A review by booklywookly
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

3.0

The beauty of the unknown is in the eyes of those trying to decipher it. The more our feeble minds break away from shackles of the known and common sense, the more we dare to step into a world that defies any laws of nature, the more we accept the unpredictability of it, the more radiant and beautiful this unknown gets. 

And then comes the challenge. You have peeked into the dark heart of the heart. How do you explain it to ones who are not willing to open their third eye to the unexplainable? Not all brains work that way. “It’s there right in front of you!” You want to scream like a possessed madman. Ah, madman. That’s what you get to be when you stare at the abyss, and the abyss stares back at you and you refuse to blink.

Ask Schrödinger and Heisenberg. Both having solved the unknown at quantum level, but with extreme polar opposite theories. Passion and ego, it’s a battle of particles vs waves, common sense vs imagination, Newtonian mechanics vs quantum mechanics, with Einstein playing referee, de Broglie adding to fire, and Bohr and Plank and Perrin cheering from the crowd.

Ask Schwarzschild. Struck by absurdity of his own discovery of Singularity - the black hole - so dark that light can’t escape, where all common sense will cease to exist, and time will flow like space and space will behave like time, deforming the very fabric of physics. The true horror of the darkness opened his eyes to the horrors inflicted upon world by his Fatherland Germany. The horrors to which his scientific mind contributed.

Ask Grothendieck, who refused to share with world what he saw in the void while attempting to survive horrors (and poisonous gases) of The War from deep in trenches, for he believed such knowledge will spell eternal doom on humanity. Self isolated, he died an agonizing death with that secret, passing the curse to another great scientific mind, Mochizuki.

Ask Scheele, Haber, Bosch, how the invention of a synthetic color in the 18th century paved a scientific path to and ultimately enabled chemical warfare in World War I and Zyklon B used in Nazi gas chambers. Begs the question, hate the player or the game?

This is a book of scientific awe and cosmic horror. The binary nature of science and discoveries. Conflict between cusriosity and morality. It’s a work of historical literary fiction with progressively more fiction into its largely nonfiction narrative. A sort of dramatization for tv if you will with creative liberties. I haven't read his other book yet but safe to assume this book was testing grounds for Maniac?