Madness ... mirrors ... murders ... and maybe a prose-poem about the mistakes and masterpieces of modern mathematics, physics, and chemistry? Benjamín Labatut's 2020 short novel When We Cease to Understand the World has elements of all those. It's a dreamlike depiction of historical and fictional events. Wonderful writing, confusing and cautionary. Scary in spots. Increasingly crude as it progresses into insanity. Amazingly accurate in its scientific sections. Better if it had been half as long?

_{(see reviews and commentary in the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker; cf Quantum Nondemolition (2000-02-05), Power Distortion (2001-02-12), Prophetic Uncertainty Principle (2004-05-29), Schrodinger's Catastrophe (2008-01-26), Alternative Paths (2017-01-15), ...) - ^z - 2024-01-10}