Un verdor terrible

The narratives included in this unique and fascinating book have a common thread that intertwines them: science, with its searches, attempts, experiments and hypotheses, and the changes that -for better and for worse- it introduces in the world and in our vision of he. Through these pages parade real discoveries that form a long disturbing chain: the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian blue, created in the 18th century thanks to an alchemist who sought the Elixir of Life through cruel experiments on living animals, becomes the origin of hydrogen cyanide, a deadly gas that the German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber, father of chemical warfare, used to make the pesticide Zyklon, without knowing that the Nazis would end up using it in the death camps to murder members of his own family . We also witness the mathematical explorations of Alexander Grothendieck, which led him to mystical delusion, social isolation and madness; to the letter sent to Einstein by a dying friend from the trenches of World War I, with the solution of the equations of relativity and the first omen of black holes; and to the struggle between the two founders of quantum mechanics - Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg - that generated the uncertainty principle and the famous answer that Einstein shouted to Niels Bohr: "God does not play dice with the universe!" Literature explores science, science becomes literature. Benjamín Labatut has written an unclassifiable and powerfully seductive book that talks about random discoveries, theories bordering on madness, alchemical searches for knowledge and exploring the limits of the unknown.