When We Cease to Understand the World

Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?

“If researchers want to apprehend my work, they must first deactivate the thought patterns that they have installed in their brains and taken for granted for so many years,” Mochizuki wrote on his blog.

In the last letter he sent to his wife from Russia, written the same day he chose to share his discovery with Einstein, Schwarzschild complains of something strange that has begun to grow inside him: “I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”
Soon afterwards, that shadow invaded his body.

He spent nine months there, consumed by hatred, humiliated by the conditions the victorious parties had imposed on his adopted country, and feeling betrayed by the cowardice of the generals, who had surrendered rather than fighting to the last man.

the man who pulled bread from air