Albert Einstein opens a letter sent to him from the Eastern Front of World War I. Inside, he finds the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity, unaware that they contain a monster that could destroy his life’s work: the Schwarzschild Singularity. A Japanese mathematician solves a problem that no one is able to understand, after following the path set down by one of the greatest minds of the 20th century: Alexander Grothendieck, the rogue genius that revolutionized geometry before abandoning his family, his career and his humanity in order to search for the underlying structure of all things. Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality and reveal a world stranger than they could have ever imagined.

 

In When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut uses fiction to breathe life into lesser-known chapters from the annals of science. In the stories that make up this haunting volume, he delves into the strange world of memory and its many curses, offering unnerving vistas into the lives of some of the scientists that helped to shape the modern world.