Strašlivá závrať – Labatut Benjamín (2022)

God does not play dice with the universe, declared Albert Einstein. To which Benjamin Labatut would respond that God may not, but the devil does. "The Terrible Vertigo" is a non-fiction novel about scientists who made groundbreaking discoveries in their fields—Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others—but reached the limits of human understanding and, for the first time in history, gave humanity the power to destroy itself. For example, German chemist Fritz Haber discovered artificial fertilizers that saved humanity from famine. However, he also invented the chemical weapon mustard gas, which killed thousands of soldiers in the trenches of World War I, driving his wife to suicide, which she committed before his eyes. Similarly, the atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were not split by the skilled hands of generals, but by groups of physicists armed with a handful of equations. Benjamin Labatut's dramatic story about the defining moments in the history of science throws us into the exciting territory between fact and fiction, progress and ruin, genius and madness, and confronts us with the question of whether science helps us understand the world better or, on the contrary, makes us lose it. He was nominated for the final of the International Booker Prize for his book in 2021.