Labatut: what are the unintended consequences of scientific progress?

Contemporary Chilean author born in the Netherlands Benjamin Labatut has written one of former President Obama's favorite books read in 2023. Curious what moved Obama so much? Let's discuss morality of scientific discovery and the personal price that such progress exacts from the researcher in a beautiful book that straddles non-fiction and fiction. If you read (or attempted at least!) Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, we can link discuss whether these people fit his concept of idolatry in the sciences or the better goal of contemplation in the sciences, and whether society should be measured by how much it successfully supports such individuals.
**Placeholder date subject to change...once date is set, then RSVPs will be opened two weeks in advance **
original Spanish: Un Verdor Terrible
English: When We Cease to Understand the World
a German translation: Das Blinde Licht: Irrfahrten des Wissenschafts,
184 pages

Excerpted from Goodreads:
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.

Let the author himself describe his book, and let's see if we agree:

In 2020, I published a book called When We Cease to Understand the World, in which I followed some of the threads that form the network of associations, ideas and discoveries that gave rise to modern chemistry, physics and mathematics, because these disciplines—along with the sudden explosion in communications, biology and computing—form the basis of our current cosmovision...It’s a book composed of an essay (which is not chemically pure), two stories that try not to be stories, and a novella.” quoted from "The Elementary Particles of Benjamin Labatut" by Pedro Pablo Guerrero https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2022/02/the-elementary-particles-of-benjamin-labatut/