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When We Cease to Understand the World cover art

When We Cease to Understand the World

Written by: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
Narrated by: Adam Barr
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Publisher's Summary

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
©2021 Benjamin Labatut and Adrian West (P)2021 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Biographical Fiction Alternate History
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Meandering Vulgar Science Mysticism

For a book trying to mythologise physics into some parody of mysticism and eldrich horror it takes itself way too seriously. it drowns in its own prose and the throws every bit of vulgairty it can imagine to try to shock you. There are better written eldrich horror stories and more interesting histories of physics elsewhere.

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