I was attracted to this book by its title, and hooked by Philip Pullman calling it "the strangest and most original book I've read for years." When We Cease to Understand the World is a Sebaldian hybrid of essay and fiction about scientists who followed their theories to conclusions that reoriented reality in strange ways; quantum mechanics is the paradigm case. In Labatut's world, the radical new worldview drives the scientist to madness.
The book is divided into five independent sections. The first, "Prussian Blue," fulfills all the promise of the premise. It starts with the Allied forces capturing Hermann Göring with Germany's entire supply of the opioid dihydrocodeine and ends with Fritz Haber, the creator of chlorine gas, worrying that "his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium" that plants were going to take over the world. In between is a tightly wound meditation on how beneficial and accidental discoveries inevitably come with terrible consequences as well, and how the pursuit of art leads to the machinery of war. At the end of its 24 pages I just said, "Wow."
Alas, the book gets progressively weaker from there. The second section, "Schwarzschild's Singularity" retains the intensity of "Prussian Blue" but lacks its spiraling structure. The third and fourth sections offer fairly conventional depictions of mathematicians and physicists heading down conceptual rabbit holes and coming away convinced they'd seen stark reality. The final section is a short attempt to tie the other sections together.
It was mathematics––not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon––which was changing our world to the point where... we would simply not be ale to grasp what being human meant. ... Even scientists no longer comprehend the world. ... We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.
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