The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow (PDF)

Description

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 color; 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.)

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Mlodinow never fails to make science both accessible and entertaining.” —Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time“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.” —Marcia Bartusiak, The Washington Post “Mlodinow is an engaging narrator who leavens the proceedings with a mischievous wit.” —Alan Hirshfeld, The Wall Street Journal “An inspiring, exciting exploration of how our very inquisitive species has attempted to comprehend the cosmos.” —Louise Fabiani, 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)“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)“[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.” —Ray Olson, 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“[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 “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)“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 LEONARD MLODINOW received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include the best sellers Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award), War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), and The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (a New York Times Notable Book), as well as Feynman’s Rainbow and Euclid’s Window. He also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow“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.

⭐This is an interesting, well-written and deeply researched book covering the development of science from the first tools to quantum physics. A theme throughout it is that humans have consistently thought out-of-the-box: “our creativity is constrained by conventional thinking that arises from beliefs we can’t shake, or never even think of questioning.” This red line holds the story together and gives a very inspirational message.The book is divided into three chronological parts. Personally I was most interested in the first part: the Neolithic revolution, the growth of human spirituality, the Göbekli Tepe religious sanctuary, the rise of language, early maths, and “the introduction of professions that dealt with the pursuit of ideas rather than the procurement of food.”In this part though, I thought Mlodinow was not as comprehensive as later in the book and there were some glaring omissions. Surprisingly, there was no mention of the great archaeological periods: the Iron, Copper and Bronze Ages. We are told that the Babylonians and Egyptians started working out the area and circumference of a circle, but there was no mention of Pi, its origin or use! I would have liked to learn more about early Chinese science. And although he mentions the 100-year period when “medieval Islamic scientists made great progress in practical optics, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, overtaking the Europeans,” we are left wondering what those advances actually were.In the second part, Mlodinow warms to the subject, and you begin to realize that he is a physicist and is keen to write about Newton, Hooke, Boyle et al. What I liked about this part were the historical biographies of the scientists he covers and the insights into their personal and spiritual lives. “Little is known about Boyle’s mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by then must have come as a relief.”By the third part Mlodinow is really in his element, describing the work of Einstein, Dalton, Faraday, Bohr, Heisenberg etc. These are the author’s real heroes and I get the impression that they were the reason why he undertook the book in the first place. Unfortunately, not being a physicist myself, the great attention to detail that he gives to this section frequently lost me.However, despite my struggles and some glaring omissions, I believe this book would be a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in human scientific evolution and the cultures that shaped their ideas, and that the advance of human understanding was made possible by “someone capable of looking at the world just a little bit differently.”

⭐I gave this book 3 Stars because I honestly don’t know who the intended audience is. I also believe that many readers will give it 1 or 2 Stars and equal number of readers, ones who enjoyed reading it, will give it 4 or 5 Stars. In my opinion, the best way for a prospective buyer to know if this book is for her is to quote a few sentences from p. 230. “In particular, Planck discovered that a quantum of light energy is equal to the frequency multiplied by a proportionality factor, which Planck called “b”, and which today is known as Planck’s constant. Had Planck taken Boltzmann’s last step, in essence setting “b” equal to zero, then energy would have been posited as endlessly divisible. By not doing that, and instead fixing “b” by comparing his formula with experimental data, Planck was that-at least as far as blackbody radiation is concerned-energy comes in tiny, fundamental packages and cannot take on just any value.” If physics related information is interesting to you and you can grasp concepts like those I quoted, then this book is for you.About 2/3 of the book is about the advancement of physics. There is a chapter on chemistry and there is a section on Darwin that I found interesting.

⭐I was very satisfied with my purchase, and I thank you for an excellent service.

⭐I heard of this book while channel surfing while driving and on Coast to Coast radio of all places. The author was doing an interview and it was interesting enough for me to remember to look for the book. Now if you’re anything like me, that in itself can be an anomaly. I think of so many things I’d like to do when I’m driving that never get done after I park the car. Anyway, I decided to read the first chapter online to see if this was something that I could be interested in reading. After the first two paragraphs, I stopped and just ordered the book. Leonard Mlodinow takes what could be dry, boring, bang your head against a wall to stay awake material and makes it interesting and readable. His story is a potent mix of history, physics, math, psychology, anthropology and sociology wrapped in a package of comedic genius. This connect-the-dots journey takes the ready from the cave scratching of early man to the brain surgeons operating room that make the reading wanting for more. If you’d like a book that is a relatively easy ready but would make you sound smarter at your next water cooler conversation …then this one’s for you.

⭐This is a very well written, easy to read book about how we humans evolved from chimps to reach such higher levels of intellect and understanding this vast universe. It takes you through the journey of greats such as Galileo, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Bohr and many more scientists who have contributed immensely in our attempt to decipher the world around us.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

⭐If you are at all interested in mankind’s history and the development of science, this is a book for you. Beautifully written, this engaging tale will interest you, to the extent that you will read it non-stop, except for your regular daily duties.

⭐A very well written book. Covers the history of human thought from the time we were apes and just started walking on land inventing stone tools, to the times we developed quantum mechanics. It takes you through the stories of intellectual giants like Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and many others.

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