A Terrible Greenness
Could the resolution of Einstein's equations lead to the contemplation of an abyss unimaginable to the human mind? Or could the discovery of a formula save humanity from hunger while also serving as one of Nazism's most diabolical weapons of destruction? Or could the dream of the absolute lead to the most terrible of nightmares?
In five masterful accounts, intertwining fiction and history, horror and beauty, BenjamÃn Labatut constructs a literary and essayistic labyrinth from the lives of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians such as Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, and Werner Heisenberg—elusive and eccentric figures on the threshold between genius and madness who revolutionized the twentieth century and marked the moment humanity ceased to understand the world.
A strange book about strange ideas, resistant to categorization, that ventures into realms as inaccessible as black holes and quantum mechanics and transforms them into literature.
