WHEN WE CEASE to UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, by Benjamín Labatut

 When We Cease to Understand the World is an extraordinary work of ... nonfiction? historical fiction? Dystopian fiction? Some sort of combination of all three.  The book consists of a number of vignettes - narratives about scientists who were mostly part of the often contentious discourse about the newly-"invented" field of Quantum Physics in the first half of the 20th Century. The stories all highlight some dark aspects of the lives of these scientists (and others), often with mixed results for the reader. They are seldom absolute heroes or villains. One reviewer called the book a dystopian novel set in the present, because the unsettling real-life uses of mathematics underlying the work of these scientists are certainly dark and destructive. 

For a review of the book from The Guardian, click here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut-review-the-dark-side-of-science