Benjamín Labatut

When We Cease to Understand the World

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SELECTED FOR BARACK OBAMA'S SUMMER READING LIST
'A monstrous and brilliant book' Philip Pullman'Wholly mesmerising and revelatory… Completely fascinating' William Boyd Sometimes discovery brings destruction
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 lives 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.
This book is currently unavailable
181 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2020
Publication year
2020
Publisher
Pushkin Press
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Quotes

  • finalfadeouthas quoted7 days ago
    Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?
  • finalfadeouthas quoted11 days ago
    “If researchers want to apprehend my work, they must first deactivate the thought patterns that they have installed in their brains and taken for granted for so many years,” Mochizuki wrote on his blog.
  • finalfadeouthas quoted12 days ago
    In the last letter he sent to his wife from Russia, written the same day he chose to share his discovery with Einstein, Schwarzschild complains of something strange that has begun to grow inside him: “I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”
    Soon afterwards, that shadow invaded his body.

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