When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.
Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.
With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Reviews
Ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing… Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present
John Banville Guardian
We may be familiar with such things as Schrödinger’s cat and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle… but the sheer audacity, the utter insanity of the ideas and the thinkers who discovered these ideas has never, in my experience, been so vividly and terrifyingly conveyed as in this short, monstrous, and brilliant book
Philip Pullman
A deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses… In Labatut’s hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking
New York Times, ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century’
