#Benjamin labatut

[retrocausality]

The Final Act

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut | x, x

[emgoesmed]

2/8/2024

30nym challenge Day 4: what book are you currently reading?

📚 - Un verdor terrible por Benjamín Labatut

[mmonstra]

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

[viggles]

Last Bloom

Two-plate linocut on paper, 2024

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut

[sublecturas]

"Un verdor terrible", de Benjamín Labatut en la #LíneaH

[frances-baby-houseman]

Relatable 🥹

[emvisual]

Que manía con dejarme solo en las librerías. Al final acabo comprando por encima de mis posibilidades. Ya no es sólo el dinero, también el espacio.

[schizografia]

Durante un esame medico nei mesi precedenti al processo di Norimberga, i dottori notarono che le unghie delle mani e dei piedi di Hermann Göring erano macchiate di un rosso sgargiante. Pensarono, erroneamente, che il colore fosse dovuto alla dipendenza da diidrocodeina, un analgesico di cui prendeva più di cento pillole al giorno. Il suo effetto, secondo William Burroughs, era paragonabile all’eroina e almeno due volte più forte della codeina, ma con una scossa elettrica simile alla coca; per questo, prima che Göring comparisse davanti al tribunale, i medici americani dovettero curarlo dalla tossicodipendenza. Non fu facile. Quando venne catturato dagli Alleati, oltre allo smalto che si metteva sulle unghie quando si travestiva da Nerone, il gerarca nazista aveva in valigia più di ventimila dosi della sua droga preferita – quasi tutto ciò che rimaneva della produzione del farmaco in Germania alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale.

Benjamin Labatut, Quando abbiamo smesso di capire il mondo

[iirulancorrino]

If you enjoyed either Oppenheimer or Benjamin Labatut's first novel When We Cease to Understand the World, you will love his new book MANIAC. This has been a public service announcement.

[exhaled-spirals]

En el sustrato más hondo de las cosas, la física no [ha] encontrado una realidad sólida e inequívoca como la que añoraban Schrödinger y Einstein, regida por un dios racional que tiraba de los hilos del mundo, sino un reino de maravilla y extrañeza, hijo del capricho de una diosa de múltiples brazos jugando con el azar.

Benjamín Labatut, Un verdor terrible

[davidlavieri]

“We have no guiding star,” he told me, “nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us.” Jancsi thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology...

Benjamín Labatut, The Maniac

[espantajerias]

Writers: Benjamin Labatut.

[sandboy]

labatut.

Sempre affascinati da artisti, musicisti, poeti, molto spesso dimentichiamo quegli scienziati che tanta influenza hanno sulle nostre vite e il nostro mondo. In questo libro Labatut ne racconta in modo magistrale la vita e le scoperte di alcuni, mostrandoci quanto profondo può essere un certo sguardo scientifico, tanto profondo da venirne risucchiati e atterriti. Tra queste pagine troviamo una…

[atmedicine]

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and the manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

-When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut

[benevolentlibraryghost]

The destructive world of science

This book is a collection of short nonfiction stories about famous scientists in history and the prices they had to pay for their discoveries. I imagined this book to be very difficult, but even with my limited science knowledge I was able to understand what Labatut was writing about.

The book is a combination of fiction and nonfiction. Even when I wasn’t sure if what I was reading was a fact or not, I was still able to get an image of the scientist I was reading about and the person he was. 

They made mistakes, big ones, as described in the first chapter (which is almost entirely nonfiction). Fritz Haber, who won the Nobel prize for his discovery of Nitrogen fertilizer. It saved our world from famine. But it also turned into the weapon that was used to kill millions in concentration camps. This was not what he intended, of course. Or as someone on goodreads said: No One Does Evil Willingly.

It is fascinating to read these stories. Not just because of the facts, but also because of how scientists/physicians/mathematicians struggled and fought internal battles with themselves to reach their goals. The things we know nowadays that seem obvious to us, the discoveries we give them credit for, are also paired with a great deal of pain.

The only ‘complaint’ I have, is that the final story felt too different to me compared to the rest of the book. 

“Is there anything that is truly at rest, something stationary around which the universe revolves, or is there nothing at all to hold on to amid this endless chain of movements in which every single thing seems bound? Just imagine how far we have fallen into uncertainty if the human imagination cannot find a single place to lay its anchor, if not a single stone in the world has the right to be considered immobile!”

Rating: 4/5 discoveries

[warpspeedch1c]

a brilliant, beautiful piece of literature. the best i've read this year.

it's a kaleidoscope kind of a book. full of eccentric information and mesmerizing in the way it's told. i'm only halfway done yet neck-deep with fascinating stories about genius, mad minds buzzing in my head.

i love it. i love it love it love it. schwarzschild and grothendieck have become my wikipedia obsessions. it's shocking to realize that i know so little of the people who've built this world for what it is today by changing the trajectory of human understanding through physics and mathematics. through madness.

i love what this book's doing to me. i love it.