When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamin Labatut, Adrian Nathan West

eBook - 2021

One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated LiteratureA fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled ge...nius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and... more