Name: When We Cease to Understand the World
Rating: 4.302631578947368 (114 reviews)
ISBN: 9781782276128

Benjamin Labatut

Albert Einstein opens a letter sent to him from the Eastern Front of World War I. Inside, he finds the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity, unaware that it contains a monster that could destroy his life's work.

When We Cease to Understand the World

asks us questions of the tradeoffs that technological and scientific progress brings. the author strings us along various scientific breakthroughs -- cyanide (and its byproducts), the schwarzchild radius, and quantum mechanics. it ends with a poignant question of whether observation of phenomena should be likened to cutting a tree down to see its inner workings.

the prose is nothing short of musical. one clause strings you to another effortlessly, not a word is wasted. that being said, i didnt enjoy it as much as i thought i would. i think it was fairly overhyped and honestly reading interviews of the author lowkey ruined the experience for me, he doesnt seems like a horrible but just seems insufferable. maybe thats just me..

Ghee

asks us questions of the tradeoffs that technological and scientific progress brings. the author strings us along various scientific breakthroughs -- cyanide (and its byproducts), the schwarzchild radius, and quantum mechanics. it ends with a poignant question of whether observation of phenomena should be likened to cutting a tree down to see its inner workings.

the prose is nothing short of musical. one clause strings you to another effortlessly, not a word is wasted. that being said, i didnt enjoy it as much as i thought i would. i think it was fairly overhyped and honestly reading interviews of the author lowkey ruined the experience for me, he doesnt seems like a horrible but just seems insufferable. maybe thats just me..

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize 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.

Super cool glad I finally read this and can now read his next one. So very much fictional nonfiction, in the best and worst ways. Last story was an odd include, I can imagine a publisher pushing back on that one.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Where was Labatut when I was in school, despising physics and chemistry?

c0up

Where was Labatut when I was in school, despising physics and chemistry?

Extremely readable and informative. 

Like listening to the best history or science teacher you will ever have. 

Frederik De Bosschere

Benjamín Labatut

‘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.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

Emma Bose

Begs the questions: What is the existential price of scientific progress? What is the cost of ceasing to understand this Icarian world?

Natalie

A engrossing, seamless blend of fact and fiction about some of the most important scientific achievements of the past century, in a brilliant translation that never reads like a translation. Though the longer piece about the Heisenberg-Schrodinger rivalry, compared to the chapter-long pieces, threw off the pacing for me, this book never loses its luster in presenting scientific knowledge, and its consequences and limitations, accessibly but most importantly humanely.

y✦

✦ one of my favorite reads of 2022
✦ science stuff across history given the poetic treatment
✦ also, this being marketed as a "non-fiction" novel got me curious
✦ probably the only time i’ll invest in an astrophysics book is end of times theory
✦ alexa, play no plan by hozier

Sad and harried and frenetic and wonderful.

Jamie Rumbelow

Gavin

A big list of facts. But good facts! Beautiful or terrible facts, arranged by Labutut frantically mining Modern Europe for ironies and antimonies. (A fun game: how many words would you have to change these ~short stories~ into a standard good magazine profile?)

(Actually some of them aren't facts, which punctured the good giddiness a bit:
* Scheele actually did eat the hydrogen cyanide, and lived.
* He repeats the credulous truism about Turing's death but then walks it back a few sentences later.)
* "while the movement of two bodies bound by gravitation can be known with precision according to the laws of Newton, the addition of a third renders it unforeseeable." No! there's no exact solution, but we approximate solutions easily and routinely. Numerics is the greatest branch of applied maths which no outsider appreciates.
* "In 1910, [Schwarzschild] discovered that the stars had different colours, and he was the first to analyse them". Seems unlikely, though certainly the naked eye is insufficient.
* "He published 112 articles in total during his lifetime, more than virtually any other scientist in the twentieth century." Cmon!
* He makes much of the fact that no one understood Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, and struggled with the complicated calculations. But he fails to mention that the method is now taught to high schoolers.
* The human bone fertiliser claim appears to be true(!!)

  Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.

* The Mochizuki / Grothendieck connection is wild but I can't find anything else about it.

Part of the book's importance is its portrayal of the romantic obsession with discovery. Schwarzschild was possessed, the van Gogh or Hunter Thompson of science.

  he travelled to Algeria to observe a total eclipse, but he failed to heed the maximum exposure time and damaged the cornea of his left eye. When they removed the patch he had been forced to wear for weeks, he noticed a shadow the size of a two-mark coin in his visual field, which was apparent even when his eyes were closed. The doctors told him the damage was irreversible.

a snowstorm had stranded them on one of the ledges of the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountain range. To keep from freezing to death, they had had to build a shelter and sleep holding one another, as they had when they were children... His brother Karl did not misstep a single time, as if he were somehow capable of seeing the trail in the dark, but was left with nerve damage in his right hand from the cold; in the shelter, he had repeatedly removed his gloves to revise his calculations concerning a series of elliptical curves.

 The alternative was unbearable: that there was nothing more than lifeless spheres in the throes of random chance, “like the molecules of a gas that float from one place to the other in a completely irregular manner, so much so that their very chaos is being enthroned as principle.” In Potsdam, he created an enormous network of colleagues to follow and register, with the maximum possible precision, the movements of more than two million stars.


Grothendieck:

  Towards the end of his life, his point of view was so remote that he was only capable of perceiving totality. Of his personality, nothing but tatters remained, tenuous threads pulled apart by years of constant meditation.


Very French. Overheated in places too. ("one of the strangest and most powerful equations that the human mind has ever created".) But hey, it brings out the majesty and romance of chemistry, Inter-Universal Teichmüller, the old quantum theory largely intact, and you don't see that every decade in fiction.

A dark, sometimes confusing work. Was frankly not up to the task of fully comprehending the text at times! At yet, very haunting and stuck with me well after i finished. 

Sarah Erle

Matt

An interesting book, some facts and a lot of sensationalism...but an overall enjoyable book outlining the extreme actions people take to accomplish a die hard goal.

I have read many a non-fiction book that read like fiction, but this is the first fiction book that read like non-fiction for me. It was a little over my head but still thought-provoking. 

Jayme Bosio

Nelson Zagalo

"When We Cease to Understand the World" (2020) começa como um normal livro de divulgação de ciência — química, física e matemática —, mas imensamente estimulante, apresentando muitos factos excêntricos e pouco conhecidos. À medida que se avança vamos sentido que o descritivo do mundo científico se vai deixando contaminar pelo narrativo da ficção criada pelo autor como modo de intensificação daquilo que parece querer dizer-nos. Depois, no epílogo, somos brindados com uma pequena história que de tão realista, ainda que mantendo a excentricidade, se lê como metáfora de tudo o que foi apresentado antes, deixando-nos com uma forte ideia filosófica sobre o sentido da espécie. Labatut agradece no final a vários autores, de entre os quais W. G. Sebald, mas não seria preciso, esta é uma obra totalmente sebaldiana pelo modo como fusiona ficção com não-ficção.

[ler com links e imagens no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...]

O livro parece à primeira vista dividir-se em 4 contos, mas não o são. Cada capítulo foca-se numa personagem das ciências —— o químico Fritz Haber; o astrofísico Karl Schwarzschild; o matemático Alexander Grothendieck; e os físicos Erwin Schrödinger e Werner Heisenberg — que nos falam daquilo que AC Grayling definiu como "Fronteiras do Conhecimento" (2021). Labatut aproveita a existência dessas fronteiras, entre o conhecido e o desconhecido, para ficcionar sobre a relação entre o mundo visível, o real, e a nossa espécie nas suas capacidades para investigar, aferir, chegar a conhecer. Dá conta do muito positivo que a ciência nos deu (quase extinção da fome), mas foca-se em particular no modo como a ciência também nos trouxe o negativo, não apenas para este planeta (o nuclear e o clima), mas para nós, humanos que estudamos e tentamos compreender nem que isso nos leve ao limite (o quântico e o holocausto, assim como a insanidade).

Não é um livro de respostas, nem sequer de grandes questões, é um livro de descrições, comparações e contrastes que podem ser apenas coincidências, ou podem conter mais do que isso. O seu maior feito é mesmo a experiência que cria em nós capaz de nos levar a refletir sobre um conjunto de factos, ideias e conceitos que nos conduzem ao questionamento sobre nós mesmos enquanto todo. Se o título em inglês vai direto à grande questão do que significará o conhecimento humano — Quando Deixamos de Entender o Mundo —, mas não oferecendo mais do que isso, o título original — Um Terrível Verdor —é bastante mais subtil, servindo-se da analogia do florir do limoeiro, apresentado no epílogo como golpe final e verdadeiro murro no estômago.

O livro esteve na shortlist do Booker 2021 deste ano, e no entanto antes mesmo de chegar a inglês já tinha sido traduzido para português pela Elsinore. Se isto seria suficiente para enaltecer a editora, mais ainda o deve ser quando verificamos que a nossa tradução segue o original em espanhol da Anagrama, enquanto a tradução inglesa realiza cortes, como por exemplo o ocultar do facto de Hermann Göring pintar as unhas enquanto consumia uma variante da heroína.

Publicado no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

Kathy Andrew

Garrett Jansen

The blend of non-fiction and fiction can be a lil' uncomfortable at times but it expertly uses the medium to succinctly explain the departure from entirely understanding the world to having to accept that we simply cannot. It's a special book where you'll likely learn a lil' something while also embracing the chaos of it all.

When We Cease to Understand the World

Reviews

Highlights