The tendency towards hybridization between essay and narrative has given rise to a porous border (the Anglo-Saxons speak of Non Fiction Novel). This narrative built with bricks of reality has found a great vein in the lives of brilliant scientists who fell into the abyss. The disaster of geniuses causes us astonishment and perhaps an unspeakable relief that reconciles us with our mediocrity.
The Debate publishing house was smart to publish American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in the summer, following Christopher Nolan’s excellent film, Oppenheimer, based on this Pulitzer-winning biography. It tells us the turbulent life of the physicist who led the Manhattan Project, where the first nuclear bomb in history was cooked. Some of the most brilliant scientists of their time could not resist the temptation to collaborate because the ease of means that the government provided them to research and experiment with their science drowned out their scruples about contributing to a weapon of mass destruction. Moral doubts would always haunt Oppenheimer and he would end up, in a humiliating fall, with 34 charges against him, accused of being anti-American.
In The Inventor (Libros del Asteroid), a finalist for the Femina Prize, the French writer Miguel Bonnefoy tells us about another fall of a scientist. Agustin Mouchot, born in 1825, demonstrated a great talent for mental calculation from a young age. He patented the first solar machine in history, a modest pot powered by the sun made from crystals that would become the starting signal for the use of solar energy. His own obsession with going further in his research would end up causing him to get lost on a scientific pilgrimage through the desert in search of more and more sun until he ended up burning up physically and financially. The ending is worthy of a Charles Dickens novel.
Even worse was the end of another genius of the 20th century, the physicist and mathematician Paul Ehrenfest, a close friend of Einstein, with whom he shared the difficulty of having a child with a disability. He ended up shooting his son and then committing suicide himself, desperate because the nascent Quantum Mechanics disrupted the entire mathematical system that had sustained his brilliant scientific life and he was no longer able to follow it. Benjamin Labatut tells us in Maniac (Anagrama), who spent a few days in Barcelona with the aura of a revelation writer of Chilean literature.
It is true that Labatut has a very good hand at telling, from various points of view, the anguish of these privileged minds. In his previous book, A Terrible Greenness, he already showed his amazement at the contradictions of scientific geniuses, such as the sad story of the chemist Fritz Haber, who created the pesticide Zyklon that the Nazis ended up using to murder hundreds of thousands of people in chambers. of gas including members of their own family. In Maniac (bad title for a good book) he also tells us the lights and shadows of one of the most astonishing human brains in history, that of the Hungarian mathematician Jancsi Von Neumann. Labatut opens in his pages a confessional where those who knew him show, as if in murmurs, their astonishment at his intelligence and his apprehension towards someone without moral limits.
Von Neumann plunges into another abyss worse than that of bankruptcy, social rejection or remorse: that of cruelty. Labatut, a writer in search of that blind spot of reality, has explained these days that “What attracts and terrifies us about madmen and geniuses is that they see, or imagine, or hallucinate, a world to which others cannot. “We have access.”
