Book, When we stop understanding the world[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. In 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published articles proving one of the most important conjectures in number theory. When his proof was considered impossible to understand by the greatest experts in the field, Mochizuki ended up excluding himself from society, evoking the self-exile of another mathematician, the legendary Alexander Grothendieck. Was there some enigmatic connection between these two men? This is the starting point of "The Heart of the Heart", one of the narratives that Chilean Benjamín Labatut brought together in this book that would make him a worldwide sensation. Similar elements appear in other texts: scientists as brilliant as they are tormented pursue their ambitions at the cost of their physical and mental health, while the personal and historical consequences of their discoveries cross time and space. Based on real biographies and theories, but using fiction to produce aesthetic effects and associations of ideas, the author explores in his stories the intertwining between intimate life and scientific exploration. With a style in which we hear echoes of WG Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, the reader may feel that he is facing the skillful assembly of "a puzzle whose lid has been lost" — to take advantage of the metaphor with which Labatut describes the young Heisenberg playing with the matrices that will lead you to formulate quantum mechanics. Starring not only famous scientists such as Einstein and Schrödinger, but also lesser-known and equally fascinating figures, the book is a literary investigation into men who reached the "point of no return" of thought and revealed to us to some extent the "dark core" at the center of things."