When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
The book When We Cease to Understand the World explores the complex relationships between mathematical and scientific discovery, psychosis, and societal collapse.
Benjamin Labatut plunges the reader into the turbulent lives of notable figures like Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger to reveal how they wrestled with life’s most important concerns. They have flashes of unmatched genius, alienate lovers and friends, and deteriorate into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries improve human life; others open the door to anarchy and unfathomable agony. The boundaries are always hazy.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
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Labatut tells the story of the mathematicians and scientists who pushed the boundaries of what is conceivable at a rapid pace and with a richness of frightening information.
This book can be thought of as a collection of tales that have been expertly interwoven to shed fresh light on the murky corners of the created human world. The countless strands of a ragged past are woven together to make the dark light, which is the basis of our vision. Our attempts to gain knowledge and control of this weird and misleading environment are met with resistance. We discover that time moves across space, and vice versa, within the space-time kaleidoscope.
The past is a single moment that has been frozen in time, and the future is an endless void. The link between the two is the unique abnormality of the present that is still beyond our reach and in which we are imprisoned indefinitely.
This leads us to a fresh knowledge of the world because nothing fixed, absolute, or universal can help or enhance our comprehension of it. We stop comprehending the world on the terms in which we really encounter it when we insist on understanding it according to our own terms, whether that be the fixed order, the absolute value, or the universal truth, whether in physics or ethics.
