The Dream of Reason Brings Forth Monsters

Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s work elaborates a kind of chaos, chronicling unforeseen swerves in human knowledge, the awful epiphanies that unlock voids of despair and unfathomable realities. His 2020 book, When We Cease to Understand the World, is about fear and trembling on the frontier of science. Many of the greatest discoveries of the last century came about (or were necessitated by) the arrival of industrialized warfare, and those who made them were often psychologically ill-equipped to handle the fallout of their findings. Caught as they are in the gears of history, scientists and mathematicians have been casualties of their own investigations. In unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos, they have also unraveled themselves. This is what gives modern science its tragic aspect, the promethean ethos that has clung to it ever since it was elucidated by the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, two centuries ago.