Scientific Progress

In When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut uses history in order to explore the various effects of scientific progress on the human relationship with reality. In each of his first four chapters, Labatut details a scientist on the verge of a grand discovery. Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger all appear to move closer to some form of the ‘heart of the heart’ (a description that Grothendieck uses to describe the foundations of mathematical and scientific reality). Through their distinct—though interconnected—discoveries, the scientists challenge the limits of human understanding. It is here that Labatut begins to condemn science for rendering the world incomprehensible. Throughout the novel, characters balk at the existential vastness that scientific progress brings about. Perhaps most directly, a stranger in a Copenhagen bar explicitly blames Heisenberg and his fellow scientists for this...