‘People say my book gave them a panic attack’: When We Cease to Understand the World author Benjamín Labatut

His page-turning books about quantum physics and game theory have given the Chilean writer a cult following - and won him famous fans from Stephen Fry to Bjork and Barack Obama

I know you're trying to skirt around it," says Benjamin Labatut when I put to him thathis books concern people of unworldly intelligence working on problems that are maximally deep, but the best way to sum it up is: Why am I interested in mad scientists?'" Fair play. There's no getting away from it: that's exactly what his richly satisfying, deeply researched books are about.

Both of Labatut's two books currently available in English - the International Booker-shortlisted WhenWe Cease to Understand the World (2020) and The Maniac, recently published in paperback - pivot around that moment in the early 20th century in which our dreams of a perfect rational understanding of the world were turned on their heads. This was when the deranging discoveries of quantum physics killed off the clockwork universe; and when Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem destroyed for good the positivist project tosupply a stable, logically unimpeachable foundation for therules of mathematics.