Terrible vertigo

Audiobook When We Cease to Understand the World, author Benjamín Labatut, translated by Anna Štádlerová. Read by Filip Jančík, directed by Miloš Vrána. God does not play dice with the universe, Albert Einstein declared. To which Benjamín Labatut might reply that God perhaps does not, but the devil does. When We Cease to Understand the World is a novel of fact about the scientists who made revolutionary discoveries in their fields—Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others—but reached the limits of human understanding and, for the first time in history, gave humanity the power to destroy itself. For instance, German chemist Fritz Haber discovered artificial fertilisers, which saved humanity from famine. But he also invented the combat gas yperite, which killed thousands of soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, driving his wife to commit suicide before his very eyes. Similarly, the atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki to pieces were not split by the skilful hands of generals, but by a group of physicists armed with a handful of equations. Benjamín Labatut's dramatic story of the defining moments in the history of science throws us into the thrilling territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness, and confronts us with the question of whether science helps us to better understand the world, or if we are, on the contrary, losing it. BENJAMÍN LABATUT Benjamín Labatut (born 1980) was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He spent his childhood in The Hague and Buenos Aires and moved with his parents to Santiago de Chile at the age of fourteen. His short story debut, La Antártica empieza aquí (Antarctica Starts Here, 2009), won the Caza de Letras Prize. He then published the novels Después de la luz (After the Light, 2016) and When We Cease to Understand the World, which was nominated for the International Booker Prize and has been translated into more than ten languages. FILIP JANČÍK He started out as an actor but decided to devote himself fully to voice acting. That is why we can only see him in a few films or series. As a young actor, he played, for example, in the film Mystery of the Puzzle and The Moneychanger or The Good Old Golden Times. In contrast, the voice of Filip Jančík is immediately noticeable, for example, on the TV station Prima Cool or in an impressive number of Hollywood films and series.