When We Cease to Understand the World
Originally published in 2020. Translated by Adrian Nathan West.
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.
The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tunnels so deeply into abstraction that he tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause.
Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality, revealing a world stranger than they could have ever imagined.
Using extraordinary, epoch-defining moments from the history of science, Benjamín Labatut plunges us into exhilarating territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness.
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Benjamin Labatut
Benjamín Labatut was born in 1980 in Rotterdam, grew up in The Hague, Buenos Aires, and Lima, and currently lives in Santiago, Chile. By the age of 25, he had not yet written a single word of prose and thought he was already too old to become a writer, until he met an elderly Chilean poet. Since then, he has written several acclaimed works, including When We Cease to Understand the World, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
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