When We Cease to Understand the World
2020 • 192 pages
Ratings33
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings33
Average rating4.1
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.
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A (partly) fictional retelling of how some real-world mathematicians and scientists came across their discoveries which reshaped or otherwise shed light on concepts foundational to humanity.
Still not sure how I feel about this book - while well written, I often got fixated on figuring out what was truth and what was dramatized or outright fiction. If you can look past that easily, this would be an excellent read.
