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Summary
Summary
A few million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and began to stand upright, freeing our hands to create tools and our minds to grapple with the world around us.
Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, he presents a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today's technological world.
Along the way he explores the cultural conditions that influenced scientific thought through the ages and the colorful personalities of some of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers: Galileo, who preferred painting and poetry to medicine and dropped out of university; Isaac Newton, who stuck needlelike bodkins into his eyes to better understand changes in light and col∨ and Antoine Lavoisier, who drank nothing but milk for two weeks to examine its effects on his body. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and many lesser-known but equally brilliant minds also populate these pages, each of their stories showing how much of human achievement can be attributed to the stubborn pursuit of simple questions (why? how?), bravely asked.
The Upright Thinkers is a book for science lovers and for anyone interested in creative thinking and in our ongoing quest to understand our world. At once deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author's trademark wit, this insightful work is a stunning tribute to humanity's intellectual curiosity.
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mlodinow (Subliminal), a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, opens his powerful new book with a story about his father, who as a starving prisoner at Buchenwald once traded his bread for the answer to a riddle. He writes that upon hearing his father's story, he "realized then that search for knowledge is the most human of all our desires." That is the recurring theme as Mlodinow follows scientific thought from its birth in prehistoric man to its blossoming in Aristotle, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein, and beyond. He discusses the intransigence of belief in a natural world ruled by gods before Aristotle and the subsequent intransigence of belief in a natural world ruled by too many erroneous Aristotelean precepts. He notes the suffering that can accompany the pursuit of knowledge-such as that of Galileo-as well as the enormous, wordless satisfaction. Breathing new life into science history, he frames narratives of great thinkers with serial scenes of his father's great courage and curiosity, despite only having a seventh-grade education. Mlodinow's point has been made before, but rarely so well: the quality that best distinguishes-and honors-humankind is not an ability to answer questions, but that "after millennia of effort," nothing stops us from asking them. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Mlodinow, Stephen Hawking's sometime coauthor (A Briefer History of Time, 2005; The Grand Design, 2010) and fellow physicist, is a whiz of a popular-science writer, as this amazingly compact yet satisfying history of technical and scientific discovery attests. Spanning from Homo habilis noticing that certain stones could be split to make scraping blades to the questions of physics, chemistry, and biology that remain to be either answered or retired, the book's scope is breathtaking, though its pace never seems so. Attending to the real people involved in the story he tells, and gifted with a knack for inserting a personal anecdote, a biographical tidbit, or a laugh line just when one is needed, Mlodinow never bores or exhausts. His structuring of the book is also exemplary. It's in three sections, the first ranging from H. habilis to Aristotle and the formalization of reason, the second from Renaissance cosmology to Darwin, and the third from Planck's and Einstein's invention of the quantum onward. Amateur science mavens couldn't ask for a better brief, introductory text.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Two books consider memorable shifts in the course of science and how to inspire them. THE UPRIGHT THINKERS The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos By Leonard Mlodinow Read by the author 12.5 hours. Random House Audio. UNSTOPPABLE Harnessing Science to Change the World By Bill Nye Read by the author 11.5 hours. Macmillan Audio. WHEN YOU LOOK at a graph plotting information over time, perhaps one in this very publication, you are probably comfortable reading it. The x-axis represents time. The y-axis represents whatever you're measuring: votes for Bernie, number of 3-point shots Steph Curry has made each game this year, amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You understand how to find a value over a time, and get that the steepness of the line between two points represents how quickly that variable increased. People tend to think of their comprehension of graphs as intuitive, but it was, in fact, invented, in large part by Isaac Newton, who crafted a fundamentally new way of thinking about plotting and interpreting data. And, in turn, he changed not just how newspapers graph election results, but also how much of science and mathematics was done. It is the sort of moment chronicled in Leonard Mlodinow's new book, "The Upright Thinkers : The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos," and the kind Bill Nye hopes to catalyze with "Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World." Moments are those instances when scientific inquiry, curiosity and innovation alter how we see and interact with the world. Mlodinow offers a bird's-eye view of key moments in scientific history, while Nye tries to spark a moment himself - to build a world that better deals with climate change. As readers of their work, the two differ quite a bit. Nye is a performer. His audiobook is easy to listen to, especially if you grew up with the children's television program "Bill Nye the Science Guy," in which case his voice will be downright familiar. Mlodinow, while a talented public speaker, would have done better to have someone else narrate the book. Reading from a script, even his own, seemed like a chore for him, and I found his cadence awkward and difficult to follow. But both books share a worldview: Humans possess an incredible set of traits that make them not just able to manipulate the world, but also motivated to do so. Mlodinow provides proof through the history of science; Nye through the history of human impact on the climate. If you were to listen to Mlodinow's book first and Nye's second you would get a crash course in how science and technology have completely altered humans and the planet both for good and for ill, and what we can do about it. "The Upright Thinkers" is littered with snappy anecdotes. The one about Newton sticking a "needlelike bodkin" in his eye to figure out how we perceive color. The one about Antoine Lavoisier drinking only milk for weeks to see what would happen. The one about Charles Darwin being told to write about pigeons instead, because everybody loves pigeons. If you're acquainted with the basic history of science, these might be well known to you. Mlodinow's aim is not to uncover any new insights but rather to suss out what makes the greats so great. With each story he highlights the secrets of their success: The thinkers he profiles are stubborn, curious, persistent and dogged (and male). Are you surprised? Probably not. This is where both books stumble. They recycle well-known material - say, the fact that climate change is pernicious and that there are engineering solutions at hand (Nye) - and draw on surface-level history and biography (Mlodinow). Alone, neither focus would justify a new book - and it seems that the authors know this. So, Nye spends a good chunk of his book talking about the setup of his extremely energy-efficient home, and being the engineer that he regularly reminds us that he is, he goes into elaborate detail when describing how he made hot water come out of his tap immediately, so he wouldn't have to wait for the water to warm as it ran. Mlodinow tenuously connects his family history, including his father's imprisonment in Buchenwald, to tales of scientific struggle and perseverance. Some of these stories are relevant and interesting. Other times, they feel forced, as if both authors knew that without a personal touch, their books would read like any other general primer on climate change or great men in science. I would read a book about how Mlodinow's family history shaped how he thinks about science. I would read a book about Bill Nye's house, and how he fiddled with everything to be more sustainable. I don't need a grand pretense about the nature of scientific inquiry or the vast challenges of climate change to make me interested in those things. The irony here is that both men write about the power of curiosity, about how the people who really change the world are pursuing obsessions indifferent to dreams of fame - but, strangely, both tried to write big, "important" books instead of lingering on their personal passions. The authors reveal how science has altered the planet both for good and for ill. ROSE EVELETH is a science columnist for BBC Future and the producer and host of the podcast Flash Forward.
Kirkus Review
A selective, guided tour of the human accumulation of knowledge from American physicist and former CalTech instructor Mlodinow (Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, 2012, etc.).In this smooth celebration of the human project, the author places a decided emphasis on its cerebral aspects: "The thirst for knowledge is the most human of all our desires." If at times Mlodinow drifts into hubris"we have shaped our environment to our needs, rather than allowing our environment to shapeor defeatus"it can be excused as a byproduct of his enthusiasm, the thrill of deciphering nature's puzzle and appreciating the striking characters who pioneered scientific discoveries. It is an endlessly fascinating story, this ineluctable quest that required getting out of the head's comfort zone and accepting change, and Mlodinow's explanations of often perplexing thinking are easy to digest. He throws out ideas and theories that are consistently thought-provokinge.g., "Animal brains first evolved for the most primal of reasons: to better enable motion." The author divides the book into three sections: the development of the human mind, touching down at critical junctures; the revolutionary entrance of the hard sciences; and quantum physics, developed thanks to the "brainpower in Central Europe," which Mlodinow fittingly introduces via Tom Stoppard ("It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong"). Though the book has a snug cohesiveness, the author clearly enjoys his role as storyteller, introducing entertaining, illuminating asidese.g., Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, "had a huge belly," because she was primarily vegetarian; and "fortunately for science, in the Arab world the ruling class did find value in Greek learning." Mlodinow also reacquaints readers with significant characters, from Galileo to Planck, who made the incomprehensible comprehensible.A breathtaking survey of the human mind exponentially accelerating the accumulation of knowledge, from pratfalls to ventures beyond the veil. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In what is essentially a collection of brief biographies of notable scientists and philosophers, Mlodinow (Subliminal) traces the development of human ideas of the structure and functioning of the universe from Aristotle to Heisenberg. Arguing that progress often comes from iconoclastic minds and personalities willing to ask unconventional questions, he focuses on the social surroundings and temperaments of these pioneers, noting, for example, Sir Isaac Newton's misanthropy and Dmitri Mendeleev's sloven-liness. More broadly, he suggests that part of what makes us human is our relentless inquisitiveness. The narration, performed by the author himself, is halting and sometimes makes for uncomfortable listening. VERDICT While the book is informative and occasionally entertaining, there is little here that is original aside from personal stories of the author's father's hardships in Nazi Germany. Others, notably Daniel Boorstin (The Discoverers), have done better work in the history of science. Only for those with a casual interest in the history of science.-Forrest Link, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Our Drive to Know My father once told me of an emaciated fellow inmate in the Buchenwald concentration camp who had been educated in mathematics. You can tell something about people from what comes to mind when they hear the term "pi." To the "mathematician" it was the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Had I asked my father, who had but a seventh-grade education, he would have said it was a circle of crust filled with apples. One day, despite that gulf between them, the mathematician inmate gave my father a math puzzle to solve. My father thought about it for a few days but could not master it. When he saw the inmate again, he asked him for the solution. The man wouldn't say, telling my father he must discover it for himself. Sometime later, my father again spoke to the man, but the man held on to his secret as if it were a hunk of gold. My father tried to ignore his curiosity, but he couldn't. Amid the stench and death around him, he became obsessed with knowing the answer. Eventually the other inmate offered my father a deal--he would reveal the puzzle's solution if my father would hand over his crust of bread. I don't know what my father weighed at the time, but when the American forces liberated him, he weighed eighty-five pounds. Still, my father's need to know was so powerful that he parted with his bread in exchange for the answer. I was in my late teens when my father recounted that episode, and it made a huge impact on me. My father's family was gone, his possessions confiscated, his body starved, withered, and beaten. The Nazis had stripped him of everything palpable, yet his drive to think and reason and know survived. He was imprisoned, but his mind was free to roam, and it did. I realized then that the search for knowledge is the most human of all our desires, and that, different as our circumstances were, my own passion for understanding the world was driven by the same instinct as my father's. As I went on to study science in college and after, my father would question me not so much about the technicalities of what I was learning, but about the underlying meaning--where the theories came from, why I felt they were beautiful, and what they said about us as human beings. This book, written decades later, is my attempt, finally, to answer those questions. *** A few million years ago, we humans began to stand upright, altering our muscles and skeletons so that we could walk in an erect posture, which freed our hands to probe and manipulate the objects around us and extended the range of our gaze so that we could explore the far distance. But as we raised our stance, so too did our minds rise above those of other animals, allowing us to explore the world not just through eyesight but with our thoughts. We stand upright, but above all, we are thinkers. The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we've achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is nature. An ancient, given a microwave oven to heat his auroch meat, might have theorized that inside it was an army of hardworking, pea-size gods who built miniature bonfires under the food, then miraculously disappeared when the door was opened. But just as miraculous is the truth--that a handful of simple and inviolable abstract laws account for everything in our universe, from the workings of that microwave to the natural wonders of the world around us. As our understanding of the natural world evolved, we progressed from perceiving the tides as being governed by a goddess to understanding them as the result of the gravitational pull of the moon, and we graduated from thinking of the stars as gods floating in the heavens to identifying them as nuclear furnaces that send photons our way. Today we understand the inner workings of our sun, a hundred million miles away, and the structure of an atom more than a billion times smaller than ourselves. That we have been able to decode these and other natural phenomena is not just a marvel. It also makes a gripping tale, and an epic one. Some time ago, I spent a season on the writing staff of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. At my first story meeting there, at a table populated by all the show's other writers and producers, I pitched an idea for an episode that excited me because it involved the real astrophysics of solar wind. All eyes were focused on me, the new guy, the physicist in their midst, as I enthusiastically detailed my idea, and the science behind it. When I was done--the pitch had taken less than a minute--I looked with great pride and satisfaction at my boss, a gruff, middle-aged producer who had once been an NYPD homicide detective. He stared at me for a moment, his face strangely unreadable, and then he said with great force, "Shut up, you f--king egghead!" When I got over my embarrassment, I realized that what he was so succinctly telling me was that they had hired me for my storytelling abilities, not to conduct an extension school class on the physics of stars. His point was well taken, and I have let it guide my writing ever since. (His other memorable suggestion: if you ever sense that you are going to be fired, turn down the heat on your swimming pool.) In the wrong hands, science can be famously boring. But the story of what we know and how we know it isn't boring at all. It is supremely exciting. Full of episodes of discovery that are no less compelling than a Star Trek episode or our first trip to the moon, it is peopled by characters as passionate and quirky as those we know from art and music and literature, seekers whose insatiable curiosity took our species from its origins on the African savanna to the society we live in today. How did they do that? How did we go from a species that had barely learned to walk upright and lived off whatever nuts and berries and roots we could harvest with our bare hands to one that flies airplanes, sends messages instantly around the globe, and re-creates in enormous laboratories the conditions of the early universe? That is the story I want to tell, for to know it is to understand your heritage as a human being. Excerpted from The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Part I The Upright Thinkers | |
1 Our Drive to Know | p. 3 |
A starving man's hunger for knowledge | |
The human odyssey of discovery | |
2 Curiosity | p. 10 |
Lizards don't ask questions | |
From Handy Man to Wise, Wise Man | |
What infants ask but chimps don't | |
3 Culture | p. 24 |
Humanity's first church | |
Knowledge, ideas, and values go viral | |
Human and primate culture | |
4 Civilization | p. 39 |
From the savanna to the city | |
How the charms and headaches of neighbors led to the new arts of writing and arithmetic | |
The invention of law, from peasant (Don't vomit in streams) to planet (Don't stray from your orbit) | |
5 Reason | p. 61 |
Bad crops and angry gods | |
A new framework for looking at the world | |
The mystery of change and the tyranny of common sense | |
Aristotle, the one-man Wikipedia | |
Part II The Sciences | |
6 A New Way to Reason | p. 85 |
Trusting your eyes over your ancestors | |
Castrated boars and universal laws of motion | |
The tactless Professor Galileo | |
7 The Mechanical Universe | p. 114 |
The good, the bad, and the ugly: Isaac Newton | |
The bet that turned Newton from alchemy to authoring the greatest scientific treatise ever written | |
The force of Newtonian thinking | |
8 What Things Are Made Of | p. 148 |
From embalming to alchemy | |
The similarities between burning and breathing | |
Lavoisier loses his head | |
Mendeleev and his periodic table | |
9 The Animate World | p. 183 |
Cells and the complexity of life | |
A recipe for making mice and the revolution of the microscope | |
Tragedy, illness, and Darwin's secret research | |
Part III Beyond the Human Senses | |
10 The Limits of "Hum-an Experience | p. 215 |
The billion billion tiny universes in a drop of water | |
Cracks in the Newtonian worldview | |
Accepting an unseeable reality | |
Planck and Einstein invent the quantum | |
11 The Invisible Realm | p. 247 |
The insights of a dreamer | |
The crazy ideas of a pale and modest young man | |
The early quantum laws, "awful nonsense, bordering on fraud" | |
12 The Quantum Revolution | p. 264 |
Heisenberg's new physics | |
The bizarre reality of the quantum universe | |
The empowering and humbling legacy of a new science | |
Epilogue | p. 293 |
The advance of human understanding as a succession of fantasies | |
The importance of critical and innovative thinking | |
Where we are and where we are going | |
Acknowledgments | p. 299 |
Notes | p. 301 |
Index | p. 321 |