John Higgs Books

One of the strangest ideas of the twentieth century is that time is not the same for everyone. Before Einstein, most people lived within a Newtonian picture of the universe: space was fixed, time ticked forward evenly, and reality operated like a giant machine. Einstein’s theory of relativity shatte...

From Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

If relativity weakened certainty, quantum mechanics blew a hole through it. Early twentieth-century physicists expected matter to become clearer as they looked closer. Instead, they found a realm governed by probability, uncertainty, and paradox. Particles behaved like waves, observation influenced ...

From Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

Modern life became stranger the moment people stopped believing they fully understood themselves. Sigmund Freud’s central claim was unsettling: consciousness is only a small part of the mind, and our actions are shaped by desires, fears, memories, and conflicts that remain hidden from awareness. Eve...

From Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

When reality starts to feel unstable, art changes with it. Modernism was not simply a new aesthetic style; it was a response to a world that no longer seemed coherent, orderly, or whole. Traditional realism assumed that the world could be represented clearly and consistently. Modernist artists, writ...

From Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century’s greatest trauma was not just the scale of its violence, but the fact that advanced civilization produced it. The First and Second World Wars exposed a devastating contradiction at the heart of modernity. Industrial progress, scientific expertise, and bureaucratic efficiency h...

From Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

After so many certainties collapsed, postmodernism asked a dangerous but liberating question: what if the big stories we live by are not universal truths, but constructions? Nations, ideologies, religions, scientific objectivity, even personal identity came under renewed scrutiny. Postmodern thinker...

From Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century