Vertigo

God does not play dice with the world, declared Albert Einstein. To which Benjamín Labatut would reply that God may not, but the devil does. When We Cease to Understand the World is a factual novel about the scientists who made revolutionary discoveries in their fields – Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others – but who reached the limits of human understanding and, for the first time in history, gave humanity the power to destroy itself. For example, the German chemist Fritz Haber discovered artificial fertilisers, saving humanity from famine. But he also invented the chemical weapon mustard gas, which killed thousands of soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, a fact that drove his wife to commit suicide in front of his very eyes. Similarly, the atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki to pieces were not split by the deft hands of generals, but by a group of physicists armed with a handful of equations. Benjamín Labatut's dramatic story about the defining moments in the history of science plunges us into the thrilling territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness, and makes us question whether science helps us to better understand the world, or if we are, in fact, losing it. For this book, he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.