As history's bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men ?" a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines ?" converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders. The other man had already won the Nobel Prize for work he had done around 15 years earlier and would soon top the Allies' most-wanted list for the work they suspected he had done in Germany's unsuccessful atomic weapons programme. But while Jorge Luis Borges knew nothing of the advances of quantum mechanics, and while Werner Heisenberg wouldn't have encountered the work of a man among whose books was one that sold a mere 37 copies on the other side of the world in Argentina, around the year 1942 they were each obsessed with the same question: how does language both enable and interfere with our grasp of reality?