5/5 STARS
What’s it about? Though When We Cease to Understand the World defies easy description, think of it as a treatise about the responsibility of discovery and the cost of our species’ relentless pursuit of knowledge. Labatut takes on this theme through accounts of Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and other luminaries as they redefined their disciplines, be it quantum physics or mathematics. Running through the book is an undercurrent of dread as scientific breakthroughs inevitably become tools of war.
How’d I find it? Shout out to Enoch Pratt Free Library for always having the hot titles available. I strolled in to pick up a hold and there this was, waiting.
Who will enjoy this book? When We Cease to Understand the World felt like a book by Milan Kundera, one of my all-time most beloved authors. Labatut’s blend of fiction and history, use of humor, and the slipperiness of madness and obsession hearken back to the Czech master. Fans of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer will also enjoy.
What stood out? Hot damn, this is a good one. Labatut picks apart the insularity of academic research by visiting great minds at work in the battlefields of World War I or at a sanatorium among convalescing patients, settings that highlight the loneliness and mania of genius. The blurry line between fact and fiction keeps the reader unsettled, uncertain — thoroughly effective in a book that feels like a warning.
Which line made me feel something? From the section “Prussian Blue:” “An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantryman of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it”
