Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World (Pushkin, 2019) *****

Please read this: 

"In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany's production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. "An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane," a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war."

 Or this: 

"The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, and who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shock waves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014. Like the night gardener, when Grothendieck turned forty, he left his house, his family and his friends, and lived like a monk, holed up in the Pyrenees. It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup."

Two random pieces of text, extracts of this amazing book - part literature, part science, part biography, part history - that brings us five stories - five texts if you want - on topics that are related to science. Labatut's texts are little symphonies of factoids, linked together in an incredibly powerful prose, balanced, surprising, disciplined and at the same time luxurious and fast. 

The first extract above comes from the first story, "Prussian Blue", the history of cyanide. German scientist Fritz Haber managed to extract nitrogen from the air, which was used afterwards on a commercial scale as fertiliser, savings millions of lives, yet he also upgraded it to develop Zyklon B, the gas that killed millions of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. The first story is also 99% fact according to the author. 

As we move forward, the reality of the historical figures become more literary, with fiction starting to creep in, in the form of dreams, unwritten thoughts by the scientists, dialogues that never happened. 

The other stories are all about the real boundaries of science, the tipping point of understanding, but also the tipping point of some dark and unfathomable danger that could wipe out mankind. 

In the second story, the mathematician and soldier Karl Schwarzschild solved the field equations in the theory of general relativity in 1915, and writes this to Albert Einstein from the front, but when Einstein answers, the soldier is already dead.

The third story is about the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki and the German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. The mathematic challenges and the discoveries by both men of course elude me, as they do with possibly 99% of all mathematicians, but the story is about what Grothendieck discovered at the heart of mathematics and never wanted to discuss, terrified by the horrors his findings might cause.

Of course we also have the fight between Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg over the right perspective on quantum physics. They too fundamentally changed our view of reality, while at the same time also providing the physical insights that led to nuclear weapons.

Labatut said in an interview that "This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits". 

This is a work of fiction, but based on some of the most advanced and terrifying scientific discoveries. 

Labatut's prose and writing skills make this an exceptional reading experience. 

I cannot recommend it highly enough.