Love and Algorithms

I am all for serendipity call it destiny or fate but then with dating apps and all the social media sites, karmic energy is no longer limited to looking for The One IRL…. It is going to take time for some of us to get our head around to this innovation never mind that algorithms appear to know us better than we know ourselves.

As technology advances, families can be created via IVF , sperm and egg donation and surrogacy. Science has now made procreation possible with or without finding Mr or Ms Right and adoption is no longer the only way for an individual to become a parent. There are mating sites for wannabe parents to post their profiles and indicate their health and education. The unorthodox exercise does sound a tad transactional and calculating but elective co-parenting makes sense for those who cannot wait for The One to start a family.

Lucie Yi is Not a Romantic by Lauren Ho is a funny and fresh tale where the main character decides to take things in her hand when she wants to have a child of her own.

In Lucie Yi is Not a Romantic by Lauren Ho, Lucie Yi, thirty-seven, has ended a relationship and is focusing on her career working towards a partnership at a tax consultancy firm. She has been in New York for twenty months and will return home when the secondment ends. She feels that finding Mr Right is a myth but finding Mr Right good enough to have children with is the next best option.  She signs herself up on a platonic co-parenting website. She meets Collin Read, a software engineer who loves dancing hiking yoga and does sudoku and puzzles but he is lactose intolerant and is very allergic to nuts  ( he carries EpiPens with him all the time ).  Lucie is Singaporean and Collin is Malaysian but spending most of his life living in America. His mother is Japanese Scottish American and his dad is Malaysian Peranakan with a dash of Malay and Chinese living in Singapore.As Lucie and Collin become acquainted with one another, they quickly get down to brass tacks and come up with some ground rules. Lucie asks Collin about his thoughts on death penalty and euthanasia and is pleasantly surprised when they get talking on the phone. Admittedly in an arrangement such as this, the bar is set lower than when you are looking for a romantic partner. She knows where he stands on so many issues and it is odd that these are the kinds of questions one should ask one another in a romantic relationship. Can we sum up who we are by providing answers in a questionaire? I tend to think that often we are all too fluid and changeable, do we really know what we think? Can we trust the algorithms to decide on our matches?

As soon as Lucie and Collin have decided to take the leap, the process is set in motion. They decide to move back to Singapore to co-parent their child and thus the ride begins when they arrive home. Lucie meets Collin’s estranged dad and Lucie finds out more about Collin who seems laid back about everything else.

Collin meets Lucie’s parents who are very traditional. Ivy Chen and Yi Wei Liang find the whole situation totally unacceptable when Lucie is not planning to marry Collin. Although they do not quite approve of him, they feel that an illegitimate grandchild will bring shame to the family. To them it is about security and ‘face’ reasons and they reckon that all this will affect Lucie’s brother Anthony Yi who has political ambition. Enter her remorseful ex-fiancé who is bent on winning her back and together with her two bffs , Weina Ling ( a former investment banker now a stay-at-home mother of a five-year-old and newborn triplets ) and Sushila Mahmud aka Suzie ( divorced and best friend since primary school), you have the perfect rom-com that you want to sit back and read the book with a glass of wine or cocktail.

Lucie Yi is Not a Romantic by Lauren Ho is a story about taking a chance at love and knowing what you want and who you are. It is a fun read that you very much like to finish in one sitting. Lucie Yi is Not a Romantic is Lauren Ho’s second novel. Her debut, Last Tang Standing is another fun read.

Love Transcends

 

In The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz, Bee has a successful business repurposing wedding dresses and friends who love and support her. A mail gets misdirected to Bee’s inbox and the sender is Nick, a writer whose career has stalled after early promise and now his marriage is on the rocks. Nick has just ghost written a book for a client whom he thinks is avoiding payment. His viciously funny message that is entitled ‘ What the HELL is wrong with you?‘ and intended for his client ends up in Bee’s box. You would think the mail goes to spam, but Bee actually responds to tell him to double- check the recipient’s address. It does not stop there. Nick responds and then she reciprocates. When another Tinder date turns out to be a nightmarish experience for Bee, she finds comfort in exchanging texts with Nick via email. Perhaps it is easier to rant to a stranger online all your frustrations. Nick is suffering from low self esteem and to top that his wife Poll and his best pal have been carrying on behind him, things cannot be worse. Chance meet with Bee over the cyberspace certainly makes things look less bleak . But should they meet? Maybe they do not want to spoil things as the email exchange is going so well. With some support from Bee’s best friend and Nick’s stepson, they decide to meet. The meeting place is Euston station in London. Nick is from Leeds. That is when things get complicated. In Nick’s world there is no large clock at Euston Station. When they both arrive at Euston Station, Nick explains that he is in this Tweed suit, evidently looking out of place and when Bee does not see him, she thinks that she has been had. Bee decides to block Nick but she misses their exchange so she unblocks him.

The Impossible Us is narrated in two voices, Nick and Bee’s and partly in an epistolary style.

Here is an excerpt in Nick’s narratives.

‘ DESPERATION. HOPE. IN the weeks following what would eventually become known as Euston- Gate, I became overly familiar with those two weeks. I now understand why desperate people find religion, or end up believing in aliens or conspiracy theories. Because sometimes the rational answer doesn’t cut it. Sometimes you have to look outside the box. And my hope-desperation twofer had led me way outside the box, all the way to a Willow Green allotment in fact, where, God help me, I was walking to meet a bunch of people who even the most charitable among us would label “raging nut-job weirdos.“‘

So Nick finds a bunch of people who may have some answers why he and Bee could not meet. It turns out that they are from two different worlds. Both worlds are ‘poisoned with racism, sexism, social and gender inequalities, and capitalism, albeit with subtle differences ( due to the social stigma attached to being a sociopathic greedy bastard)‘ Nick’s world is greener while Bee’s world is technologically more advanced. Nick’s world has Universal Basic Income and Bee sums up his reality as “Quaker capitalism with a side order of socialism“. Both worlds have the Google and the Net but in Bee’s world, it is not subject to reams of privacy legislation. Nick’s world has Elective Euthanasia but does not have Tinder. David Bowie is present in both worlds except that when they compare notes about the albums, they are different. Both worlds have experienced pandemics and they both have Star Wars, Star Trek and the Marvel Universe.

Bee asks Nick:

<Can I come to your semi-utopian world, Nick? Wait, do you have Netflix? >

<Nope>

<Scratch that then>

Here is an excerpt from Bee’s narratives

‘THE WHOLE THING was bonkers, with a capital WTF, but in a weird way it made sense. The Red Flags, his sincerity ( which, deep down, I knew couldn’t have been faked) , the technical glitches that occurred whenever we tried to communicate via methods other than e-mail. Alternate reality and parallel universe theories were part of our DNA and pop culture; even I, a quantum-physics ignoramus, was aware of them. But bizarre as it all was ,it took me a surprisingly short amount of time to stop using the stipulation “if this IS what’s actually happening.” Because, I suppose, adaption and acceptance were also hardwired into our DNA. Nick was right:people needed answers. We needed answers, and this was the only one we had. And, as shallow as it sounds, my overriding emotion was relief at having him back. A missing piece restored in good order. ‘

Imagine two nearly identical world with some differences….

Bee asks Nick :

< Did you have 9/11, Nick>

<???>

<The Twin Towers blown up?>

< Fuck no. Bloody hell Bee>

< So no Iraq War, Afghanistan??ISIS?>

<No>

<Brexit?>

<You mean Biscuit?  No. We are fully in the eurozone>

No wonder Nick keeps mentioning euros.

Big Ben, London

The question is when you know that is your soul-mate, how far would you go for love?

Lotz is imaginative and original in that she makes her central characters go further by looking up the versions of each other in their respective sides of the world. In Nick’s world, there is Rebecca when in Bee’s world, there is Nicholas. With the Internet, it is not difficult to track down each other’s versions in the parallel world. When they locate each other’s version in their respective world, they make contact with their other versions and things get complicated. The whole story is full of twists and turns, it is hilarious and a fun ride. 

The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz is an excellent read for diehard romantics.

Brighton Railway station

Adulthood

 

Olive by Emma Gannon is a contemporary read that examines the choices that young women make in their lives. In Olive, thirty-three-year-old Olive Stone as a millennial feels strongly about not having a child of her own. She has no sign of ” twitching ovaries’ or fertility flutters, or random broodiness.”

As the editor-in-chief of .dot, an online platform, she writes this:

   ‘I hold babies and , sure, they ‘re cute, but I give them back and don’t feel any biological shifts or urges. I see pregnancy announcements online and press the heart button but feel zero jealousy. I picture myself twenty, thirty years into the future, with silver in my hair, walking on a beach with a partner, writing in the evenings with a glass of wine, and multiple nephews and nieces visiting me in my cosy home. There might be no children of my own in my future, but why should this cause me any worry? ‘

The fiction is narrated in Olive’s voice. It explores different variations on adulthood and motherhood. Olive tells her readers ‘ the decision to have kids might be one of the biggest choices we ever face, and we should be talking about this in all its complicated, nuanced depth.‘

In 2019, Olive breaks off a nine year relationship with Jacob whom she loves and adores. Jacob wants kids and her not wanting kids is a deal breaker. She is heartbroken but like all those who have been in love and then out of love, you go through a period where you mope and wonder if you will ever feel the same way again or resist the temptation to just rekindle the relationship that will only end in more heartaches and tears. Olive is terribly sad, crying and drinking booze a lot and leaving heaps of washing -up that needs doing. She feels like a woman made of ‘Play-Doh‘. She distracts herself ‘ by watching Netflix documentaries about climate change, serial killers, and how the world is totally fucked beyond repair.’ She watches old episodes of MTV Cribs on Youtube and even forces herself to have a haircut. But none of it helps. She badly wants to share her news with her close friends from college flat share days. She finds that she can no longer connect with her married friends whom they have gone through things together and vowed to be there for each other no matter what. For a start, they cannot hang out freely just like before. Bea is a mother of two, and she is naturally good at running a household, a planner and organizer. ‘In Bea’s book, you embrace the madness of life and stop trying to control everything by keeping your life clean and orderly‘. When Cecily gets pregnant, both Bea and Cec become close. Cecily used to be the friend whom Olive can count on when she wants to have a wild evening out but now she is an expectant mother who is trying to do everything right for her first child. Isla has been struggling for months in trying for a child through IVF . Olive cannot tell them how she is really feeling and the reason why she and Jacob have broken up.

‘ Everyone else seems to have exciting or important news, while my only update is that my relationship has come to an end.’

So Olive begins to weigh the pros and cons to have or not to have babies. She feels lonely and to her friends, she is not a grownup. Of course everyone of her friends is just too involved with their own trajectory based on the choices they have made. They each have expectations of how the others will be understanding and supportive of some of the big changes they are going through and be there for each other. Olive feels alienated and in standing by her own feelings of not wanting children of her own, she ends up looking like she is totally insensitive to women like Isla who is struggling to conceive.

Olive by Emma Gannon is primarily a story about becoming adults and friendship between four women who manage to move pass their differences and follow their own paths and make peace with whatever life throws at them. It is sweet and funny, a commendable and thought-provoking read about cross-roads and milestones in life. Gannon is a Sunday Times bestselling author, speaker, novelist and host of the No.1 careers podcast in the UK, Ctrl Alt Delete. She also writes a weekly newsletter called “The Hyphen’ and runs a book club, The Hyphen Book Club.

A Time Travel Story

 

The Door that led to Where by Sally Gardner is a young adult mystery novel about sixteen- year-old AJ Flynn who has to go back in time to make sense of the present. Flynn has only one GCSE, his future is looking far from rosy. He is not happy at home as his mother finds him a disappointment and is critical of him. He does not enjoy school for he feels that he is forced to learn subjects that he lacks interest in. He goes to the library after school to read the classics such as Dickens and that explains why he has scored A* for English Lit. His mother gets him an interview at a London law firm and he is offered a junior clerk position at the firm. His life is about to change as he starts working at Baldwin and Gray as a trainee clerk. One day at the firm, AJ  is asked to tidy up the archive and there he comes across an old key, mysteriously labelled with his name and date of birth 2nd October 1996. He thus becomes determined to find the door that fits the key. He meets an old professor who asks him to look for a lintel in an old wall. Based on a map found in a file, he finds himself walking through a waste ground that used to be a car park. He then begins an amazing journey to the streets of Clerkenwell in 1830, where the streets are replaced with cobbles and carts, and the law can be twisted to suit a villain’s means. Life in 1830 is tough but not unlike the present days.

In 1830, AJ and his friends, Slim and Leon quickly find that their own lives have much more value. They’ve gone from sad and hopeless youth statistics to young men with purpose – and they find themselves adjusting to life without smart phone and modern amenities. AJ is an avid reader and he is knowledgeable about what happens in history so he advise those in 1830 not to worry much about certain outbreak . AJ finds out that it was his grandfather, old Jobey who first went through the door and he discovered that one could profit handsomely by trading with the future. He took a partner , a Mr Samuel Dalton and started to break every rule.

‘There are rules ?’

‘Every game has its rules, Mr Jobey,’said Mr Stone.’And it is a rule of time travel that you do not do business with the future. It is forbidden.’

‘Who by?’ asked AJ.

‘By gravity, by the laws of physics.The future has, by tis very nature, to remain unwritten, always to be a blank page. When your grandfather handed the key to your father, Lucas, it was already too late. His fate and the fate of his family were sealed. And there lies the sorrow.’

-The Door that led to Where , Sally Gardner

AJ is told that his father was murdered and an innocent girl was sent to the gallows for killing the Jobey family. The story is fast paced and there are many characters as the story spans between 1830 and the present day. As the story progresses, there lies a crime only AJ and his friends can solve. The Door that led to Where is a delightful read. Its author, Sally Gardner is a multi-award-winning novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty-two languages. She lives in North London, an area that features in the story. Gardner‘s writing is described as genre-defying. She lives in North London, an area that features in the book. Thanks to the Internet, I understand that the author ‘grew up amongst the drama of London’s law courts, as both her parents were lawyers. Having been branded ‘unteachable’ by some and sent to various schools, Sally was eventually diagnosed at the age of twelve as being severely dyslexic. Sally is now an avid spokesperson for dyslexia; she sees it a gift, not a disability, and is passionately trying to change how dyslexics are perceived by society.’

click

London 31st December 2014

The Outsider

 As a rule, I am not a fan of ghost and fantasy stories but recently when I came across an interview conducted by Tom Pepperdine with Zen Cho about her writing process interview with Tom Pepperdine, I felt compelled to check out the writer’s latest novel, Black Water Sister,

Zen Cho has cleverly spun a story about supernatural forces by weaving together the family drama involving the protagonist’s present and the ghost of the past that is essentially her mother’s estranged relationship with her grandmother and uncle. The story is about Jessamyn Teoh and her family’s shenanigans. It begins with strange dreams that she starts having before she leaves the States and returns to Penang with her mother. Jess is a Harvard graduate and presently unemployed. She is a closet gay carrying on a clandestine long-distance relationship with Sharanya who is doing a doctorate in Singapore.

Nineteen years ago, Jess and her parents moved to America when she was a toddler and now that they have lost all their money, they are returning to Malaysia. Her father has already gone ahead and started the new job his brother-in-law has arranged for him. As Jess helps her mother pack away their belongings for their return, she starts hearing voices in her head. She subsequently learns that they are voices of her maternal grandmother who passed on the year before. Jess and her mother arrive in Penang with a few weeks to go before Lunar New Year. They have been invited to stay with her Kor Kor, her dad’s sister. Before returning to Penang, Jess has imagined that Kor Kor’s house will be quiet since her children are away but she is wrong as the house is perpetually full with visiting aunts or uncles or some young relatives. Amidst all the exchange and gossips amongst her aunts and uncles, Jess has to decipher the voices in her head and find out what her Ah Ma wants from her. She learns that Ah Ma, her late grandmother was the medium for a deity known as Black Water Sister who had died a tragic death. Her grandma has unfinished business and she needs to borrow Jess’s body to make mischief and forestall some new housing developments by a business magnate who has instigated a court action with a view to demolish the temple that houses Black Water Sister and various gods. Jess ends up being drawn into the world of spirits and sorcerers . There are superstitions and all things taboos that her family and relatives do not want to talk about. Family members get spooked when someone mentions that there is some spirit that is lingering around the house. They beat about the bush by giving different names and do not utter the word ‘ ghosts’ when they mean “ghosts” because spirits somehow cause unease amongst the aunties and uncles. For Jess, though her parents are not especially pious , their approach is to leave the gods alone, in the hope the gods will return the favour. Despite her Western acculturation, part of her is not a hundred percent sure about ghosts and the supernatural forces. She is confused and needs to get rid of her grandmother who has taken over her body. She is appalled when her Kor Kor tells her that she has been waking up at 2a.m. and spoke good Hokkien, a dialect that she normally speaks haltingly, liberally mixed with English. To top it all, she has no memory of her midnight conversation with her aunt. Through her Ah Ma’s ghost, she gets to know the maternal grandmother she never had a chance to know while her grandma was alive. It is a poignant yet hilarious story.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter One.

‘Jess smothered the thought. Dad was only in his fifties. Asia was rising. This move to Malaysia wasn’t a failure, for Jess or her parents. It was a new beginning.

Her subconscious wasn’t convinced. In the manic run-up to the move, she started having vivid dreams about Malaysia.

At least, she assumed it was Malaysia. The dreams were permeated by overpowering sunshine, an intense glare she had never seen anywhere else. The perpetual sticky heat and vivid greenery were familiar from visits there. But nothing else was familiar.

She was almost always engaged in some mundane task—scrubbing plates, hanging up faded laundry on a clothesline, washing herself with a bucket of gaspingly cold water from a tank. Sometimes there was a baby she was responsible for. It never seemed to stop crying. She found herself staring at its scrunched-up face with stony resentment, hating it but knowing there was nothing to be done.’

–Black Water Sister, Zen Cho

Her mother believes that if the moth flies into your house, you cannot chase or kill them because they are the spirit that passed on, the spirit of your ancestor.

Here is the excerpt on the conversation between mother and daughter when they come across a moth on the wall :

“ What’s what?” Jess followed Mom’s line of sight. There was a big brown moth on the wall, next to hte window. “Oh.”

Mom hated creepy-crawlies of all kinds, which was weird given she was the one who’d grown up in this bug-ridden climate.

Jess got up. ” I’ll get rid of it.”

” No, don’t need to do,” said Mom. ” Leave it alone.“

” It’s fine , Mom.” Jess riffled through the desk, looking for a sheet of paper to scoop up the moth with. ” I won’t kill it. I’ll let it out of the window.”

” No need. Better don’t touch,” Mom was saying when Dad poked his head around the door.

” What’s the matter? Why are you all quarrelling?”

” Not quarrelling lah,” said Mom.

“I’m going to get rid of this moth, but Mom wants to keep it as a mascot,” said Jess.

Mom rose to the bait, predictably.” What mascot? I’m just saying, this kind of thing, don’t need to do one.“

” Moth? What moth ? That moth? ” said Dad, though it wasn’t like there was more than one to choose from. ” Mom is right. Better don’t kacau. Don’t need to test.“

” Test what ? ” Jess started to say, when it clicked.” Wait. Is this a superstition?”

As far as Jess could tell, all Chinese superstitions were about either money or death, and the ones about death were nearly impossible to learn about because talking about death was taboo. Her parents were cagey enough that this had to be a death one.

” People say if the moth fly into your house, cannot chase or kill them, ” Mom said finally. ” They’re the spirit that passed on, the spirit of your ancestor.“

” Ah,” said Jess.

She looked at the moth. Maybe this was Ah Ma’s idea of closure.

– Black Water Sister, Zen Cho

Black Water Sister is a multi-layered story filled with suspense and dramas about retribution and injustice. It reminds me of the sword fighting and fantasy movies that my parents used to take us to watch except that the novel is set in contemporary setting. Its author has also included Sunwukong , the monkey god in the story. While I did grow up watching Wuxia movies and Journey to the West, they were not my favourite genre when come to films for entertainment value.

Zen Cho has been candid in capturing the behaviour of aunties and uncles and all the various colourful characters in the story. Her vivid descriptions of the fighting and the gods do bring the scenes to life. It is not an easy feat to coin a fantasy story that mixes the mundane and subject that relates to superstitions and faiths.

Paradoxes

When We Cease to Understand the World by Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut.  was written in Spanish  and translated by Adrian Nathan West. It is a work of fiction based on true events and made up of twentieth century scientists and mathematicians including  Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein,Erwin Schrödinger and Karl Schwarzschild . The story  is about their troubled lives and how in their quest to find answers to  questions of existence and the universe, they alienate friends and loved ones, and were driven to madness in their pursuits and how their genius make them suffer. While some of  their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better,  others pave the way to chaos and sometimes, even destruction. The book begins with the disturbing narratives on Prussian Blue  and about how it was first synthesized by a young alchemist, Johann Conrad Dippel who presented himself as a Pietist theologian, a philosopher, artist and doctor. Dippel was wicked and bound by no principles. He worked on countless experiments claiming to have discovered the Elixir of Life and it was Dippel’s elixir that would eventually produce blue that shines in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Cyanide was subsequently discovered  by stirring a pot of Prussian Blue with  a spoon coated in traces of sulphuric acid.  The other horrible account is about how in 1907, Fritz Haber invented modern-day nitrogen fertilizers and in 1915 he was also the first man who created the chlorine gas that caused mass destruction during the First World War.

In the story, on December 24, 1915, Albert Einstein received a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, a German astronomer and Mathematics who gave the world its first glimpse of the black hole. Through Labatut’s detailed narratives, Wiener Karl Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics is pitted against Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation. On October 24,1927, twenty- nine physicists attended the Fifth Solvay Conference at the Physiology Institute, an institute ‘built for the purpose of demonstrating, insofar as possible  the phenomenon of life should be explained by the physical laws that govern the universe, which we may know through observation and the objective study of the facts of the world.’ ‘Although the conference theme was “Electrons and Photons” , all present knew the true purpose was to analyse  quantum mechanics, which was casting doubt on the whole edifice upholding physics.’

During the conference, two accounts of quantum mechanics faced off. Schrödinger defended his waves and multidimensional theory followed by Heisenberg and his mentor, the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr presented their vision of quantum mechanics known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. They said that reality does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. ‘A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears. Before being measured,it has no attributes; prior to observation, it cannot even be conceived of .It exists in a specifc manner when it is detected by a specific instrument. Between one measurement and the next, there is no point in asking how it moves, what it is, or where it is located, Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist : it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.’

 Heisenberg was saying that ‘There simply existed no “real world” outside that science was capable of studying’. ‘They live in worlds of potentialities, Heisneberg explained ; they are not things, but possibilities. The transition from the “ possible” to the “real “ only occurred during the act of observation or measurement. There was, therefore, no independently existing quantum reality’.

The duel between Einstein and Bohr dominated the conference and, in the end, Einstein had to yield. Labatut writes :

‘ He had not found a single inconsistency in Bohr’s reasoning. He accepted defeat grudgingly, and condensed all his hatred of quantum mechanics ‘in a famous phrase by him :

“ God does not play dice with the universe !”  to which Bohr responded “ It’s not our place to tell Him how to run the world.” when he heard Einstein’s sniping remark.  Schrödinger also came to detest quantum mechanics.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a fascinating and disturbing read. Its title is appropriate for the theme that runs through the story. The narration is fast pace, partly fiction but  based on true events. The writer has woven together art, history and science and tells a story about the paradoxes about science, mathematics  and its discoveries with  some theories pitting against another. The world will continue to elude us.

I find the book mind expanding and simply brilliant even though all that blurb about theory of relativity  and black hole are lost on me.  I have zero knowledge about quantum mechanics and in school, I found physics  a painful subject and was hopeless at it. In the story ,there is such a wealth of information about physicists, mathematicians and about how they quest for answers about the physical world and in so doing their personal lives suffered.  The book is a blend between fiction and non-fiction, and the way the writer has written about these luminaries and their discoveries, you realise that there is just so much about the universe we cannot possible know. Things are not what you think they are and often they cannot be explained even with a scientific mind.

The author ends the book with the encounter and conversations with a night gardener who used to be a mathematician who now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He decided to quit his career as a mathematician because he realized that  ‘it was  mathematics- not nuclear weapon, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.‘

When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. It is a book that asks us to questions about our limitations in understanding the universe.

The book is best summed up by the author , Benjamin Labatut himself when he was asked this question: Could you summarize your book in two sentences?
‘ This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits.’

It is brilliant.