Measuring the World

  • Daniel Kehlmann
transl. by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon: 2006. 259 pp. $23. To be published in the UK by Quercus in April. 0375424466 | ISBN: 0-375-42446-6
Carl Friedrich Gauss (left) and Alexander von Humboldt had very different views of how science should be done. Credit: THE ART ARCHIVE/M. CHARVET

Quite often, it strikes me that being a scientist is an odd way to spend your time. We all ask the same questions. Where do I come from? Where am I going? What does it all mean? Yet few — and only relatively recently — have chosen the scientific method as the means to answer them. And for those who have, many of their answers seem as impenetrable and marginal as avant-garde poetry or 'squeaky gate' music.

Daniel Kehlmann's neat novel Measuring the World, a bestseller in Germany last year under the title Die Vermessung die Welt and now translated into English, provoked these thoughts once more. The book is set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the structures of science, and the job of being a scientist, began to take on something like their present form. It weaves together the stories of two of the giants of the time: the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the explorer, geographer and biologist Alexander von Humboldt.

Kehlmann deploys the two men as archetypal and opposite examples of how to be a scientist. The core of Humboldt's story is his five-year journey to the Americas, which made him famous and had a huge influence on nineteenth-century naturalist travellers including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. But the journey makes no apparent impression on Kehlmann's Humboldt. He is the embodiment of cold rationality, a Gradgrind who, lacking any personality or inner life, builds one out of facts and measurements. He'd rather stare down his sextant than look at a solar eclipse, and rather study a woman's lice than have sex with her. He chases up rivers and mountains, oblivious to hardship, with French botanist Aimé Bonpland as his Sancho Panza.

Gauss, on the other hand, hates going anywhere. But then, he doesn't need to — from childhood, revelation comes to him, in an unbidden stream of mathematical genius. He sees science as “a man alone at a desk, a sheet of paper in front of him”. This is also novel writing, so perhaps it is not surprising that Kehlmann makes Gauss the more sympathetic and, despite his freakish abilities, the more human character. He worships his mum, falls in love, visits prostitutes, and has children who disappoint him.

Humboldt is a cipher. This also has the effect of making Gauss's way of doing science seem more noble and authentic than Humboldt's. It isn't, but this is a neat twist, as mathematicians are usually the ones portrayed as weirdos.

It would be just as silly to complain that Gauss and Humboldt probably weren't much like this as it would be to object to Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus on the grounds that Salieri probably didn't aim to bump off Mozart. I will, however, make one point in Humboldt's defence. Kehlmann is truthful to the facts of his biography, and Humboldt was an enigmatic man, who tried to destroy documents pertaining to his early life, and who might have substituted work for emotional fulfilment. (There has been speculation, to which Kehlmann briefly alludes, that this is because Humboldt was homosexual.) But he knew how to do the right thing. Bonpland returned south to America but was caught in disputed border territory and imprisoned. Kehlmann's Humboldt wrings his hands; the real Humboldt, in contrast, sold his world-class collection of plant specimens to provide his friend with financial support.

Kehlmann skilfully stops Measuring the World becoming a highbrow tale of nutty professors. For a start, his professors are more melancholic than nutty. Gauss's prodigious abilities — and his decision to be true to them, even at the cost of his own and others' happiness — cut him off from people, and everyone else's stupidity depresses him. Humboldt's political, administrative and official duties gradually overwhelm his opportunities to take measurements, and in old age he reprises his American journey in Russia, as farce. Each learns that no degree of cleverness or immersion in science grants immunity from, or even helps much with, the messy business of life and death.

Kehlmann also avoids naffness by telling his story in a relentless deadpan, which is at first alienating but then gets under the skin. As the story develops, your sympathy for the two men grows, as their own does for each other. One of the things they agree on, for example, is the deplorability of “novels that wandered off into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the names of real historical personages”.

Kehlmann, then, does a good job of capturing the strangeness and comedy of science, as well as the powerful sense of futility that can afflict researchers from time to time. But he doesn't get near to explaining why, despite its oddness, science provides such powerful and beautiful answers to our questions, or why mathematics has such an uncanny power to provide these answers. Nor do we get any idea why a few people, such as Gauss, have mathematical abilities that seem supernatural to the rest of us, or why others, such as Humboldt, are willing to give up their fortunes, comforts and sometimes lives to see, and measure, what's over the horizon. Quite right too, I'm tempted to think — where would the fun be in knowing that?