How long does it take to read When We Cease to Understand the World?
Benjamín Labatut, Adrian Nathan West
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, Adrian Nathan West takes about 3 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 30 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2019. 191 pages, about 52,525 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 50 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 11 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Subjects: Fiction, business, science, mathmatics, Scientists
