Benjamín Labatut – When We Cease to Understand the World

There are many wonders of the modern world. Which matters most to us depends on our individual preferences. To me, the easy access to the written word is a miracle that was not available even a generation ago.

Sure there were books in the past but access was costly in terms of time and money. Today, most of us have broadband internet connections. That means not only text but vast quantities of quality audio, video, text and graphics are at our fingertips, on our computers and smartphones.

What’s more, the marginal cost of all that awesome stuff is near zero. There’s more material being added every hour than one can consume in an entire lifetime. Time and attention is the scarce resource, not material.

Here I want to recommend two books by Benjamín Labatut. I stumbled upon the first, When We Cease to Understand the World, on YouTube. It was an unabridged reading of the book.

(I use the 4K Video Downloader to extract the audio from YouTube videos.)

I listened to the four and a half hours of audio in one go. Then I got epub versions of that book and another book, MANIAC, by Labatut. Here’s a bit from the New Yorker book review of his When We Cease to Understand the World:

The stories here circle obsessively around the question of whether some of the twentieth century’s greatest minds drove themselves to the brink of insanity—and, in Labatut’s accounts, well beyond it—in their search for a key to the secrets of the universe. Among the main figures is Fritz Haber, a German Jewish chemist who developed a process to obtain ammonia from nitrogen in the air, for use as fertilizer—an innovation that won him the Nobel Prize and, by staving off famine, has probably saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people—but who also pioneered the military use of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon responsible for some of the worst horrors of the First World War, as well as a hydrogen-cyanide pesticide that was a direct forerunner of Zyklon B. Then there is Karl Schwarzschild, a physicist who came up with the first exact solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity, and in the process proved the existence of black holes, a concept that shook the foundations of physics. Later, we encounter Alexander Grothendieck and Shinichi Mochizuki, two of the most brilliant mathematicians of the past hundred years; both pursued a quest for greater and greater abstraction, “a strange entity located at the crux of the mathematical universe.” The most familiar of the stories, perhaps, is that of Werner Heisenberg and his formulation of quantum uncertainty, a theory that seems to defy reason. “Einstein sensed that if one followed that line of thinking to its ultimate consequences, darkness would infect the soul of physics,” Labatut writes. “A fundamental aspect of the laws that governed the physical world would remain forever obscure,” opaque to human understanding.

The pile of books to read grows but those two are now in my books-read pile. Thank goodness.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.