When We Cease to Understand the World

Paperback, 192 pages

Published Sept. 28, 2021 by New York Review Books.

ISBN:
978-1-68137-566-3
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4 stars (7 reviews)

A 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 genius, 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 unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

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Review of 'When We Cease to Understand the World' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

It's a fascinating and entertaining book. The way it highlights connections among individuals, historical events and scientific discoveries is remarkable, and I haven't read anything like it before. There was one thing that bothered me. It seemed to me that, for the most part, women were treated as props and mentioned only briefly (e.g., wives, mothers, daughters, students, lovers, innkeepers, etc.). For example, Clara Immerwhar was a scientist herself - a seemingly interesting person who had a stronger moral compass than her husband Fritz Haber - and she got about one paragraph in the book. As the book frequently veered into related characters and stories, sometimes in great detail, the fact that it largely avoided doing this with the women stood out to me. One exception later in the book was Miss Herwig, who - despite being primarily portrayed as the object of Schrodinger's sexual fantasies - was given a …

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