Five books that pull at the seams of reality
Awesome perils, enchanting possibilities, and the nature of truth.

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” — Max Weber, Science as a Vocation (1918)
“Does that mean God’s not real?” — My eight-year-old daughter, out loud, in the theater, after hearing that we are all made of stardust while watching the IMAX film Deep Sky.
The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions by Ersilia Vaudo (Translated from the Italian by Vanessa Di Stefano, W.W. Norton, April 29, 2025)
In her upcoming book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global,1 journalist Laura Spinney tells of an Indo-European legend that allegedly dates back 6,000 years, which she identifies as a precursor to the story of Faust:
Among the oldest songs that Indo-European poets sang, mythologists tell us, is one about a smith who makes a pact with a devil.
She doesn’t provide a citation. (This is one of my red flags.)
I found the source and I think it would be more accurate to say that a folklorist and an anthropologist believe that the story dates back to the Indo-Europeans while others are less certain. Nevertheless, the story is quite old, found across many different cultures, and has certainly stood the test of time. There’s something inherently attractive to us about this story and its themes—that there’s something dangerous about knowledge and that technology has a corrosive effect on our souls. That those among us who can harness the secrets of the universe have tapped into some nefarious, infernal power.
I suppose it’s no surprise—the prehistoric metal smiths at Varna, Bulgaria who Spinney believes may have inspired the legend were among the first to make bronze weapons, ushering in a new and more lethal era of warfare. In a way, they are the antecedents of men like Robert Oppenheimer, our “American Prometheus,” people whose understanding of the physical laws of nature gave them insight that led to discoveries that were awe-inspiring, in the original sense of the word.
Since the Enlightenment, scientists and philosophers have done what they can to dispel the superstitions that have plagued us for millennia, to “disenchant” the world through reason and empiricism. But there’s a reason “The Smith and the Devil” has stuck around for so long and why we can’t help but talk about a modern, scientific figure like Oppenheimer in those ancient, mythical terms.
In the end, nothing beats a good story. Print the legend, as they say.
Ersilia Vaudo’s The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions is a valiant attempt to demystify not just how the universe works, but how scientists work. It’s far from perfect—explaining complex science to a lay audience is hard enough, but doing it in Italian and then translating it into English brings with it its own challenges. The book is, unfortunately, a clunky read, and what Vaudo chooses to explain and what she allows to stand on its own can be baffling—she defines “refraction,” for example, something anyone interested in this book likely remembers from high school science, while letting other, much more specialist jargon pass without comment.
Vaudo focuses on five important advances in scientific knowledge: Newton’s theories on gravity, Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity; Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe, and the discovery of anti-matter. If there’s a common theme among these discoveries (and their discoverers) it’s that, for all their brilliance and unique insight, what really allowed them to untangle the mysteries before them was an ability to change their perspective and shift their frame of reference. They were all willing to entertain ideas that seemed outlandish and that went against the received wisdom. They were willing to take a chance on a concept that provided an elegant solution, even if it didn’t make intuitive sense.
But even more interesting, Vaudo shows how this ability only went so far. Many of these thinkers became stuck in their own frame of reference and resisted subsequent developments that challenged their perceptions of what was real. Newton, infamously, wasted a significant portion of his life on alchemy. Lord Kelvin declared that physics had reached its end point not long before Einstein showed that there was much more to be said. Einstein himself didn’t believe the universe was expanding and disliked the “spooky action at a distance” of quantum mechanics. Today, it’s the tiny vibrating dimensions of string theory that strain our capacity for credulousness. No matter how brilliant the great scientists of the past might have been, there were limits to what they could see and what they were willing (or able) to accept.
Despite its less-than-stellar prose, The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions isn’t a bad primer for a non-technical person trying to wrap their head around the basics of what’s going on in the field, decent enough as a crash course in how we arrived at our current understanding of the universe.
But nobody makes a deal with the devil. Its protagonists aren’t tortured by anything other than advanced math. Dramatically speaking, it’s just not a very good story.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, New York Review Books, September 28, 2021)
Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, however, is a very good story, because it operates within the Promethean mode and is more than willing to bend reality for the sake of narrative. At the end of the book, in the acknowledgements, Labtaut reveals that “This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of the fiction grows throughout the book.”2
I thought that was interesting, because I found that my interest in the book at any given point tended to be inversely proportional to the quantity of fiction it contained at that moment. So the first chapter, “Prussian Blue,” a labyrinthine tale about paint pigment, chemical warfare, Fritz Haber, synthetic fertilizer, and the Final Solution, is absolutely riveting—Labatut says it contains only one fictionalized paragraph.
But as the book went on, I couldn’t help but notice that more and more of it rang false. And the most surprising parts were always the least true. “The Heart of the Heart,” which is centered on the very real Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, is especially peculiar. Labatut writes (again, in the acknowledgments) that “most of what is said here about him, his biography, and his research is fiction.” Alright. Then why use him at all?
The titular story, about the unraveling of quantum mechanics by Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg is a completely invented story of fevered epiphanies and self-inflicted psychological torture out of which comes clarity and understanding. It is by far the least interesting story of the book.
What Labatut is doing with When We Cease To Understand The World is creating a new mythology out of recent history, taking those allegorical associations we are so apt to make to ancient myth a step further: What if instead of comparing Oppenheimer to Prometheus, we simply treated Oppenheimer as if he were Prometheus?
The discoveries made by Labatut’s fictional protagonists are not the result of precise calculations or tedious experimentation, they strike them light lightning bolts from the sky, but only after they endure harrowing trials that push them to their breaking points. The men (and they are all men) in this book suffer for science, and more often than not, we end up suffering for it, too.
In Labatut’s world, scientific discovery is a Lovecraftian pursuit. These men have peered into the abyss of deep space and cracked open the heart of the atom in search of the truth, and what they found drove them to frothing, hysterical madness and unleashed upon the world unfathomable terrors. Not just the gas chambers or the atom bomb or climate change. What they found undermined our very notion of reality itself—the idea that there can be a fixed truth, an objective frame of reference, a shared perception of events. Everything is relative and certainty is an illusion. All that was once solid has melted into air.
When We Cease to Understand the World seeks to reenchant the world by taking the arcane and complex revelations of modern physics and grafting it onto the visceral, emotionally resonant mythologies that have been embedded in our psyches for thousands of years. Maybe Labatut is onto something. Perhaps that’s the only way most of us can ever really understand what any of this means, or fathom just how monumental, how dangerous, how profound this work really is. Perhaps in this realm of uncertainty and relativity, a factual truth is less important than a meaningful lie.
The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut (Penguin Press, October 3, 2023)
If When We Cease to Understand the World is Labatut’s riff on the Promethean myth, then The MANIAC is his Faust, or maybe his version of “The Smith and the Devil.”
In this version, though, the smith invents the devil. Labatut’s purview here is the origins of modern computing (MANIAC being one of the first programmable computers, the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer—used to model nuclear explosions) and the development of artificial intelligence. The brainchild of John von Neumann, MANIAC was notable for being the first computer to defeat a human being at a game similar to chess,3 making it a precursor to the AlphaGo AI that Labatut focuses on in the book’s third chapter.
[Von Neumann] thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology…
I’ll admit that I didn’t find The MANIAC quite as compelling as When We Cease to Understand the World. I liked it, sure, but it didn’t have the same aura. First, the decision to structure the section on John von Neumann as an oral history feels like a misstep. Each chapter within the section is told from the point of view of someone in his life—his wife, his colleagues, and so on. But unfortunately, I never felt that their voices felt distinct or especially personal. They all sounded pretty much the same. I suppose Labatut felt that it was easier to shift perspective from scene to scene and get more intimate that way, but I think a third-person narration probably would’ve been fine, too. (The section about AlphaGo and Lee Sedol is written like that and is perfectly fine.)
Overall, the prose seemed rather bland, especially when compared to Cease. It’s interesting that Labatut wrote this himself in English, while Cease was translated from his original Spanish. Something was definitely lost—the breathless, virtuosic poetry of Cease was its primary virtue. There’s none of that in The MANIAC. The chapter on Sedol, especially, while very interesting, reads very plainly, like a newspaper article or magazine feature. It lacks personality and style. You might wonder whether it (like the book’s cover) was produced by AI. In some respects, The MANIAC feels like an epilogue to Cease, possibly made up of bits developed during thar project that didn’t find their way into the mix. The Amnesiac to Cease’s Kid A, if you will.4
Whatever their flaws, Labatut’s two books do an admirable job of presenting the scientific and technological advances of the last century or so in the context of an arresting story. They succeed in conveying the awesome terror of what our modern smiths have forged.
It’s just a shame that so much of it isn’t true.
A Scheme of Heaven by Alexander Boxer (W.W Norton, January 14, 2020)
But how sure can we be that we’re capable of distinguishing what’s true and what isn’t? Might we be easily deceived by the appearance of truth, a faux-scientific veneer that hides little more than the same old mysticism and superstition?
In this engaging, well-researched history of astrology, Boxer argues that contemporary data science, the basis for recent innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence, may be exploiting the same cognitive biases and logical fallacies that astrology has used to hide its limitations and disingenuously present itself as an objective source of truth.
For centuries, astrology was considered to be a true science by history’s great thinkers and powerful leaders. Its prophecies could have a profound impact on the course of human events. Complex, mathematical algorithms and basis in empirical observation gave it a veneer of credibility, obscuring the fundamental flaws in its premise and the biases built into it by its human designers.
As machines begin to assume responsibility for making critical decisions regarding employment, college admissions, mortgage lending, and financial planning, the risk that new technology will be used to launder old, exclusionary biases is significant. Using astrology as an example, Boxer provides readers with a means of thinking critically about systems that seem to be offering tidy, technical solutions to society’s most crucial problems.
It’s a shaggy, sprawling, charming book that never condescends to its reader or its subject matter. I found it particularly relevant at the time, given both the rise in concern over the influence algorithms play in our lives and the recent resurgence of astrology among young people on social media (which may have been a leading indicator of incipient fascism).
You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter (Harper, March 3, 2009)
Still, it would be wrong to allow a healthy dose of doubt and an appreciation of relativity to lead us to nihilism. It would be too easy to say that there’s no such thing as the truth. Or, perhaps, that the slippery nature of the truth prevents us from reaching a place of understanding.
Back in 2009, I had the pleasure of reviewing Christopher Potter’s You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe. If you were intrigued by Vaudo’s book, I would recommend checking this one out as well (or instead). It might also be a nice context setter if you’re thinking of taking on Labatut’s books and want to ground yourself in the material first. There’s a risk that some of what’s in here could be out of date—it is 16 years old, after all, but I suspect that’s mostly not the case.
Potter is not a scientist, he’s a journalist, and as such has a better sense of how to convey the complexities of astrophysics for a lay audience.
You Are Here unfolds along several dimensions, describing the sizes and scale of the universe to its horizon, the increasing smallness of its essential particles, and its birth and expansion over time. The book is not merely concerned with the big, galactic picture, however. Potter spends a lot of time exploring the progression of science, from its genesis in ancient philosophy to today’s modern scientific methods.
In a virtuosic chapter, he neatly explains the history of scientific thought from its earliest thinkers like Plato and Aristotle to contemporaries Hawking and Greene, with brief yet revealing synopses detailing their contributions to our understanding of the universe. Potter shows how each new theory built on previous ones, and how our present knowledge of our world is the result of constant proposition, experimentation, and reevaluation. He also charts the evolution of life on Earth, and follows humankind from its earliest known origins as it crisscrosses the globe and solidifies its dominion over it.
In a lot of ways, You Are Here strikes a comfortable middle ground between Vaudo and Labatut. It’s respectful of the history, well-written, and informative, while also impressing upon you the scope and profundity of the knowledge it contains.
In short, Potter knows how to take the truth, the factual truth, and tell a good story with it.
Michael Patrick Brady is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. His criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Millions, among others. His short fiction about aspiring ghosts, trivial psychics, and petty saboteurs has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, BULL, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Online, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ink In Thirds, and Uncharted. He is currently working on a novel. Find him at www.michaelpatrickbrady.com.
Keep an eye out for my review this weekend in the Wall Street Journal.
Why not put that at the beginning? Because it would break the spell? Just call it what it is, historical fiction. Putting it at the end, tucked away in the acknowledgements, makes it seem like you want people to conflate your fiction with the truth. Or that you think it wouldn’t hit as hard if people understand what you’re actually doing.
A 6 by 6 grid and no bishops. Big whoop.
Call it “Not OK Computer,” am I right? (Also, I prefer Amnesiac to Kid A, just saying.)
I am both pleased by and ashamed of the way Labatut sucked me into taking his books as reality, even despite the disclaimers. "This isn't the authentic von Neumann," I thought; I even wrote a substack about it which you could easily find if you felt it important. I didn't know vN (I was born the year he died) but I knew people who did and have read personal letters he wrote to those I knew. I didn't know Schrödinger but I know a lot about the technical aspects of his work to form a professional opinion about him.
But I also know enough about writing novels to recognize the importance of picking at the boundary between fiction and reality.
I reject Labatut's claim that the gods have disappeared. Today is Mars' day. In two days it will be Jove's. We learned about these gods so early in our lives that we think they are in our DNA like the number of eyes, we move around in their divinity as unaware as we are of the Earth's atmosphere.
You're wrong; Amnesiac is the second disc of the single album Kid Amnesiac, which Radiohead has finally admitted with its recent re-release/packaging. I've been saying it since they came out, and therefore am a Really Smart Guy (it's always a guy. Sigh).