The adventure of science converted into literature. An unclassifiable and powerfully seductive book.

The stories included in this unique and fascinating book have a common thread that intertwines them: science, with its searches, attempts, experiments and hypotheses, and the changes that – for better and for worse – it introduces in the world and in our vision of life. he.

Real discoveries parade through these pages that form a long disturbing chain: the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian blue, created in the 18th century thanks to an alchemist who searched for the Elixir of Life through cruel experiments on live animals, becomes the origin of hydrogen cyanide, a deadly gas that the German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber, father of chemical warfare, used to make the pesticide Zyklon, without knowing that the Nazis would end up using it in extermination camps to murder members of his own family . We also witness the mathematical explorations of Alexander Grothendieck, which led him to mystical delirium, social isolation and madness; to the letter sent to Einstein by a dying friend from the trenches of the First World War, with the solution of the equations of relativity and the first prediction of black holes; and to the struggle between the two founders of quantum mechanics – Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg – that generated the uncertainty principle and the famous response that Einstein shouted at Niels Bohr: “God does not play dice with the universe!”

Literature explores science, science becomes literature. Benjamín Labatut has written an unclassifiable and powerfully seductive book, which talks about discoveries resulting from chance, theories that border on madness, alchemical searches for knowledge and the exploration of the limits of the unknown.

«Labatut penetrates the heart of a reality that few have seen before him, and that no one has described in this way. A book of terrifying beauty" (Wolfram Eilenberger, author of Time of Magicians).

«The prodigy of Benjamín Labatut's writings lies in his ability to access domains of enormous complexity without giving up rigor, at the same time that he turns these scientists into flesh and blood characters, pure literary figures that are probably truer the more they more they seem invented» (José Mário Silva, Expresso, Portugal).