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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

The X-reality files: searching for the truth about the world

15 Dec 2018 Robert P Crease
Taken from the December 2018 issue of Physics World, where it appeared under the headline "The X-reality files". Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app.

Robert P Crease seeks your suggestions for novelists and artists who use physics to reach deeper truths

Skull fracture X-ray

Hans Castorp’s X-ray is like a moment out of Frankenstein.

The protagonist in Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain is visiting his cousin Joachim, who is suffering from tuberculosis at a sanitarium in the Alps. The story is set shortly before the First World War and it’s only a few years after Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays. Within a few weeks of his arrival, Hans himself gets sick and goes together with Joachim for the procedure. They descend a set of stairs to a dark room. Hans watches as an assistant positions Joachim, instructs him to hold his breath, and then flips a switch.

“For two seconds,” writes Mann, “the dreadful forces necessary to penetrate matter were let loose” as jets of flame fuelled by thousands of volts erupt all over the machine. “Discharges exploded like gunshots. The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks cracked along the wall.”

What a difference a century makes. When I recently had an X-ray. I sat in an ordinary chair in an ordinary, well-lit room. A polite technician covered my lap with a heavy blanket and vanished behind a window. Harmless red lines crossed my body to aim the machine. I heard a soft buzz. The technician reappeared almost instantly and directed me to another office. There my pictures were displayed on a large, flat wall-mounted screen. The doctor and I discussed them as pleasantly as if we were talking about vacation photos.

Mann based his description on close knowledge of X-ray procedures at the time. His wife Katia had been a student of Röntgen and had had one; Mann visited a sanitarium and may have had one too. But in the century since, not only has the procedure of getting X-rayed changed, so has its meaning.

Reality matters

The X-ray scenes in Mann’s novel embody ambivalent feelings about truth. The issue comes up early in the book, when Castorp reminiscences about his grandfather, who had raised him after his own parents died. Castorp realizes that his memories of his grandfather had “lapses and eccentricities” that fail to capture the man. “His essential reality was quite different, much more handsome and authentic than his everyday appearance”. The truth, Castorp thinks, is embodied in a life-sized, magnificent portrait on canvas of “his authentic and real grandfather”, compared with which his household memories are but “a temporary, imperfectly adapted improvisation”.

Years later, in the sanitarium, Castorp takes X-ray images as a new and deeper kind of truth. But while the painting of his grandfather is of his exterior and directly accessible to perception, the X-ray picture is more removed, showing something beyond the visible, and has been created by technicians with special equipment who harnessed nature’s powers. Its truth has to be interpreted by experts, and is mysterious and perhaps dangerous. Surveying the equipment in the sanitarium’s X-ray room, Castorp thinks: “You couldn’t tell if you were in a photographer’s studio, a darkroom, or an inventor’s workshop and sorcerer’s laboratory.”

Watching Joachim’s interior become transparent, Castorp is stunned by the sight of a green glob pulsing in the middle of the fluorescent plate: “Good God, it was the heart.” When Castorp contemplates his own X ray, he is alarmed by being able to see through his flesh to the one bodily part that will survive his death: his skeleton. “For the first time in his life he understood that he would die”. The doctor tells him, “Spooky, isn’t it? There’s no mistaking the whiff of spookiness”.

Castorp tries to ignore, yet cannot avoid, that spookiness. At one point he loftily tells a friend that X-rays provide “real diagnostic certainty” and “positive knowledge”. Suspicious, the friend remarks that X-rays can deceive – whereupon Castorp accuses him, with some bravado, of not believing in science. But Castorp’s attraction to X-rays is more than cerebral; it’s partly mystical and at times erotic. He asks the woman he loves to give him hers as she leaves for a trip so that he can contemplate the framework of her body, “delicately surrounded by the soft, ghostlike forms of her flesh”.

Through its protagonist, Mann’s novel makes clear that X-rays don’t solve, but only complicate, the problem of truth. Nor, for that matter, do any of today’s scientific tools, such as genetic analysis or neuroscience, that objectify features of human life. By showing us that we don’t have to choose between the portrait and the X ray – between art and science – and that we can live comfortably with them together, the novel shows us a deeper truth about human life that cannot be experimentally verified but only artistically revealed.

Entropy effects

Novelists sometimes create fascinating plot twists with the aid of props – such as computers, vaccines and weapons – derived from various branches of science and physics in particular. A few others use science to help reach deeper truths about humans and their relation to the world. Mann is not the only one. James Joyce wove ideas about entropy throughout Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), in which entropy is a central metaphor connecting the universe, personal development, and individual creativity. All of these, in Joyce’s works, exhibit thermodynamic system-like behaviours of energy cooling or disintegrating.

Entropy also fascinated the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, who appealed to it directly in his short story “Entropy” (1960) and in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), using it to connect ideas about the degeneration of weather, information, and ultimately civilization itself. Unlike Mann, both Joyce and Pynchon use a scientific idea, not to affirm a deeper truth, but to undermine truth and expose its fragile and fraught foundation.

But the well-read readers of Physics World are surely aware of more examples than these. Send them to me and I’ll write about them in a future column.

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