When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

It was not politicians who would destroy the planet, he told them, but scientists like them who were “marching like sleepwalkers towards the apocalypse”.

all atoms were—like light—both wave and particle, at times acting like the first, at times like the second.

physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.

it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.