When We Cease to Understand the World

Review

I really enjoyed reading 'Prussian Blue', which felt taut and coherent; the rest of the book felt like it spiraled out into something more feverish and less understandable.

According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. Those hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg's discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself.