Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches and finds the black hole waiting inside them. Grothendieck goes so far into mathematics he stops speaking. Heisenberg works out matrix mechanics alone on an island while half blind with hay fever, and Schrödinger writes his equation in a sanatorium. Labatut’s argument is that the deepest scientific insight and the loss of your mind may be the same road, and the further in you get the less of it is verifiable.
When We Cease to Understand the World