Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is #83 on The New York Times’s ongoing list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”
Reviewer A.O. Scott writes of the book:
“You don’t have to know anything about quantum theory to start reading this book, a deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses. By the end, you’ll know enough to be terrified. Labatut is interested in how the pursuit of scientific certainty can lead to, or arise from, states of extreme psychological and spiritual upheaval. His characters — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, among others — discover a universe that defies rational comprehension. After them, ‘scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.’ That may sound abstract, but in Labatut’s hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking.”
To view the rest of the list, which will be published over the course of this week, click here.