The Principle Read online

  POSITION 4:

  BETWEEN THE POSSIBLE AND THE REAL

  In bibliographies as in war memorials, names end up turning into lies that conceal what they should designate. They are ageless and faceless, and I hadn’t realized how young you were until I saw that photograph taken in 1920, perhaps just as you were joining Sommerfeld’s seminar. You’re not much more than a child, and it’s true, you look like a boy scout, but the innocent smile that lights up your face bears witness to a trust in life so admirable that each time it makes me forget everything that distances me from you. It’s a total, spontaneous trust, without arrogance or conceit, which is impossible to ridicule, and it seems as though it’s bound to preserve that youthfulness of yours forever, because we find it still intact ten years later, at the University of Leipzig, with only the black armband you’re wearing after the death of your father to distinguish you from your students, or in Brussels, in the group photograph of the 1927 Solvay Conference. You aren’t in the front row, where Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Max Planck are sitting, but, more modestly, standing in the back row, a little stiff and embarrassed, next to Pauli, who seems to be giving Schrödinger a sidelong look. And yet it’s your principle that’s the focus of all the debates: every morning at the breakfast table, Einstein presents the experiment he’s imagined during the night to refute it, an experiment that ought to prove at least the theoretical possibility of determining exactly the speed and position of a particle; and every evening, after a long day of reflection in the course of which he has, as usual, turned the problem this way and that until those around him are completely exhausted, Niels Bohr points out the flaw he’s discovered in Einstein’s argument and saves the principle until the following morning. But Einstein, supported by Schrödinger and Louis de Broglie, doesn’t give up.

  He’ll never give up.

  It has nothing to do with a technical disagreement or a problem of mathematical formalism. Paul Dirac, who’s even younger than you, has demonstrated that your matrix mechanics is mathematically equivalent to Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, and that they therefore express exactly the same thing, as if they were translations, into two different languages, of a single mysterious text—the word of the master of Delphi, who neither speaks nor hides his meaning, for which mathematics is also a subtle metaphor. You began with the battle, you began with the fire, and now, spending the summer of 1989 in my father’s house by the sea, sheltering the bleeding shreds of my self-esteem and trying as best I can to understand what earned me the worst humiliation of my life, I discover that instead of extinguishing that fire, you spread it like a wild man, until it became an immense conflagration, joyously ravaging the Holy of Holies, consuming all the sacred ideals of science in its devouring flames, just as Einstein told you in Berlin in 1926.

  You had to have been young, with the youth of conquerors and killers.

  You write to your friend Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker that you’ve just disproved the law of causality, you can’t get over it, and, in the enormity of that statement, entrusted to a fifteen-year-old boy who admires you and dreams of following in your footsteps, there’s a mixture of sacrilegious panic, nonchalance, and pride. You’re right to be terrified, you’ve done much more than disprove causality, you’ve uttered, with the murderous innocence of youth, a verdict of dissolution that transforms the ultimate components of matter into creatures in limbo, paler and more transparent than ghosts—poor things without qualities, so stripped of everything that they become indescribable, barely the promises of things, lost somewhere between the possible and the real, waiting for the gaze of men to turn toward them and call them into existence. For the gaze of physicists is no longer anything but the gaze of men, injecting the venom of subjectivity into everything it touches. It will never be God’s gaze. The old man’s plans won’t be revealed, the most we can hope is to throw a furtive glance over his shoulder, and that’s what Einstein can’t bear. Neither he, nor Schrödinger, nor de Broglie can agree to give up the unreasonable, magnificent hope that was the raison d’être of their lifelong quest—the hope that one day they would achieve an objective description of the secret core of things—and they can’t accept the fact that, thanks to you, that hope should be abolished, unable to survive even as an ideal, because things have no core, the principle places an insurmountable barrier between us and things, an isthmus beyond which stretches an unspeakable void.

  It was an honorable battle, a necessary battle, and, even though the future has consistently proved you right, long after all your deaths I sometimes feel like reproaching you for considering from the start, with the nonchalance and naive arrogance of youth, that it was a lost battle—but I don’t do so, and I regret thinking that you were nonchalant about it, you weren’t, any more than you were naive, in fact you were so far from being naive that it was impossible for you to believe that the whole reality of the world would one day allow itself to be tamed by the familiar concepts of the language of men, you knew that the time would come to yield to the cruel necessity to express, as poets do, what can’t be expressed and should be silenced. You knew it, deep down you’d always known it, well before being reminded of it by Niels Bohr on that wonderful day in Göttingen in 1922, when you walk all afternoon beside him for the first time, beneath a limpid spring sky, amazed that he should confide in you like that in spite of your youth and insignificance, as if the recollection of an intimacy much older than your encounter already linked you to him. Listening to him with fervor, you follow him up onto the hills overlooking the city and then well beyond, as far as that place whose existence you’ve long suspected, which isn’t even a place and can only be evoked, as Niels Bohr tries to do with an anxious, feverish, almost sick rigor, in a whirl of metaphors, alternating partial, inexact images without fear of contradiction, for here, he says, the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. Here, he also says, nothing can be both clear and precise—and now I understand how much I was misled by the deceptive clarity of your texts, stupidly trusting the simple examples you give only in order to restrict their pertinence and validity. You assert nothing you don’t finally question, in a constant movement made up of leaps and retreats and suddenly inverted viewpoints, it’s exhausting to follow you in these twists and turns, which contort language every which way with a seriousness all the more respectful and compassionate in that you know you’re performing an impossible task—trying to make words say what can’t be said but must nevertheless be said. For a long time I suspected you of chronic indecision, naming and renaming the principle with exasperating casualness, as if to add to the confusion, hesitating between uncertainty, indeterminacy, and that German term, obviously impossible to translate, that means the absence of sharpness, the lack of detail in a poor photograph, where we don’t know if the failure is due to a mistake in focusing or because we were trying to capture the fleeting shimmer of an almost nonexistent object, an object without outlines—but I was still wrong; because of their sin, men long ago lost the privilege of looking at the surfaces of things and reading their true names, which remain hidden, and perhaps you found it impossible to choose a single name.

  Perhaps you needed all those contradictory names in order for them to come together in some mysterious way and for the true name to emerge from their very discord.

  These are difficult things to understand, especially when you’ve done nothing else but listen to cold wave music and send your overcomplacent mother out shopping as often as possible in order to at last be alone with the girl whose memory stops me from working and distances me from you again, in my father’s house in the summer of 1989, because I see her again advancing toward me, inaccessible and naked, as if she came from far away, in spite of the narrowness of my room, I watch her advance, she walks interminably because, thank God, her position isn’t clearly determined, and I’m still watching her even as I already huddle in her arms, she walks without seeing me, as if I didn’t exist, as if she wasn’t coming toward me
but going down to bathe naked, on a starry August night, in the coolness of an unknown river, while I watch her, not from a teenager’s mattress laid on the floor, but hidden, my heart pounding, behind heavy, scented branches that sway in the breeze, and, when I huddle against her, still watching her walking endlessly, I know that I will never forget this moment when the existence of the mind becomes more tangible, more indisputable, than that of the flesh, in the transparency of the flesh itself. How much closer I should feel to Schrödinger than to you, who burn with an abstract fever; Schrödinger loved women, he loved them so much that on the basis of that indefatigable love he constructed a whole vision of the world, sensing, from having experienced it so often, that flesh too is a vibrating wave.

  But what did you know of that, with your unhappy love affairs, your spectral love affairs so long condemned to haunt the misty border between the possible and the real?

  You follow Adelheid von Weizsäcker’s fragile footsteps as she glides like a ghost through the streets of Berlin and you know that she passed that way, still escaping you, because everything the girl illumined has again become drab and gray. You scared her, her and all her family, starting with your friend Carl Friedrich, with the mystical intransigence of your passion, that abstract fever that consumes and exiles you. You ask too much, your demands are excessive, you’d like every declaration of love to be an epiphany that transforms the world utterly, as it did that night in Pappenheim, and opens a new path toward the invisible beauty of the central order, but nobody understands you.

  You write to your mother that destiny is denying you happiness.

  Everything escapes you.

  All you’re left with is the sad pleasure of intangible things, the memory of a hand lightly touched, the promise of a journey that didn’t take place, the imperceptible rustle of distant fabrics, the smell of faded flowers, and all the gray streets of so many cities that Adelheid did not illumine with her presence. The abstract fever that is yours spreads, it invades everything. The verdict of dissolution that you uttered falls on your own life. Retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ernst Jünger writes that the atom has lost its substance and become pure form, and that’s how the young girl you loved escapes you, not by fleeing but by evaporating before your eyes, becoming ever more diaphanous, and now, while she continues to live far from you and you appear nowhere in her dreams of happiness, all you have left of her is a pale, translucent envelope she unwittingly bequeathed to you, the idea of a girl, an idea nobody will take in his arms, an idea that smiles at you sadly in your immense solitude.

  You spoke to your mother about the distant music of essential things, you complained that your life was like a dusty road through an ugly, arid landscape, and without your work your immense solitude would have been absolute. But it wasn’t. You had to participate in huge, unending debates, which allowed you to escape both your melancholy and everything that disgusted you in public life, which you didn’t take seriously because you found it impossible to believe that the forces of stupidity were infinitely superior to those of reason. If you were naive, it was perhaps in dreaming that, when it came down to it, the world of politics ought to obey the same aristocratic rules as the world of science, in which the fiercest struggles allow no other weapons than arguments and still constitute expressions of friendship and respect. When a cause is defended only by violence, lies, and calumny, you thought, it admits its own weakness, and you were right—but you never imagined the power of weakness, humiliation, resentment, and abject fears. Something subtle and rotten was tainting the air you breathed but you didn’t sense it; you conversed fraternally with men of all nationalities who had the same idea as you of what was essential, you went from one country to another, one university to another, in Italy, England, the United States, as if the vast contemporary Athens in which you lived had wiped out borders, you leaped happily onto the corner pillar of a terrace in Japan, and Dirac, terrified at the thought that you might fall at any moment, watched you balance there, your hands nonchalantly plunged into your trouser pockets, impassive and joyful, facing the big clear sky.

  That path is neither drab nor gray. It doesn’t yet have any of the colors of disenchantment. It leads to Stockholm, where you go in 1933 with Dirac and Schrödinger, who’ve been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics; it’s also been awarded to you, a year late, for 1932. A year too late. What are you thinking, in your white tie and tails, as the president of the Royal Academy of Sciences begins his solemn speech?

  Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen…

  Are you thinking of the sad irony of your resounding success at a time when the girl who doesn’t want you to love her has slowly turned into a ghost who may be standing painfully close to you? Or of the SA parading beneath your windows a few months ago, brandishing the torches of victory? Isn’t it strange that such a thing becomes real when what should be real remains forever confined to the endless limbo of the possible? It wasn’t the wind in the foliage, it wasn’t the fog, it was the Erl-King, drunk with a fatal love, the father clasps his child to him, the corpse no heavier in his arms than the memory of a child, no heavier than the absence of Adelheid, the SA parade in triumph and you can’t hate them, you can’t believe those fine young people will let themselves be deceived by a charlatan for much longer, they’ll get over their rapture, but you know nothing of that rapture, you know nothing of power, or the incredible exhilaration of the herd, you can’t know that something has just begun for Germany that will only end this month, November 1989, when I sit next to my mother in front of the television and watch incredulously something you would so much have liked to see and won’t see, the fall of the wall I thought was eternal and the end of the only world I’ve known until now. The impossible is becoming real with disarming simplicity. In the city of your birth, while the stone eyes of priests and saints straight out of one of Pauli’s nightmares look down impassively, people from the East cross the old bridge over the Main and park outside the Prince-Bishop’s Palace in the icy night. On the radio, the mayor asks that they be saved from the danger to which their curiosity and regained freedom have exposed them, that they be taken food and hot drinks and given shelter, and the inhabitants of Würzburg set off to meet those they haven’t seen for so long they no longer know them. It’s likely they hurt them unwittingly; after a separation of forty years there’s something absurd about such goodwill. They stare at their strange clothes and impossible cars; they welcome them with conventional, excessive compassion, not like brothers they thought they would never see again, but like convalescents who have at last recovered from a shameful disease, one with which they were familiar from having suffered it themselves but from which they’re proud to have happily recovered much earlier—which is tantamount to telling these other people that their whole lives have been nothing but a long disease.

  Professor Heisenberg, it fell to you, while still so young…

  There are so many things you can’t know, so many things I don’t understand, but, if this disease exists, stretching over generations, you must have vaguely felt the first effects contaminating your joy and giving it the bitter flavor of an incurable sadness while the shadow of Adelheid fades away and the President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences salutes you as the founder of quantum mechanics before going on to praise the work of your colleagues.

  Professor Dirac.

  Professor Schrödinger.

  You’re alone again, in a place where I can’t join you, a place where, in truth, nobody can, waiting to bow to the king who is to give you your prize, and there you are, standing balanced above the void, perched on the pillar of a terrace in Japan, next to Dirac whose anxiety you don’t even notice because you aren’t looking at him, you aren’t looking at anything or anyone, you shyly plunge your hands into your trouser pockets and you’re all alone, as if you too are suspended between the possible and the real, against a colorless sky, with your youth still intact, so moving and so
pointless.

  SPEED

  Now it’s the whole world that you watch fading away on a street corner in Leipzig, one morning in January 1937. You hold out your winter aid bowl to the passersby. In return for their contributions, you give them a badge made out of scrap iron with the arms of Saxony on it, which they pin to the collars of their winter coats before walking on in the cold. You can’t remember why you’re doing this but it doesn’t matter because the world is fading away, the whole world. You look around you, trying to understand what has changed. You can touch the buildings, feel the cold stone beneath your fingers, but you don’t trust your sensations.

  It’s all a lie.

  The passersby, the streets of Leipzig, and you yourself are merely characters in a grotesque play intended to rouse the unshakable solidarity of the German people, all of whose members, even eminent Nobel prizewinners, are prepared, as long as the suggestion is insistent enough, to voluntarily sacrifice a valuable part of their time to help the needy by appealing to the unfailing generosity of their compatriots, who spontaneously put their hands in their pockets in a way that warms the heart in spite of the harsh winter weather.

  What does it matter that it’s all a lie, what does it matter that the whole meticulously planned operation, by making charity and spontaneous generosity obligatory, drains them of their meaning, turning them into an untruth the stench of which upsets you much more than the cold? Truth and lies are now a question of decree and you’re no longer allowed to pass a judgement on them.

  What does your despair matter?