Review: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

I went into this book unaware of what awaited me, and I was caught off-guard. It is an unusually structured book, and sails through history and historical personages at a brisk knot, and it took a while for me to find my sea legs.

The book begins with a three chapter preface, which makes up the first two fifths of the book. Labatut threads together 20th century inventions and discoveries: cyanide, black holes, algebraic proofs. Inventors and inventions both find themselves deployed in wars. Science and society are inextricably linked: developments in one shape the outcomes of the other. Both are driven by individuals, but advance on a scale so immense and interconnected that no one individual can turn the tides. Labatut’s stories are a mesmerizing blend of fact and fantasy, and it’s not always clear what is true, what is disputed, and what is fully invented.

The main section of the book continues in tone, focusing in particular on Schrodinger, Heisenberg, De Broglie, as they investigate the nature of matter and light. These hallowed figures find themselves caught up in madness, despair, sexual deviancy, mysticism, and spiteful feuds as they grapple with the biggest questions of physics and ramifications of their answers.

The final tenth of the book is a 5-part essay titled The Night Gardener. It echoes the themes and motifs of the preceding pages, but now without the giants of 20th century science: suicide, poison, fascists, the misuse of science in society, the struggle for individuals to shape society, society’s likely impending doom.

Negative reviews of this book point at its rehashing of tired science tropes: the lone genius driven mad by his discovery, oblivious to social norms and lacking in emotional awareness. Women enter the pages only to be objects of sexual desire. The author revels in the popular aesthetics of science — frantic midnight scribblings covering reams of paper, dramatic postulations at a lecture stand — more than shedding light on the experience of actually doing science. 

While these critiques are well-founded, it would be a shame to entirely dismiss the book on these grounds. Although the narrative revolves around science, the emotional aspects explored are not unique to science. What do you do when you cease to understand your world, when what you thought you knew is unveiled to be an illusion? Perhaps you’ve discovered your government aids a genocide, or someone dear to you breaks your trust. Do you withdraw into yourself? Abandon everything or end your life? Throw yourself back in with everything you have, and keep fighting? What is it like to feel torn between ambitions of greatness and feelings of uselessness? How do you come to terms with the fruits of your creative labour dispersing into the wild to be used and transformed beyond your intentions, out of your control? Labatut repeats these refrains in different keys and different voices. His unusual storytelling makes for a thought-provoking read with more to offer than a summary might suggest.