When We Cease to Understand the World

I love physics and math and history so loved this weird little book. It profiles the scientists behind some of the major physics and math breakthroughs in the early twentieth century and does a pretty amazing job of weaving their stories together.

As the title implies, sometimes the breakthroughs are so disruptive that they cause untold actual and potential destruction. And sometimes they drive the inventor insane.

One thing the scientists profiled shared was outsized ambition. I loved reading anecdotes about their obsessions.

On Karl Schwarzschild:

He was convinced that mathematics, physics and astronomy constituted a single body of knowledge and believed that Germany was capable of exercising a civilizing force comparable to that of ancient Greece. To do so, however, its science must be raised to the heights already achieved by its philosophy and art, for “only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”

On Louis de Broglie:

Vasek was a painter, but he had also compiled an extensive collection of works he called art brut: poems, sculptures, drawings and paintings composed by psychiatric patients, mentally disabled children, drug addicts, alcoholics, perverts and sexual deviants, whose twisted visions, it seemed to him, bore the seeds from which the myths of the future would spring forth. De Broglie was never convinced of the possible utility of what Jean-Baptiste called “creative energy in its purest state”, but his dedication to art resembled Louis’s own monomaniacal devotion to physics, and they could spend whole afternoons conversing in one of the salons in de Broglie’s mansion, or else in tranquil silence, neither feeling the passage of time nor paying attention to what was occurring in the outside world.