When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

In June 2016, an Argentine man paid more than three thousand euros for a pair of the Reichsmarschall’s silk underpants.

WTF!!!!.......................I mean, I like a pair of underpants as much as the next man. But that much for a pair of Goering's silk underpants? I feel queasy.

It bothered him that his office-mates used his favourite mug, so he chained it to a radiator with a padlock;

These scientists are a mad bunch - I mean, who wudda thunk of that (I wish I had)?

The first gas attack in history overwhelmed the French troops entrenched near the small town of Ypres, in Belgium. When they awoke on the morning of Thursday, April 22, 1915, the soldiers saw an enormous greenish cloud creeping towards them across no-man’s-land.

................and what horrible deaths they suffered too. Described in horrific/forensic detail by this author. Just terrible. Oh, and let's not forget the wildlife, farm animals and horses that also died terrible deaths.

In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment.

The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years.

Wow

Inside he found a letter bearing the last spark of a true genius: Karl Schwarzschild, astronomer, physicist, mathematician and lieutenant in the German army.

People like this are just show offs in my opinion!!!!!

Schwarzschild had sent him the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity.

Amazing. These nutters armed with only a piece of chalk and a blackboard, dream up solutions to answers most of us wouldn't even ask. Theoretical physicists/mathematicians are real superstars.

He never lost the capacity for astonishment:

I love "Astonished people".............aren't they the best?

The shame he felt was nearly unbearable, but Heisenberg refused to masturbate: he was convinced that all his body’s energies must remain bottled up so that he might devote them to his work.

Might try that!