It is to this mysterious figure that the narrator – or Labatut, since the two seem synonymous – gives the last, alarming, word. Towards the close of the book we are introduced briefly to the narrator’s neighbour, whom he encounters on his nocturnal strolls with his dog and whom he refers to as “the night gardener”, because he tends his plants when they’re asleep and won’t be distressed by his interfering with them. When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West) is his ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing “work of fiction based on real events”, though it might have been better to call it a nonfiction novel, since the majority of the characters are historical figures, and much of the narrative is based on historical fact.Īlbert Einstein. Labatut, born in Holland and resident in Chile, will have none of it. Outlandish hypotheses put forward in the late 1920s by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, the originators of the Copenhagen Interpretation of how atoms work, today underpin the science that guides the exploration of the farthest reaches of space and the workings of the mobile phone in your pocket.īooks of popular science usually celebrate the wondrous achievements that applied mathematics has wrought in the realms of physics, chemistry and cosmology. He spent the last 30 years of his life attempting to bring about a synthesis that would transcend quantum theory, and failed. About quantum mechanics, the development of which was as bold and momentous a feat as the formulation of the theory of general relativity, Einstein had more than a doubt – he loathed it, refusing to accept a version of physics that replaced Newtonian certitude with a haze of probabilities.

Locked heart dice