| ***** | I picked up Benjamin Labatut's "When We Cease to Understand the World" on recommendation from a friend on Twitter. It did not disappoint, and moved this friend immediately into "Buy any book he mentions" territory in my brainspace.
Without giving too much away, let me simply say that the book, which discusses the men and minds who gave us quantum theory, is itself a sort of duality, neither fully fact nor fully fiction.
It's beautiful and sparse and unbelievably well-executed; I found myself (as a math and science teacher) particularly drawn to the passage below, which digs right into the heart of the modern human's understanding of the mechanisms underlying a great deal of our existence:
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. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
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