put forward a hypothesis that expressed an unreasonable hope and must have appeared to you a terrible step backwards: that electrons had never been particles but, quite simply, waves, which sometimes looked falsely like particles. In support of his statements, and in order to describe the evolution of these waves of matter, Schrödinger proposed a magnificent differential equation that took account of the experimental results as well as your stern matrices, but in an infinitely simpler and more familiar manner. In doing so, he aroused the enthusiasm of a scientific community delighted, after years of wandering in a quantum storm, to at last see again the shores of the paradise that a jealous God had taken away from it. The professor you admired so much, Arnold Sommerfeld, also seemed ready to succumb to the baleful siren song of these waves, and no matter how strongly you objected that Schrödinger’s theory, seductive as it was, contradicted known facts, nobody listened to you, everything would soon be resolved, it was all perfectly obvious, you were even openly suspected of harboring some nasty grudges, you were focusing on unimportant details out of pure jealousy, vexed at having to renounce your quantum ravings. Nobody is free of pretty resentments, and it’s quite possible you were indeed suffering from wounded pride, but what motivated you before anything else was the belief that it was necessary to renounce forever the intuitive representations of atomic phenomena, however painful that might be: Schrödinger and all the others were wrong, they were embracing the futile pipe dreams that desire and nostalgia rendered irresistible to them, nothing more, but, without knowing it, they were still wandering in a labyrinth full of monsters, on the borders of a savage land, a hostile land they would have to tame because it wouldn’t let them escape, and never again would they find their lost paradise.