A strange but incredibly interesting book. It tells short partial biographies of some of the most exceptional geniuses in history, always with the slat that extreme suffering or extreme willpower are what causes the epifinies that advance science.

Whether thats true or not I dont know but the stories are amazing. Grothendeick who revolutionised half of maths with an evntual goal of discovering the central truth of it, but then at forty suddely became so scared of what he might unleash by doing so that he renouced all of mathmatics and devoted himself souley to doing as much good as he could in the world (even if he wasnt padticulary good at achiving this).

And how people succumb to the black holes (literally in the case of Schwartzchild) in their work, succed in to the point of madness, unable to escape the singularity left after the destruction of the previously accepted fundamental truths. When we cease to understand the world.

Its really crazy than Grothendeick only died in 2014. And spent his last years trying to undo all his influence.

The book ends saying that the real biggest threat to humanity isnt some advance in physics, ai or global warming or whatever, its maths. Maths could give us a level of understanding of the universe too powerful for us.

I’m not so sure on the purpose of the chapters of Schrödinger and Heisenberg but they were interesting, even if mostly fiction. I wonder if the author made up that facts that both of them basically arrived at their results in a dream and had no way of justifying them apart from that they worked. Thats probably not true.

It is crazy that so many people we’re defeated by the fundamental confusingness of quantum. God does not play dice with the universe. The end of both Einstein and DeBroglie.

A reallly good book.