A book that is both fiction and non-fiction, both wave and particle, both history and imagination, and somehow, something else entirely. Great mathematicians and physicists walk the pages—Haber, Heisenberg, Bohr, Grothendieck, Schrödinger, and more. Their lives are marked by great achievements, fame and shame, agony and lucidity, and a great many deaths—their own, of course, but also countless deaths that emerged from their science, atoms formed and split and wielded as swords. Among other things, this is a story about great men and the great downfalls they engender. Women appear infrequently in the pages, but one of them is instructive: a kind of specter, she becomes a surface for one of the scientists to project himself upon, but she lets those projections pass through her, as if his act of measurement did not have the power to pin her into place.