When We Cease to Understand the World

In the relative quiet at the end of the year I caught up with one of the most acclaimed books of 2021 (including by James at Madison Books when it came out in October). I suspected it would be right up my alley, and indeed it was. In chapters that read at first like essays and then increasingly like fiction, Labatut elegantly traces the lives and ideas of some of the 20th century's most prominent physicists and mathematicians. But those elegant tales lead again and again into horror, both in the personal lives of these obsessive thinkers, which span the most murderous decades of the century, and in the consequences of their ideas. Reading of their struggles to push the margins of our comprehension, you feel like you are standing at the edge of the abyss that faced one of his subjects, the German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, who, while dying at the front in World War I, madly solved equations that led to an unthinkable conclusion: the existence of black holes.