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

Let a man alone with anything long enough and he’ll put a Penis in it. I mean what was the reason? Embarrassing writing from Labatut. Prussian Blue is brilliant but the experimentalism is devolving into his nonsensical wet dreams now and the pop science is becoming silly and comical—no Benjamín, Schrödinger did not invent transcendental functions and that’s not why they’re called that. Pick up a textbook!

Abeer A.

Sitting at the foot of his bed, Hafez offered him a glass of wine. Heisenberg took it and drank it in long gulps, letting it run over his beard and chest, before realizing it contained the blood of the poet, who was now masturbating furiously while bleeding from his wrists. All this food and drink have made you fat and ignorant! Hafez hissed. But if you give up sleep and nourishment, you will have one more chance. Don't just sit there thinking, Go out and submerge yourself in God's sea! Wetting a single hair won't bring you wisdom. He who sees God doesn't doubt. His mind and his vision are pure. Woozy and confused, Heisenberg tried to follow the ghost's instructions, but his fever had flared up again, and his teeth would not stop chattering. He recovered his lucidity only to feel the prick of a needle and to hear Frau Rosenthal crying on the doctor's shoulder while he assured her that everything would be all right, that it was nothing more than a badly neglected cold, yet neither of them could see Goethe there, straddling the corpse of Hafez, now drained of all its blood, and yet still capable of maintaining a glorious erection, which the German poet attempted to invigorate with his lips, like a man blowing on the embers of a dying fire.

Syrina

 The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive cron of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?

The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing.

in 1905 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. To his friends, who worried about the effects eventual blindness might have on an astronomer's career, he said-only partly in jest-that he, like Odin, had sacrificed one eye to be able to see further with the other.

"How strange space is, and how capricious the laws of optics and perspective, that they should permit even the smallest child to cover the sun with one of his fingers," he wrote to his brother Alfred, a painter who lived in Hamburg.

it bothered him that his office-mates used his favourite mug, so he chained it to a radiator with a padlock; it hangs there to this very day

 The liquid form of then poison, known in Germany as Blausäure or blue acid, is highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celsius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which not everyone can distinguish as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity.

In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge.

This point really helped me to grasp that sometimes, even the most intellectual of individuals find things that are accurate and factual but don't hold any relevance in our lives whatsoever.

Jordan Parker

physics is rife with infinities that are nothing more than numbers on paper, abstractions that do not represent real-world objects

Noreen Farsai

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.

Stephen Schenkenberg

Prussian Blue was good. The rest is a rude excuse for literature 

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.

I!!! WANT!!!! TO!!!! CRY!!!!! humans and their obsession to invent even when it causes death and tragedy. i wish i could talk to labatut and ask him to possess me (this is a compliment). 

refutabilitas

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

Geetika 

Ahh i am 2 chapters in, and I love love this book. It talks about the madness in genius, short chapters on some of the genius from the past as well as from our time. It doesn't stick to them but goes around, meanders over other smaller details and i love how the author does that. 
pretty small book so highly recommend :)

Maurice FitzGerald

Wow. Now those are the stories about the geniuses. Intense

logan chung

feels like my whole life has led me to be able to enjoy this pretentious b.s. best book I’ve read in a while and continuously enthralling from the first sentence

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.

Andrew Louis

The experiment of this book is a slow ramping up of fictional material but the parts I enjoyed the most were at the beginning where the magic of the real world was conveyed simply with juxtapositions and vivid retelling of stories. Towards the end of the book, I found myself constantly distracted with the question of whether I was in a fictionalized or embellished section. But nevertheless, this was a great read and a great experiment.

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.

while this book started as incredibly interesting, i almost stopped reading it on numerous occasions. as intriguing as the concept is, i don’t see myself opening it up again for a while

Kristina K

Fraser Simons

Yesterday I couldn’t make it too far into Behave, because of the usual nonfiction reasons: it’s dry, contains unengaging prose, spits numbers and facts. I retain nothing. This book is the opposite of that. I guess narrative nonfiction… but with fiction is my jam. And… perhaps just incorporating craft from fiction, such as telling an actual story and not writing a boring thesis paper is how you capture an audiences attention. Who knows.

Regardless, this book was absolutely, completely riveting from the start. We follow “golden age” physicists as they struggle to define the field. Personal lives sometimes drilling down to the granular, always serving a purpose in their thinking, their work, and the outcome of their work. Spring boarding off each is a new character, typically. 

It’s also massively, sometimes staggeringly intersectional. Weaving in philosophy, ethical concerns and outcomes, morality. The people feel more “alive” than in any other document I’ve read about them. Sure, some of it has to be fictionalized. But magical things happen when science is communicated by characters that feel real: you automatically feel the information is important and it’s easy to follow. What’s more is the work is an extension of their personalities and upbringing. The interplay makes the dry details compelling.

Absolutely the gold standard with which I will measure future nonfiction reads (which is completely unfair because there’s fictional elements) and a niche of it I will seek out in the future. What a counterpoint to the much lauded and ceaseless drivel of Behave.

P.S. the audiobook narration is perfectly matched. Recommended!

Cindy Lieberman

We think of scientific advancement as achievement, awarding Nobel prizes and accolades. But this interesting book exposes the darker side: not the familiar “publish or perish” struggles of academics, the race to be first well described in Codebreaker. Instead, this is where the edge of what we know is pushed past by genius, and the toll such breakthroughs might take on the minds of those who see what most of us cannot. 
The first chapter is full of madness. The discovery of nitrogen as a fertilizer and the formulation of it into Zyklon B, the gas used by Nazis to exterminate millions in WW2. The rampant use of a meth-like drug by German soldiers and pilots, Goebbels’ suitcase full of pills that turned his fingertips blue because he was taking about 100 pills a day when he was captured, and the cyanide vials handed out like after-dinner mints following a concert in Germany toward the end of the war. 
The most affecting chapters started with known facts about mathematical geniuses and physics phenoms that became so focused on their work that they neglected everything else, nearly starving to death. One sees so clearly what his insights will unleash on humanity, that he disavows everything and tries to destroy any trace of his work before he wastes away. 
In all, a fascinating book about minds on the edge and those that slip over into the unknown.

Adriana Coppola

Five stars for the first 2 stories.
I found the rest of the book, as we venture further from truth and into fiction, to be much weaker.

brie 🦪

ive never been interested in math&physics before but this was one of the most interesting books ive ever read- the relationship btwn science and morality, conscience and madness, humanity in an ever developing world. labutat is a terribly intelligent writer.

When We Cease to Understand the World

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