--- product_id: 317083504 title: "When We Cease to Understand the World" price: "£11.90" currency: GBP in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/317083504-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world store_origin: GB region: United Kingdom --- # When We Cease to Understand the World **Price:** £11.90 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** When We Cease to Understand the World - **How much does it cost?** £11.90 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.uk](https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/317083504-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description One of The New York Times Book Review ’s 10 Best Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible. Review: Thought provoking - Labatut, B. (2020). When we cease to understand the world (A. N. West, Trans.). New York Review Books. Benjamin Labatut is a writer who was born in the Netherlands and currently lives in Chile. This is a strangely wonderful "work of fiction based on real events" exploring the lives of scientists, physicists, and mathematicians who through their questions, exploration, and focus began to contemplate the consequences and implications of that which they created. The narrative provides a fictionalized account of Herman Goring, Johann Jacob Diesback, Johann Conrad Dippel, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Shinichi Mochizuki, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein. In the midst of their creativity, these creators experienced ill-health, madness, guilt, and regret. The final chapter is written through the eyes of the narrator who listens to his night gardener, a mathematician, who concluded, "that it was mathematics - not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon - which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant." This book explores the lives of those who explore the sciences, physics, and mathematics. Their outputs often raise questions about potential and even unintended consequences. The writing combines research, history, and speculative fiction. For those interested in the moral and ethical questions raised by the film Oppenheimer, this book would be a wonderful book for contemplation. Review: Well written and intriguing - The older I grow the more things I think I don’t understand. While I think that this book alludes to knowledge leading to lack of such there was something in the cohesion missing for me. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #10,929 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #27 in Biographical Historical Fiction #46 in Biographical & Autofiction #1,120 in Science Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 5,830 Reviews | ## Images ![When We Cease to Understand the World - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81Wodz8m5vL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thought provoking *by A***N on June 25, 2024* Labatut, B. (2020). When we cease to understand the world (A. N. West, Trans.). New York Review Books. Benjamin Labatut is a writer who was born in the Netherlands and currently lives in Chile. This is a strangely wonderful "work of fiction based on real events" exploring the lives of scientists, physicists, and mathematicians who through their questions, exploration, and focus began to contemplate the consequences and implications of that which they created. The narrative provides a fictionalized account of Herman Goring, Johann Jacob Diesback, Johann Conrad Dippel, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Shinichi Mochizuki, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein. In the midst of their creativity, these creators experienced ill-health, madness, guilt, and regret. The final chapter is written through the eyes of the narrator who listens to his night gardener, a mathematician, who concluded, "that it was mathematics - not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon - which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant." This book explores the lives of those who explore the sciences, physics, and mathematics. Their outputs often raise questions about potential and even unintended consequences. The writing combines research, history, and speculative fiction. For those interested in the moral and ethical questions raised by the film Oppenheimer, this book would be a wonderful book for contemplation. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Well written and intriguing *by A***K on March 22, 2026* The older I grow the more things I think I don’t understand. While I think that this book alludes to knowledge leading to lack of such there was something in the cohesion missing for me. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Oddly Brilliant *by J***A on January 9, 2025* When We Cease to Understand the World is an brilliantly written but very unusual book. It has kernels of fact surrounded by glittering shells of variegated fiction. As a genre, it feels different than historical fiction. It might rather be labeled biographical fiction, or fictive biography, or truth that never occurred. I got through the whole book before I found out that what I read was only partially true and mostly untrue. On the very last page the author Bejamin Labatut disclosed that what I'd spent four days reading is "a work of fiction based on real events," and that the fiction "grows throughout the book," so that the earliest story is mostly factual, but each succeeding story becomes more and more fantastical, with elements of fact thrown in. It's as if the mortar holding thick cinder blocks together is truth while the cinder blocks themselves are fiction. When We Cease to Understand the World is a series of vignettes on brilliant scientists. The first story is about the Jewish/German chemist, Fritz Haber, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918. Haber probably saved multiple billions of people from starvation with a process extracting nitrogen from thin air, using the nitrogen in fertilizer to increase crops. He married Clara Immerwahr, the first woman in Germany to earn a doctorate in chemistry. Haber's story darkens when we learn of his participation in chemical warfare and the gassing of French troops in World War I. Haber also indirectly had a hand in gassing the Jews of World War II. A powerful pesticide he helped invent (dubbed zyklon) was utilized by the Nazis in the camps to exterminate Jews. And here he was, a German Jew ultimately contributing to the death of his family members. Labatut garnishes all of this with fiction. As, for instance, it is a fact that Haber's wife Clara killed herself with a shot to her chest from Haber's own pistol. But Labatut sets that suicide during a marital argument about the military uses of chemistry. This is not a matter of fact. Truth plus fiction. And the whole of the story is exquisitely beautiful. (This last sentence will be my chorus.) The second tale concerns Karl Schwarzschild, a Jewish/German physicist who wrote to Jewish/German Albert Einstein from a 1915 World War I battlefield with very precise solutions to Einstein's field equations, a revelation that Einstein marveled at and welcomed. Schwarzschild went on to become the youngest professor in Germany. Labatut lavishes Schwarzschild with numerous eccentricities, none of which are factually true. Labatut tells of Schwarzschild taking extravagant risks with his life and the life his brother and friends in climbing adventures in the Swiss Alps. But I cannot corroborate this story. And Labatut's galloping imagination has Schwarzschild involved in the gassing of French troops mentioned in the Haber story. Schwarzschild was indeed asked to use his mathematical genius to help German officers make ballistic calculations so that bombs would drop precisely where the German officers intended them to drop. But there's no evidence that Schwarzschild did that for the bombs containing gas. Fact plus fiction. Chorus: And the whole of the story is exquisitely beautiful. The third tale concerns two math geniuses. The first is the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki (born 1969 and entered Princeton at age 16), a genius in number theory. The second is Jewish/German Alexander Grothendieck (died 2014), whom some call the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. Here, Labatut uses one eccentric to annotate the life of a second eccentric. Labatut exaggerates the oddness of Mochizuki in numerous ways, but especially in a story about the mathematician solving aspects of Grothendieck’s mathematics that stunned the entire world of mathematics with ideas that seemed to be from a future century that no could fully penetrate. But Shinichi Mochizuki is only a calling card for the person Labatut really wants to discuss, and that's Alexander Grothendieck. We cannot discount Grothendieck's genius, but Labatut lathers on extremely bizarre stories of the mathematician ripping up carpets in homes, sleeping on removed doors, and inviting all manner of social outcasts to live in his home like it's a commune. In a final scene, Grothendieck is on his deathbed in a hospital and he has forbidden anyone to seem him—no family, no friends. Except one. A nurse recalls that a lone, shy Japanese man was granted entry. (We're not told who the man is but of course it's supposed to be Shinichi Mochizuki.) And the mysterious Japanese man stayed with Grothendieck until Grothendieck's dying last breath. This cannot be factual! Chorus: And yet the whole of the story is exquisitely beautiful. You get the picture, right? Remaining stories in the collection are about Louis De Brogelie, the French winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1929; Werner Heisenberg, the German winner of the Nobel Prize in physics 1932; and Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933. In all these tales we have kernels of truth with husks of the wildest fabrication. Don't imagine this is not a book for non-scientists. I am not a scientist and I was wholly drawn into Labatut's intricately tooled prose. ## Frequently Bought Together - When We Cease to Understand the World - The MANIAC - Orbital: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/317083504-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world](https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/317083504-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world) --- *Product available on Desertcart United Kingdom* *Store origin: GB* *Last updated: 2026-05-23*