When We Cease to Understand the World
Metadata
Highlights
- Brünnhilde’s cries of pain still resounding in their ears, members of the Deutsches Jungvolk—a section of the Hitler Youth composed of children under ten, as the teenagers were already off dying at the barricades—handed out cyanide capsules in small wicker baskets, like votive offerings at mass. (Location 85)
- An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts. (Location 161)
- If arsenic is a patient assassin, hiding out in the most recondite of the body’s tissues and accumulating there for years, cyanide takes your breath away. (Location 190)
- In his free time, he liked to play “Desert Island”, a game that consisted in crafting for himself the largest possible variety of household products: he made his own detergent, soap and an insecticide so potent it decimated his neighbours’ gardens. (Location 212)
New highlights added December 11, 2022 at 12:23 AM
- “He fought against the problems from which others fled. He loved discovering the relations between multiple aspects of nature, but what drove his search was joy, the pleasure an artist feels, the vertigo of the visionary capable of discerning the threads that weave the fabric of the future,” (Location 568)
- To do so, he constructed intricate theoretical architectures around the simplest of questions, encircling them with a vast array of new concepts. Under the soft, continuous pressure of Grothendieck’s reasoning, solutions seemed to reveal themselves of their own free will, welling up to the surface, and opening, as he once said, “like a nutshell that had spent months submerged in water”. (Location 682)
New highlights added December 11, 2022 at 1:55 PM
- “What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time.” Grothendieck continued to push past the limits of abstraction. (Location 771)
New highlights added December 12, 2022 at 7:46 AM
- during their strolls in the mountains, he convinced the young physicist that, when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry. (Location 1000)
- The physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections. From that summer onwards, Heisenberg understood that to apply concepts of classical physics such as position, velocity and momentum to a subatomic particle was sheer madness. That aspect of nature required a completely new language. (Location 1003)
New highlights added December 13, 2022 at 5:46 PM
- what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both. (Location 1803)
New highlights added December 14, 2022 at 6:41 AM
- Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. (Location 2021)
title: “When We Cease to Understand the World”
author: “Benjamin Labatut and Adrian Nathan West”
url: ""
date: 2023-12-19
source: kindle
tags: media/books
When We Cease to Understand the World
Metadata
Highlights
- Brünnhilde’s cries of pain still resounding in their ears, members of the Deutsches Jungvolk—a section of the Hitler Youth composed of children under ten, as the teenagers were already off dying at the barricades—handed out cyanide capsules in small wicker baskets, like votive offerings at mass. (Location 85)
- An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts. (Location 161)
- If arsenic is a patient assassin, hiding out in the most recondite of the body’s tissues and accumulating there for years, cyanide takes your breath away. (Location 190)
- In his free time, he liked to play “Desert Island”, a game that consisted in crafting for himself the largest possible variety of household products: he made his own detergent, soap and an insecticide so potent it decimated his neighbours’ gardens. (Location 212)
- “He fought against the problems from which others fled. He loved discovering the relations between multiple aspects of nature, but what drove his search was joy, the pleasure an artist feels, the vertigo of the visionary capable of discerning the threads that weave the fabric of the future,” (Location 568)
- To do so, he constructed intricate theoretical architectures around the simplest of questions, encircling them with a vast array of new concepts. Under the soft, continuous pressure of Grothendieck’s reasoning, solutions seemed to reveal themselves of their own free will, welling up to the surface, and opening, as he once said, “like a nutshell that had spent months submerged in water”. (Location 682)
- “What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time.” Grothendieck continued to push past the limits of abstraction. (Location 771)
- during their strolls in the mountains, he convinced the young physicist that, when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry. (Location 1000)
- The physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections. From that summer onwards, Heisenberg understood that to apply concepts of classical physics such as position, velocity and momentum to a subatomic particle was sheer madness. That aspect of nature required a completely new language. (Location 1003)
- what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both. (Location 1803)
- Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. (Location 2021)