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The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos Paperback – Illustrated, April 19, 2016
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Deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark humor and insight, The Upright Thinkers is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity and an important book for any reader with an interest in the scientific issues of our day.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateApril 19, 2016
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100345804430
- ISBN-13978-0345804433
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Review
“An entrancing tale of scientific history. . . . Mlodinow provides many cultural touchstones and tells personal stories, both poignant and amusing, about his experiences as a theoretical physicist to draw us even closer to the history.” —The Washington Post
“Mlodinow is an engaging narrator who leavens the proceedings with a mischievous wit.” —The Wall Street Journal
“An inspiring, exciting exploration of how our very inquisitive species has attempted to comprehend the cosmos.” —The American Scholar
“An audacious encapsulation of our species’ trek from savannah to city.” —Nature
“The Upright Thinkers playfully tracks the evolution of man’s understanding of the world over millions of years. . . . An accessible and engaging read that brings science’s brilliant minds to life.” —Financial Times (London)
“Mlodinow’s thesis on the virtues of tenacity is paired with fascinating anecdotes to trot out at the next dinner party. Upright Thinkers synthesizes evolution, archeology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, a spot of poetry, and several character sketches, deftly capturing a handful of the oddballs who changed the course of human events to create a breezy overview of the history of the human brain—specifically, how its propensity to ask bold questions first got us to bang rocks together into tools and then sent us on a quest to suss out the nature of reality itself.” —LA Weekly
“Powerful. . . . Breath[es] new life into science history. [Mlodinow] frames narratives of great thinkers with serial scenes of his father’s great courage and curiosity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Endlessly fascinating . . . consistently thought-provoking. . . . A selective, guided tour of the human accumulation of knowledge . . . [and] the striking characters who pioneered scientific discoveries. . . . A breathtaking survey.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A] bracing work of scientific history. . . . Don’t worry if quantum physics and the theory of relativity leave you quaking. . . . Mlodinow knows how to talk to the science-challenged.” —Library Journal
“[An] amazingly compact yet satisfying history. . . . [Mlodinow] is a whiz of a popular-science writer. . . . Amateur science mavens couldn’t ask for a better brief, introductory text.” —Booklist
“How did we move so rapidly from caves to cars, from the Savannah to skyscrapers, from walking on two legs to bounding on the Moon? Follow Mlodinow on an astonishing tour of our species’ journey; with each new stop, you'll discover how our unceasing progress is driven by something very special about human brains: our unslakable thirst for knowledge.” —David Eagleman, PhD, Neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“Mlodinow vividly traces the revolutions in thought and culture that define our civilization and, as a bonus, presents a stimulating overview of the history and majestic sweep of modern science.” —V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human
“An enjoyable and readable introduction to the history of western science, beginning with the first stone tools and ending in the era of quantum physics. Mlodinow takes us on a tour of some of the high points of scientific discovery from Egyptian and Mesopotamian mathematics, to Pythagoras and Aristotle, to the classical era of Galileo and Newton, and finally to the strange worlds of Einsteinian relativity and the uncertainty principle, which taught us how to study worlds beyond the reach of our everyday senses.” —David Christian, co-author of Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, and professor, Macquarie University, Sydney
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reprint edition (April 19, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345804430
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345804433
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #997,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,066 in Scientist Biographies
- #3,386 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #7,459 in Physics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Leonard Mlodinow was born in Chicago, Illinois, received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and is the author of five best-sellers. His book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives was a New York Times Bestseller, Editor's Choice, and Notable Book of the Year, and was short-listed for the Royal Society book award. His book Subliminal won the PEN/Wilson award for literary science writing. His other books include two co-authored with physicist Stephen Hawking -- A Briefer History of Time, and The Grand Design. In addition to his books and research articles, he has taught at Caltech, written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Forbes magazine, among other publications, and for television series such as McGyver and Star Trek: the Next Generation. www.leonardmlodinow.com
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Newton, as Mlodinow notes “in passing” was a self serving leader of The Royal Society and, in fact, denied Leibniz in his attempt to make appearances before that august group.
“The Upright Thinkers" is an enjoyable tour through the history of science. Best-selling author and a physicist, Leonard Mlodinow takes the reader on a fun journey that begins with the evolution of the human brain and ends with our excursion into quantum mechanics. This excellent 352-page book is divided into the following three majors parts: I. The Upright Thinkers, II. The Sciences, and III. Beyond the Human Senses.
Positives:
1. A well-written, high-quality effort.
2. Enjoyable and accessible book for the masses. Mlodinow’s engaging style is warm and inviting.
3. An excellent topic, a journey through science history. “This book is an effort to describe the development of science in that spirit—as an intellectual as well as a culturally determined enterprise, whose ideas can best be understood by an examination of the personal, psychological, historical, and social situations that molded them.”
4. Good format, the book is broken out into three time periods: millions of years ago with the evolution of our brains, centuries ago to the hard sciences, and finally decades ago to the new realm of existence known as quantum physics.
5. The fascinating look at the evolution of our brains. “No one knows exactly how our ancestors’ brains were organized into functional components, but even in the modern human brain, far more than half the neurons are devoted to motor control and the five senses. That part of our brain that sets us apart from “lower” animals, on the other hand, is relatively small, and was late in coming.”
6. A tour of major discoveries. “And so it happened that roughly two million years ago, a Homo habilis Einstein, or a Madame Curie, or—perhaps more likely—several ancient geniuses working independently of one another, made humankind’s first momentous discovery: if you smash one stone into another at an oblique angle, you can flake off a sharp, knife-edged shard of rock.”
7. Fun facts spruced throughout the book. “…brains, which account for only about 2 percent of our body weight, consume about 20 percent of our calorie intake.”
8. A look at culture and related topics. “‘Culture’ is defined as behavior, knowledge, ideas, and values that you acquire from those who live around you, and it is different in different places.”
9. The first cities of our species. “Perhaps the most prominent of those cities, and an important force in the trend toward urbanization, was the great walled city of Uruk, in what is today southeastern Iraq, near the city of Basra.”
10. The interaction between religion and state. “Mesopotamians did not make the distinction we do between church and state—in Mesopotamia, they were inseparable.” “And so religion became not just the belief system that held society together, but the executive power that enforced rules. What’s more, due to the fear of the gods, religion was a useful tool in motivating obedience.”
11. Find out when and where the first written word occurred. The evolution of language and mathematics.
12. A look at the origins of law. “That set of human civil and criminal laws is called the Code of Hammurabi. It is named for the reigning Babylonian king, whom the great god Marduk commanded to ‘bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and evildoers.’” “The Code of Hammurabi was issued about a year before Hammurabi’s death, in 1750 B.C.”
13. A look at a new rational approach to knowledge. “But the greatest aspect of the Greek culture that Alexander brought with him had nothing to do with arts or administration. It was what he had learned firsthand from Aristotle: a new, rational approach to the struggle to know our world, a magnificent turning point in the history of human ideas. And Aristotle himself was building on the ideas of several generations’ worth of scientists and philosophers who had begun to challenge the old verities about the universe.”
14. The great Isaac Newton, “In fact, one might say that Isaac Newton’s central contribution in creating physics as we know it today was his invention of a unified mathematical approach that could be used to describe all change, whatever its nature.”
15. Scientific progress. “That characteristic of Aristotle’s analysis—his search for purpose—had a huge influence on later human thought. It would endear him to many Christian philosophers through the ages, but it impeded scientific progress for nearly two thousand years, for it was completely incompatible with the powerful principles of science that guide our research today. When two billiard balls collide, the laws that were first set forth by Newton—not a grand underlying purpose—determine what happens next.”
16. The Renaissance. “It was the inventors and engineers who transformed European society and culture in late medieval Europe, a period concurrent with the first stirrings of the Renaissance, which spanned roughly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.”
17. The industrial revolution. “The direct results of the collaborations of science and industry include the steam engine, advances in the harnessing of water power for use in factories, the development of machine tools, and, later, the appearance of railroads, the telegraph and the telephone, electricity, and the lightbulb.”
18. A look at the development and discovery of scientific laws. “Lavoisier later turned his observations into one of the most famous laws in science, the law of conservation of mass: the total mass of products produced in a chemical reaction must be the same as the mass of the initial reactants. This was perhaps the greatest milestone in the journey from alchemy to modern chemistry: the identification of chemical change as the combining and recombining of elements.”
19. Scientific pioneers and much more.
20. The quantum world.
21. Notes included.
Negatives:
1. One of the most difficult challenges of writing such an ambitious book is keeping an even flow. The book is a bit uneven, spending much more time in some areas while less in others.
2. Limited number of illustrations and diagrams that would have complemented the excellent narrative.
3. Surprisingly, very little on the cosmos.
4. Some good scientific tidbits but not as much as expected.
5. No formal bibliography.
6. I’m a big fan of Mlodinow but let’s face it this very good book does not live up to his superior Subliminal.
In summary, I enjoyed this book. Mlodinow is a great author that brings complex scientific topics to the masses. He succeeds in providing the public with a fun journey of the history of science. I look forward to more books like this. I recommend it!
Further recommendations: “"The Grand Design" and "War of the Worldviews: Science Vs. Spirituality" coauthored by this same author were excellent, “Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth” by Jim Baggott, “Spectrums” by David Blatner, “The Elegant Universe” and “Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene, “A Universe From Nothing” by Lawrence M. Krauss, “About Time” by Adam Frank, “Higgs Discovery” and “Warped Passages” by Lisa Randall, “The Quantum Universe” by Brian Cox, “The Blind Spot” by William Byers, and “The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning” and “God and the Atom” by Victor Stenger.
Top reviews from other countries
The book goes through a well developed balanced approach through are history of thinkers and what they educated us with.
We as humans are always trying to unravel the mysteries of this universe whether on a cosmic scale or on the tinniest smallest quantum scale. This book dies affect your thought and does bring important information out in the open to help analyze this complicated unraveled world
期待した通り、約400年前に類人猿と袂を分けてから直立して知的疑問を思索探究する人間の歩みが人間臭いエピソードも交えて3部に分けて興味深く語られています。
第一部として、旧人類からの人間特有の進化による脳の肥大化や幼児期からの因果性知覚から解き起こし、新石器時代における狩猟遊牧生活者の定住と精神性の成長、ミレトス、ヘレニズム文化における自然哲学者の活躍が前段として丁寧に説明されています。
次に第二部として、11世紀のスペインのレコンキスタ後のアラブの科学書の影響や、ボローニア大学をはじめとする欧州の大学設立から始まり、その後の弛まぬ中世時代の思索を基盤とした16世紀から17世紀のニュートンをその頂点とする数学を用いた本格的自然科学の発展について、ガリレオガリレイの活躍と人間臭い逸話も交えて面白く読み手を飽きさせません。また化学の分野でも中世の錬金術からの科学的脱却について変人の16世紀のパラケルススを皮切りに、17世紀にオックスフォード大学に自費で化学実験室を設置して燃焼化学、気体の解明を発展させた博愛主義者のボイル、その弟子でのちにニュートンにひどくいじめられたロバート・フック、辛辣にしてお金儲けに敏いがその結果フランス革命で悲劇に会う近代化学の父ラボアジェの精密な実験に基づく質量保存の法則の発見の経緯についても十分に語られています。
さらにラボアジェの業績を19世紀に原子論および化合物の元素倍数比例に発展させたジョン・ドルトン、彼の法則をさらに発展させて原子周期律表まで完成させた天才ロシア人メンデレエフとその強烈すぎるキャラクターついても付け加えて生き生きと科学技術の繋がりが説かれています。
この部分で著者がGRIT(やり遂げる忍耐、頑固さ、情熱)の必要性に言及して、この本で語られている多くの輝かしい業績を遂げた学者の多くは、それどころか強情頑固で傲慢でもあるし、そこまでの必要性があったのだろうと述懐しているところも印象的です。
生物学における発展についても、1664年ロバート・フックによるコルク薄片の手製顕微鏡観察による細胞“cells”から書き起こされています。まだ生物は塵のような無生物から発生するという古代哲学者アリストテレスの説が17世紀になるまで信じられていた時代のことで、1665年にフックが出版した顕微鏡図集Micrographiaは、ペストの大流行や翌年のロンドン大火災もものともせずに大ベストセラーになったいうほど話題になったことも記載されています。
フックに触発されたオランダ人織物商レーウェンフックはより精度の高い顕微鏡の作製を行い、肉眼で見えない微生物までもを含む多くの観察を行い、結果を英国王立協会事務総長のオルデンブルグに励まされて当時英蘭戦争の真っただ中であっても英国王立協会に発表し続け生物学の発展に寄与したことついての記述は感動的でした。
これらの科学業績を受け継いでさらに事実の探究を続けるにつれて益々キリスト教教義との矛盾との対立に悩み、子弟関係まで犠牲にして探究を続けて進化論として確立した19世紀のダーウインの思索と行動を丁寧に紹介されています。
第三部はニュートン力学の限界を越えるべく19世紀以降現代にいたる近代物理学分野の科学者の探究の歩みについて量子力学の発展を中心に紹介されています。
マックス・プランクは黒体放射を研究対象に当初原子の存在をめぐって対立していたボルツマンの理論を謙虚に学び、黒色体を振動子と見做し、その放射を非連続なエネルギーによる電磁波の放射として法則を見出したこと、初めてこの非連続なエネルギーを“quantum”とラテン語で呼んだことが語られています。
1905年に相対性理論、原子の存在を説明するブラウン運動、光を説明しての量子論を発表したアインシュタインが特許事務所員から一躍第一級の物理学者と世間に認識された経緯も印象的です。さらに1909年ラザフォードによるガイガーとの共同でのα線散乱実験が有核原子モデルの説明に結びついたこと、さらにボーアの原子モデルへと発展すること、この発見が技術革新を招き、マンハッタン計画、原子爆弾の発明にも結び付く結果となったことも紹介されています。
その後量子理論は不確定性理論のハイゼンベルグと、シュレジンガーとの論争とその経緯がアインシュタインの思索の動きも絡ませて書かれていて量子力学の深さを垣間見た気がしました。
第二次世界大戦時に多く学者が連合国側と枢軸国側とに分断されたり、ナチスドイツによるユダヤ人迫害とユダヤ系物理学者の亡命と政治情勢に翻弄される物理学会の状況についても詳しく述べられています。
また全編に亘ってナチ収容所での苦闘を経験しながらも、決して十分な教育は受けていないが知識への強い探究心を失わなかった筆者の父親への深い尊敬の念が語られていることも大変印象的でした。
長いレヴューを書いていまいましたが間違いなく推薦すべき良書です。