Down the Rabbit Hole

Reflections on Benjamín Labatut's 'When We Cease to Understand the World'

Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World arrived garlanded with accolades—shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award, embraced by Barack Obama's reading list—yet no amount of critical fanfare prepared me for the book's particular species of unease. This is not conventional history, nor straightforward fiction, nor popular science writing. It exists in the unstable zone between genres. To read it is to experience intellectual vertigo, that peculiar mix of fascination and dread that accompanies standing too close to an edge.

At its core, the book traces pivotal moments in twentieth-century science and mathematics through the lives of Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. But these are no textbook portraits. Labatut thrusts us into troubled minds grappling with profound questions at immense personal cost. The book itself asks: What happens when humanity pushes against the boundaries of understanding? And what responsibility accompanies that terrible, exhilarating proximity to truth?

A Form That Embodies Uncertainty

The architecture of When We Cease to Understand the World is a descent. Comprising five interconnected pieces, it moves progressively deeper into fictionalisation, mirroring the increasingly abstract and unsettling nature of the scientific concepts it explores. "Prussian Blue," the opening section, reads as essayistic nonfiction, tracing a chilling lineage from the celebrated synthetic pigment to cyanide's accidental discovery to Zyklon B in Nazi death camps. The narrative then shifts through "Schwarzschild's Singularity," detailing the physicist's work on relativity amid wartime horrors; "The Heart of the Heart," focusing on the brilliant, reclusive mathematician Grothendieck; the central novella "When We Cease to Understand the World," dramatizing quantum mechanics through Heisenberg and Schrödinger's rivalry; and finally "The Night Gardener," an almost entirely fictional coda narrated in first person.

This progression is deliberate and structurally audacious. As the book delves into quantum mechanics—that realm of uncertainty, observer effects, and phenomena defying classical logic—the narrative itself becomes less tethered to verifiable fact. Labatut increasingly employs imagined interior states, feverish hallucinations, symbolic encounters. The blurring of fact and fiction becomes a literary embodiment of the epistemological crisis that scientists themselves encounter. Certain truths residing at the edge of comprehension, Labatut suggests, might be better accessed through imaginative exploration than strict factual reporting. The form performs the content.

Labatut describes it modestly as "a work of fiction based on real events," though this, in my opinion, undersells the book's formal daring. What he's created uses fiction's imaginative resources to animate historical accounts, filling biographical gaps with seamless, very hard to distinguish, fictional details.

The prose fuels this unsettling journey, with precise, concise and vivid pacing. Hallucinatory sequences—Heisenberg's fever-fueled breakthroughs, Schwarzschild's wartime visions—contribute to an atmosphere of eerie intellectual claustrophobia. The writing performs a difficult balancing act: lucid enough to convey complex science, fevered enough to transmit the psychological toll of confronting fundamental mysteries.

Genius Bearing Its Weight

Labatut refuses to lionise his subjects. These figures appear depicted as deeply flawed, sometimes tormented individuals who prioritise science over families and friends, treating it as their god, exposing themselves to terrible suffering in its service.

Fritz Haber embodies the book's central paradoxes most starkly. His Haber-Bosch process for synthesising ammonia revolutionised agriculture, feeding billions. Yet he's also the father of chemical warfare, pioneering chlorine and poison gases on World War I battlefields. Labatut traces the dark thread further: Haber's work led to Zyklon A, precursor to the gas used in Nazi death chambers. The narrative touches on personal tragedies—his wife Clara Immerwahr's suicide, reportedly in protest of his weapons research—and includes a fictionalised letter expressing ecological anxieties. Haber becomes a potent symbol of knowledge's inextricable duality, creation forever shadowed by destruction.

Karl Schwarzschild, providing the first exact solution to Einstein's field equations while serving on the Russian front, is haunted by violence witnessed and terrified by his own discovery's implications: the singularity, that point of infinite density where physics breaks down. He sees correlations between such cosmic monstrosities and the collective madness gripping his homeland. Alexander Grothendieck, the Fields Medal mathematician, profoundly disturbed by potential military applications of his work, dramatically withdrew from academia, becoming an eccentric recluse devoted to environmentalism and spiritual pursuits. Labatut includes a fictionalised encounter where Grothendieck refuses to share later work, fearing its potential for harm. Both illustrate the psychological toll of confronting fundamental truths and the ethical anxieties surrounding their potential misuse.

The book's longest section examines Heisenberg and Schrödinger's intellectual battle over quantum mechanics' foundations. Labatut portrays their breakthroughs not as serene epiphanies but as harrowing journeys marked by illness, hallucinations (Heisenberg's alleged absinthe use), near-maniacal work frenzies, and profound isolation (Heisenberg's retreat to Helgoland). He incorporates controversial, likely fictionalised elements: Heisenberg's sexual frustrations, Schrödinger's alleged obsession with an underage girl and purported priapism. Whether factual or invented, these details serve to portray extreme psychological states accompanying paradigm-shifting discoveries.

Here, the book courts its most serious criticism. The use of fictionalised elements—inner monologues, dreams, sometimes lurid personal details—attempts to bridge abstract science and human experience, showing the human side of intellectual giants. But does focusing on suffering, illness, and disturbing details truly humanise these figures, or does it reinforce a potentially damaging stereotype of the tormented genius? Does it risk overshadowing intellectual joy, collaboration, and sheer hard work involved in scientific progress? The fictional elements perform a complex, perhaps troubling function: seeking empathy while potentially simplifying historical figures into archetypes.

The Dual Nature of Discovery

A central artery running through the book is the theme that scientific advancement and destructive potential are deeply, perhaps inextricably, intertwined. The narrative repeatedly draws lines from seemingly benign discoveries to horrific consequences: Prussian Blue to Zyklon B, Haber's life-saving fertilisers to deadly weapons, quantum mechanics' elegant equations to the atomic bomb's terrifying power. The book suggests a Faustian bargain: touching the void, glimpsing fundamental truths, often unleashes madness upon the discoverer or horror upon the world.

The motif of genius bordering on madness pervades. Scientists descend into isolation, grapple with mental instability, suffer hallucinations. Heisenberg is portrayed as concluding he had to gouge out his eyes "to see further." Is madness the price of extraordinary insight? Or is this reliance on the genius-and-madness trope a romanticised, potentially misleading simplification?

The book probes the ethical dimensions of discovery relentlessly. Often, the figures seem tragically unaware of, or powerless to control, the ultimate applications of their work. Grothendieck's self-imposed exile represents a conscious, extreme attempt to withhold knowledge deemed too dangerous. The narrative raises uncomfortable questions: Do scientists bear primary moral responsibility for their discoveries' consequences, or are they instruments wielded by political and military forces? Labatut seems to imply that in our modern world, scientific breakthroughs are almost inevitably co-opted for destructive ends, lacking sufficiently powerful moral guardrails.

Ultimately, the book grapples with the limits of human understanding, evoking cosmic horror. Labatut highlights the fundamental inscrutability underlying known reality, suggesting the universe revealed by modern physics and mathematics is far stranger, less comprehensible, and potentially more terrifying than previously imagined. The title itself encapsulates this: the point where comprehension fails is precisely where the narrative finds its most fertile, disturbing ground.

While the relentless focus on scientific breakthroughs' dark side might suggest an anti-progress stance, closer reading reveals more complex ambivalence. The narrative conveys the sheer intellectual drive, obsessive passion, and moments of dazzling brilliance fueling these discoveries. Labatut seems less interested in condemning science than meditating on its inherent duality—capacity for profound good and unimaginable evil—and the immense psychological and ethical weight it places on individuals and society. The book functions less as a Luddite tract than as a wake-up call, urging readers to reconsider the potential costs of relentless knowledge pursuit, questioning the hubris that can accompany this drive.

The Ethical Problem of Beautiful Lies

The book's most compelling and controversial aspect is precisely this deliberate fusion of fact and fiction. The approach has drawn significant critical discussion. Some of us may praise the book's originality and how the style embodies themes of uncertainty. However, serious concerns also need to be raised about the responsibility of blurring fact and fiction, particularly in an era of fake news and scientific fact denial. Should we worry that this blend might obscure historical accuracy and contribute to myth-making? Might we argue that Labatut is actually critiquing the official myth-making inherent in simplified historical narratives?

This critical crossroads highlights the provocative nature of Labatut's project. The intentional ambiguity compelled me to question the nature of narrative, history, and truth itself. Yet is this liberation or obfuscation? The book's power derives partly from the reader's inability to determine where history ends and invention begins—but this same quality renders it ethically precarious.

The final section, "The Night Gardener," offers a cryptic coda. The shift to first-person narration, the focus on decaying trees, poisoned dogs, parasitic vines, and a former mathematician turned reclusive gardener, brings the book's themes crashing into the present. This enigmatic ending resonates with preceding historical accounts, echoing motifs of decay, hidden darkness, knowledge's burden, and retreat from overwhelming complexity. It left me contemplating the ultimate unknown—what lies beyond the veil of death—grounding grand historical narrative in personal, unsettling immediacy.

A Necessary Provocation

Reading When We Cease to Understand the World proves intellectually stimulating, often emotionally draining, and profoundly unsettling. Readers report being utterly gripped, left reeling, moved to tears or laughter, or completely enraptured. It lingers, prompting reflection on the nature of science, the course of history, the definition of genius, the precariousness of human existence. It leaves behind a residue of questions rather than easy answers.

Whether viewed as masterpiece or flawed but vital experiment, the book's haunting quality is undeniable. It serves as a potent reminder—relevant amidst contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, climate change—that pursuing understanding carries immense, perhaps terrifying responsibility. As one reviewer put it, you might start the book knowing little about quantum theory, but by the end, you'll know enough to be terrified.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a challenging, brilliant, deeply disturbing work that might be best described as a necessary provocation for our times. Its hybrid form is not merely experimental but essential to its power, mirroring the uncertainties it explores. It forces confrontation with the double-edged nature of human knowledge and potential consequences of our relentless drive to understand—a reminder that illumination and catastrophe have always shared the same frontier.