When We Cease to Understand the World

I love books about an intellectual scene and I love books about Fucked Up Little Guys(tm). These two interests often intersect. Other examples include Bright Young People, about the social set that dominated British tabloid headlines in the 30s and were sent up in Evelyn Waugh's fiction and Grand Hotel Abyss, about the lives of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. They're all messy weirdos who bounced off of another and brilliant to read about. Also you get to sound intellectual whilst basically just reading tabloid gossip.

When We Cease to Understand the World concerns itself with the figures responsible for the rise of quantum physics. Schrödinger, Heisenberg, all the boys are here. What Labatut does that is particularly good is depicting the psychological effect of the discoveries. The scientists finding these irresolvable truths and actually understanding them basically all lose their marbles, and Labatut does a good job at depicting why to an innumerate audience (me).

There's something pruriently exciting too about the intellectual 20th century scene. Heads up, fascism is coming, do your equations and figure it out before the bombs start falling and the camps are built. You can feel the precipitous acceleration towards mechanised society and the nuclear bomb from all the way back to the 1910s, when the secrets of the subatomic are revealing themselves to these neurotic little guys — and freaking the fuck out.