On the heels of the year’s smartest and most imaginative children’s books come the most thought-provoking science books published this year. (Enter the non-fictional time machine by reviewing the 2013, 2012, and 2011 selections.)
1. the accidental universe
“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from,” Carl Sagan wrote in his timeless meditation on science and religion, “we will have failed.” It’s a sentiment that dismisses in one fell Saganesque swoop both the blind dogmatism of religion and the vain certitude of science — a sentiment articulated by some of history’s greatest minds, from Einstein to Ada Lovelace to Isaac Asimov, all the way back Galileo. Yet centuries after Galileo and decades after Sagan, humanity remains profoundly uneasy about reconciling these conflicting frameworks for understanding the universe and our place in it.
You are reading: Best science books 2014
That unanswered question of where we come from is precisely what is being explored by physicist alan lightman, one of the best essayists writing today and the first person to receive dual appointments in the sciences and humanities in the mit. from various angles in the accidental universe: the world you thought you knew (public library | indiebound).
At the intersection of science and philosophy, the book’s essays explore the possible existence of multiple universes, multiple space-time continua, more than three dimensions. lightman writes:
Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does remove some of the veils.
[…]Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. it is the closest outpost of science to philosophy and religion.
in one of the most beautiful essays of the book, entitled “the spiritual universe”, lightman explores that intersection of perspectives to give meaning to life:
I fully support the central doctrine of science. and I do not believe in the existence of a being that lives beyond matter and energy, even if that being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. however, I certainly agree with [scientists who argue] that science is not the only avenue to knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. obviously, vast territories of the arts refer to internal experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. the humanities, like history and philosophy, pose questions that do not have definitive or unanimously accepted answers.
[…]There are things we take on faith, without physical proof and sometimes even without any methodology for proof. we cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. we cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life to save the life of our son. we cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” we cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning. For these questions, we can collect evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot come up with any system of analysis similar to the way a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a foot-long pendulum to make one full swing. . the previous questions are questions of aesthetics, of morality, of philosophy. these are questions for the arts and humanities. these are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.
[…]faith, in its broadest sense, is much more than believing in the existence of god or ignoring scientific evidence. faith is the willingness to surrender, sometimes, to things we don’t fully understand. faith is belief in things greater than ourselves. faith is the ability to honor stillness in some moments and in others mount the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the total engagement with this strange and resplendent world.
Dive deeper with Lightman into science and spirituality, our longing for immortality in an ever-changing universe, and how dark energy explains our accidental origins.
2. the human age
In the most memorable scene from the cinematic adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, Jodi Foster’s character — modeled after real-life astronomer and alien hunter Jill Tarter — beholds the uncontainable wonder of the cosmos, which she has been tasked with conveying to humanity, and gasps: “They should’ve sent a poet!”
telling humanity its own story is no less a herculean task, and at last we have a poet, sagan’s favorite poet, no less, to marry science and wonder. Science historian and storyteller Diane Ackerman is, of course, not just a poet, although Sagan sent her spectacular scientifically accurate verse for the planets to Timothy Leary in prison. For the past four decades, she has been bridging science and the humanities in extraordinary explorations of everything from the science of the senses to the natural history of love and the thin threads of hope. In The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us (Public Library | Indiebound), Ackerman traces how we got to where we are: a species perpetually bent on the future living in a remarkable age filled with technological marvels, most of which didn’t exist just two centuries ago, when “just a few moments before, in geological time, we were mute shadows on the savannah.”
In captivatingly lyrical language, Ackerman paints the backdrop to our explosive evolution and its yin-yang of achievement and annihilation:
Human beings have always been energetic, restless and busy bodies. Over the last 11,700 years, a mere blink of an eye since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, we invented the pearls of agriculture, writing, and science. we travel in all directions, following the long hands of rivers, crossing snowy kingdoms, climbing dizzying crevasses and gorges, trekking to remote islands and the poles, diving to the depths of the ocean pursued by illuminated fish like luminaries and jellyfish with golden eyes. under a cult of the stars, we lit fires and hung lanterns in all the darkness. We frame cities similar to Oz, travel outside our home planet, and play golf on the moon. we dream of a sorcery of industrial and medical wonders. we may not have shuffled the continents, but we have erased and redrawn their outlines with cities, agriculture, and climate change. we have blocked and diverted rivers, depositing thick sediments of new land. we have leveled forests, scraped and paved the land. we have dominated 75 percent of the earth’s surface, conserving some areas as “wilderness,” denaturalizing vast expanses for our businesses and homes, and homogenizing a third of the world’s ice-free land through agriculture. we have cut the tops of the mountains to dig craters and quarries for mining. it’s as if aliens show up with mega hammers and laser chisels and start reshaping each continent to better fit them. we have turned the landscape into another form of architecture; we have made the planet our sandbox.
but ackerman is a techno-utopian at heart. Noting that we have altered our relationship with the natural world “radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the worse,” he adds:
Our relationship with nature is evolving, rapidly but progressively, and sometimes so subtly that we do not notice the sonic booms, either literally or metaphorically. As we are redefining our perception of the world around us and the world within us, we are revisiting our fundamental ideas about exactly what it means to be human, and also what we consider “natural.”
Dive deeper with Ackerman into what the future of AI reveals about the human condition.
3. the book of trees
Why is it that when we behold the oldest living trees in the world, primeval awe runs down our spine? We are entwined with trees in an elemental embrace, both biological and symbolic, depending on them for the very air we breathe as well as for our deepest metaphors, millennia in the making. They permeate our mythology and our understanding of evolution. They enchant our greatest poets and rivet our greatest scientists. Even our language reflects that relationship — it’s an idea that has taken “root” in nearly every “branch” of knowledge.
how and why this happened is what the designer and scholar of information visualization manuel lima explores in the tree book: visualizing the branches of knowledge (public library | indiebound) — a magnificent 800-year history of the treemap, from discarding to data visualization, from medieval manuscripts to modern information design, and tracing lime’s excellent visual complexity: mapping patterns of information.
Lima writes in the introduction:
At a time when more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, surrounded daily by asphalt, cement, iron and glass, it is difficult to conceive of a time when trees had an immense and tangible meaning for people. our existence. But for thousands upon thousands of years, trees have provided us with not only shelter, protection, and food, but also seemingly limitless resources for medicine, fire, energy, weapons, tool-building, and construction. it is normal for humans, observing their intricate branching patterns and the seasonal wilting and regrowth of their foliage, to see trees as powerful images of growth, decay, and resurrection. In fact, trees have had such an immense meaning for humans that there is hardly any culture that has not invested them with lofty symbolism and, in many cases, with celestial and religious power. The veneration of trees, known as dendrolatry, is linked to ideas of fertility, immortality and rebirth and is often expressed through the axis mundi (axis of the world), the world tree or the arbor vitae (tree of life). life). These motifs, common in mythology and folklore around the world, have had, and still do, cultural and religious significance to social groups throughout history.
[…]The pervasiveness of these symbols reveals an inherently human connection and fascination with trees that spans time and space and goes far beyond religious devotion. this fascination has gripped philosophers, scientists, and artists, who have been equally drawn to the inscrutabilities of the tree and its stark, frank, and resilient beauty. trees have a remarkable evocative and expressive quality that makes them suitable for all kinds of representations. They are easily drawn by children and beginning painters, but they have also been the main subjects of renowned artists throughout the centuries.
dive deeper here.
4. the meaning of human existence
Just as the fracturing of our inner wholeness ruptures the soul, a similar fissure rips society asunder and has been for centuries — that between science and the humanities. The former explores how we became human and the latter what it means to be human — a difference at once subtle and monumental, polarizing enough to hinder the answering of both questions. That’s what legendary naturalist, sociobiologist, and Pulitzer-winning writer E.O. Wilson explores with great eloquence and intellectual elegance in The Meaning of Human Existence (public library | IndieBound).
three decades after carl sagan asserted that “if we ever get to the point where we think we fully understand who we are and where we come from, we will have failed”, wilson, a longtime advocate of bridging the gap between science and the humanities, he replies that “we have learned enough about the universe and about ourselves to ask these questions in a testable and answerable way.”
and that elusive answer, he argues, has to do precisely with that notion of meaning:
In common usage, the word “meaning” implies intent, intent implies design, and design implies a designer. any entity, process, or definition of any word is brought into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. this is at the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions and, in particular, of their creation stories. humanity is supposed to exist for a purpose. individuals have a purpose for being on earth. both humanity and individuals have meaning.
There is a second, broader way in which the word “meaning” is used, and a very different world view is implied. it is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. there is no advanced design, but overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. the evolution of history obeys only the general laws of the universe. each event is random but alters the probability of subsequent events. during organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. this concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.
Whether in the cosmos or in the human condition, the second, more inclusive meaning exists in the evolution of the current reality in the midst of countless other possible realities.
The idea that we are a cosmic accident is far from new and, to the unexamined existential reflection, far from comforting. And yet, Wilson suggests, there is something enormously encouraging in the notion that out of all the possible scenarios, out of the myriad other combinations that would have resulted in not-us, we emerged and gave life meaning. he illustrates this sense of “meaning” with the particular evolutionary miracle of the human brain, whose expansion was one of the most rapid bursts of complex tissue evolution in the known history of the universe:
A spider spinning its web has the intention, whether it is aware of the result or not, to catch a fly. that is the meaning of the web. the human brain evolved under the same regimen as the spider’s web. every decision made by a human being has meaning in the first, intentional sense. but the ability to decide, and how and why the ability arose, and the consequences that followed, are the broader, science-based meaning of human existence.
The main consequence is the ability to imagine possible futures and to plan and choose between them. how wisely we use this unique human ability depends on the accuracy of our self-understanding. the most relevant question of interest is how and why we are the way we are and, from there, the meaning of our many conflicting visions of the future.
Perched on the precipice of an era in which the very question of what it means to be human is continually challenged, we can gain much more from the fruitful cross-pollination of science and the humanities to plant the seeds of the best such possible futures. . As an Emerson of our techno-scientific age, Wilson defends the ennobling self-sufficiency embedded in this proposal:
humanity… arose entirely alone through a cumulative series of events during evolution. we are not predestined to achieve any goal, nor are we accountable to any power other than our own. only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.
dive deeper here.
5. the edge of the sky
“If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it,” pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in the 1979 volume Some Personal Views, “one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.” Whether or not theoretical cosmologist Roberto Trotta read Mead, he embodies her unambiguous ethos with heartening elegance in The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is (public library | IndieBound) — an unusual “short story about what we think the All-There-Is is made of, and how it got to be the way it is,” told in the one thousand most common words in the English language. Under such admirable self-imposed restriction — the idea for which was given to Trotta by Randall Munroe, who knows a thing or two about illuminating complexity through simplicity — Trotta composes a poetic primer on the universe by replacing some of the densest terminology of astrophysics with invariably lyrical synonyms constructed from these common English words. The universe becomes the “All-There-Is,” Earth our “Home World,” the planets “Crazy Stars,” our galaxy a “Star-Crowd” — because, really, whoever needs supersymmetric particles when one could simply say “Mirror Drops”?
What emerges is a narrative that explains some of the more complex science of modern astrophysics, told in a language that sounds like a translation of the ancient narrative, like the folk fables of African mythology, the kind of tales written before we had the words for phenomena, before we had the understanding that those words demanded. after all, language always evolves as a mixture of our most common ideas.
trotta’s story, spanning from the big bang (“great flash”) to the invention of the telescope (“great seer”) and the discoveries and unknowns that unfold at the large hadron collider (“great ring “), also features a carefully equalizing play on gender pronouns, presenting women and men as “students,” the leading scientists in the history of cosmology and astrophysics.
The story is peppered with appropriately lyrical illustrations by French artist Antoine Déprez.
In a particularly poetic chapter on space-time and the quest to grasp the scale of the universe, Trotta, who works at the astrophysics group of Imperial College London and has held research positions at Oxford and the University of Geneva, chronicles Einstein’s most enduring legacy:
Dr. Einstein would become one of the most important students in history. he had a quick brain and had been thinking hard about the building blocks of all-there-is. To his surprise, he discovered that light was the key to understanding how far things in the sky appear to us (crazy stars, our host of stars, and maybe even white shadows).
[…]You couldn’t explain this using the normal idea of space and time. Mr. Einstein then said that space and time had to marry and form a new thing which he called space-time. Thanks to space-time, he discovered that time slows down if you fly almost as fast as light and that your arm seems shorter in the direction you’re going.
then wondered what would happen if you put something heavy, as heavy as a star, in the middle of space-time. he was the first to understand that matter attracts space-time and changes its appearance. in turn, the shape of space-time is what moves matter in one way or another.
It followed that starlight and white shadows in the sky would also be pulled by the shape of space-time. understanding space-time meant understanding exactly where and how far away from us things are in the sky.
[…]mr. Einstein then began to wonder what would happen if he used his idea of space-time for everything there is.
But Trotta’s greatest feat is the grace with which he addresses the greatest question of cosmology, the one at the heart of the ancient tension between science and religion — the idea that the universe we have seems like a miraculous accident since, despite an infinity of other possible combinations, it somehow cultivated the exact conditions that make life viable. Science rejects the idea of a grand “Creator” who orchestrated these conditions, and religious traditions are predicated on the terror of admitting to such purely accidental origin — a bind with which humanity still tussles vigorously to this day, yet one Trotta untangles with extraordinary intellectual elegance:
Imagine for a minute the following situation.
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you enter a room where you find a table with a lot of small, gray, round pieces, the kind you can use to buy a coffee, a newspaper or to pay for parking. those with a head on one side and some other image on the back.
Let’s say there are four hundred gray pieces on the table. and they all show heads.
You wouldn’t believe for a second that they were all thrown on the table and landed like this. Although this could happen, it would be difficult to accept.
It would be easier to imagine that someone had entered the room before you and left them like that, heads up, all four hundred.
The weird thing about the dark push is that it’s a bit like the four hundred gray pieces upside down in the room.
If the dark push were just a little bigger than it is, then everything we see around us would be very different.
It’s as if changing just one of the four hundred heads changed the whole world.
change the dark impulse a bit and the crowds of stars could not form; none of the stars we see in the sky would be there; the sun would not be there; our home world would not be there; and life, as we know it, could not be here.
We wouldn’t be here to talk about this in the first place.
So the question is: who or what put the four hundred heads in exactly this way?
Trotta offers an answer through a remarkably succinct explanation of the concept of the multiverse and the notion of parallel universes:
some students came to believe that they could understand this by imagining more rooms. a very large number of rooms.
In each of them, the four hundred gray pieces are thrown into the air and flipped. and they land somehow, however they can.
In most rooms, some of the pieces will land heads and some won’t.
but if you have enough rooms, you will eventually find a room where all the pieces have landed face to face. So.
There is no need to imagine someone setting them up this way.
It’s just a matter of having enough rooms and trying them all.
and so the idea is that maybe all there is is not all there is.
dive deeper here.
6. shakespeare’s science
William Shakespeare — to the extent that he existed at all — lived during a remarkable period in human history. Born the same year as Galileo, a founding father of the Scientific Revolution, and shortly before Montaigne, the Bard witnessed an unprecedented intersection of science and philosophy as humanity sought to make sense of its existence. One of the era’s most compelling sensemaking mechanisms was the burgeoning field of astronomy, which brought to the ancient quest to order the heavens a new spirit of scientific ambition.
in the science of shakespeare: a new look at the playwright’s universe (public | independent library), science journalist dan falk explores the curious connection between the legendary playwright and the spirit of the scientific revolution, arguing that the bard was significantly influenced by science, especially observational astronomy.
Of particular note is what Falk calls “one of the most intriguing (and one of the most ignored) works in the entire canon”: the romantic tragedy Cymbeline. Pointing to a strange and highly symbolic scene in the play’s final act, where the hero sees in a dream the ghosts of his four dead relatives circling around him while he sleeps, Falk writes:
Shakespeare’s plays cover a lot of ground and employ a lot of theatrical tricks, but when it comes to gods descending from the heavens, this episode is unique; there is nothing like it in the entire canon. Martin Butler calls the Jupiter scene the “spectacular climax” of the play, as it surely is. But the scene is also strange, unexpected and outlandish, so much so that some have wondered if it represents Shakespeare’s own play.
[…]If there’s one thing in Shakespeare’s later plays that points to Galileo, it’s this: Jupiter, so often invoked by characters in many of the plays, never actually makes a personal appearance, until this point in Cymbeline. and of course jupiter is not alone in the scene: just below him, we see four ghosts moving in a circle. . . . Could the four ghosts represent the four moons of Jupiter, newly discovered by Galileo?
The timeline, Falk points out, is right — Cymbeline is believed to have been written in the summer or fall of 1610, mere months after the publication of Galileo’s short but seminal treatise on his initial telescopic observations, Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger). Examining a specific passage from the play for evidence, Falk writes:
the passage seems to allude, at least in part, to the sights one might see in the heavens; at the very least, it has something to do with distinguishing different kinds of objects (including, apparently, stars) from one another. But the context is crucial: the first line is addressed to Imogen; the remaining lines are clearly an aside, spoken only to the audience. he seems to be saying, my story is incredible; Why posthumously would he lower himself so much, when his own wife is so beautiful? after all, he reasons, the eye gives one the power to tell the stars apart, and even to distinguish one stone on the beach from another; Can’t he posthumously see the difference between his wife and a common whore? However, [peter, astronomer at penn state university] usher ignores the sexual aspect of these lines and focuses on the astronomical: the “vaulted arch” is surely the sky; the “fiery orbs above” must be the stars. could the precious “glasses” be a reference to a telescope-like device?
dive deeper here.
7. a sting in the tale
The great E.O. Wilson is credited with having once said, “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” But while the one million or so named species of insects make up about 70% of all known species on Earth, one type of insect is more vital to our planet’s survival — as well as our own — than any other: the humble, mighty bee. In A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees (public library | IndieBound), British biologist, lifelong wildlife enthusiast and Bumblebee Conservation Trust founder Dave Goulson explores how bees gave our cosmic home not only its beauty but also its bounty of nourishment, and what responsibility we have — as Jane Goodall once eloquently urged — in repaying that existential gesture.
inviting us into his evolutionary time machine, goulson takes us back to the cretaceous period, between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago, when the earth was covered in lush forests of giant vegetation. dinosaurs had only just flown when newly evolved feathers produced the first birds. our own ancestors at the time were small, unseemly rat-like creatures that lurked under ferns and fed on insects and fallen fruit. goulson writes:
if we could travel to this ancient land, we might be too concerned about the dangers posed by larger wildlife to notice there were no flowers; no orchids, buttercups or daisies, no cherry blossoms, no foxgloves in the wooded clearings. and no matter how much we listened, we wouldn’t hear the distinctive buzz of bees. but all that was about to change.
then why did it change? it turns out that sex does rule the world: two hundred million years after the first ejaculation in earth’s recorded history, bees stepped in to play a vital role in our planet’s blossoming to maturity:
Sex has always been difficult for plants, because they can’t move. if one cannot move, then finding a suitable mate and exchanging sex cells with them presents a hurdle. The plant equivalent of sperm is pollen, and the challenge a plant faces is how to get its pollen to the female reproductive parts of another plant; it’s not easy if you’re rooted to the ground. the first solution, and still used by some plants to this day, is to use the wind. One hundred and thirty-five million years ago, nearly all plants spread their pollen by wind, hoping against hope that a small proportion of it would, by chance, land on a female flower. this is, as you can imagine, a very inefficient and wasteful system, with perhaps 99.99 per cent of the pollen being wasted, falling to the ground or flying out to sea. as a result, they had to produce a lot.
Nature abhors waste, and it was only a matter of time before the blind stumble of evolution came up with a better solution in the form of insects. pollen is very nutritious. some winged insects now began to feed on it and before long some specialized in eating pollen. flying from plant to plant in search of their food, these insects accidentally carried pollen grains on their bodies, caught between the hairs or in the joints between their segments. when the occasional pollen grain fell from the insect onto the female parts of a flower, that flower was pollinated, and thus the insects became the first pollinators, the sexual facilitators of plants. a mutualistic relationship had begun that was to change the face of the earth. although much of the pollen was consumed by insects, this was a great improvement for the plants compared to spreading their pollen to the wind.
But this system presented our proto-bees with a serious orientation problem: Because the flowers were as drab-green as the surrounding vegetation, spotting them was no easy task. to attract insects, they had to get better at standing out from the competition and “advertising” their delicious pollen.
dive into how it happened here.
8. the universe
“The mystery of being is a permanent mystery,” John Updike once observed in pondering why the universe exists, and yet of equal permanence is the allure this mystery exerts upon the scientists, philosophers, and artists of any given era. The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos (public library | IndieBound) collects twenty-one illuminating, mind-expanding meditations on various aspects of that mystery, from multiple dimensions to quantum monkeys to why the universe looks the way it does, by some of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time. It is the fourth installment in an ongoing series by Edge editor John Brockman, following Thinking (2013), Culture (2011), and The Mind (2011).
In one of the essays, theoretical physicist Leonard Suskind marvels at the unique precipice we are lucky enough to witness:
The beginning of the 21st century is a turning point in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe. something is happening that is much more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. this is one of those rare moments when our entire perspective, our framework of thought, and the entire epistemology of physics and cosmology suddenly go into real upheaval. The narrow 20th century view of a single universe, some 10 billion years old and 10 billion light-years across with a single set of physical laws, is giving way to something much larger and full of new possibilities.
Gradually, physicists and cosmologists are coming to see our ten billion light-years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse.
Dive deeper with Lisa Randall’s Harvard Physics on “branes” and multidimensional science and some thoughts on gender in scientific publishing.
9. neurocomic
Scientists are only just beginning to understand how the brain works — from what transpires in it while we sleep to how to optimize its memory to what love does to it to how music affects it — and the rest of us fall somewhere on the spectrum between fascinated and confused when it comes to the intricate inner workings of our master-controller.
from the british independent press nobrow, which also brought us freud’s graphic biography and the magnificent no man’s land of blexbolex, comes neurocomic (public library | indiebound), a graphic novel about how it works brain. this remarkable collaboration between neuroscientist dr. hana roš and doctor in neuroscience turned illustrator dra. Matteo Farinella, supported by the Wellcome Trust, explains the inner workings of the brain in delightful and illuminating black-and-white illustrations, covering everything from perception and hallucinations to memory and emotional recall to consciousness. and the difference between the mind and the brain.
We take a walk through a forest of neurons and then learn about neuroplasticity. (“This is the great power of the brain, it is plastic!”, we are told in one of the most encouraging and reassuring parts. “Once you learn something, it is not set in stone, experience continually shapes it”). Pavlov and his famous studies of memory in 1897 Russia. we visit the haunting caves of memory and the intricate castles of deception.
This wonderful movie trailer for the project, directed by richard wyllie, takes us behind the scenes of the duo’s wonderful collaboration and creative process:
see more here.
10. the story of grieving neurosurgeons
“In both writing and sleeping,” Stephen King wrote in his meditation on “creative sleep” and the art of wakeful dreaming, “we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” But while he was exploring the creative process from a metaphorical angle, he was inadvertently describing one of the greatest neurological nightmares that could befall us. Due to the sheer enormity of what happens in the brain while we sleep, there is also a sizable possibility that things would go wrong; when they do, things can get scary. And few sleep-related brain glitches can be scarier than what is known as “sleep paralysis” — the evil twin of lucid dreaming.
four years after the disappearing spoon, his wonderful chronicle of wacky tales from the periodic table, science writer sam kean returns with the story of the grieving neurosurgeons: the story of the human brain as revealed by true stories of trauma, madness, and recovery (public library | indiebound): a mind-bending tour of the mind, which kean opens with a fascinating, both highly personal and powerfully illustrative example of the brain. humiliating complexity:
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I can’t fall asleep on my back, or rather, I don’t dare to. in that position I often fall into a fugue state in which my mind wakes up from a dream, but my body remains motionless. in this limbo I can still feel things around me: sunlight filtering through the curtains, passersby on the street below, the blanket draped over my upturned feet. but when I tell my body to yawn, stretch and get on with the day, nothing happens. I will recite the command again, move, and the message resounds, unheard. I struggle, I struggle, I struggle to twist a toe or flex a nostril, and it’s no use. is what it would feel like to be reincarnated as a statue. it is the opposite of sleepwalking: it is sleep paralysis.
The worst part is the panic. awake, my mind waits for my lungs to take a deep breath, to feel my throat expand and my breastbone rise a good six inches. but my body—still asleep, physiologically—takes mere sips of air. I feel like I’m suffocating, little by little, and panic begins to burn in my chest.
Dig deeper with Kean’s explanation of how this Rube Goldberg neurological disaster machine sheds light on how a healthy brain works.
11. what if?
For years, NASA-roboticist-turned-comic-creator Randall Munroe has been delighting the world with his popular xkcd webcomic, often answering readers’ questions about various aspects of how the world works with equal parts visual wit and scientific rigor. The best of these, as well as a number of never-before-answered ones, are now collected in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (public library | IndieBound) — questions like what would happen if a submarine was hit by lightning to what it would actually take to eradicate the common cold to the physics of trying to hit a baseball pitched at the speed of light.
munroe writes in the introduction:
I’ve been using math to try to answer weird questions for as long as I can remember. When I was five years old, my mother had a conversation with me that she wrote down and kept in a photo album. when she heard that she was writing this book, she found the transcript and sent it to me. here it is, reproduced verbatim from his 25-year-old sheet of paper:
randall: are there more soft things or hard things in our house?
To this day, I have no idea where I got “3 billion” and “5 billion”. clearly, I didn’t really understand how the numbers worked.
My math has gotten a little better over the years, but my reason for doing math is the same as it was when I was five: I want to answer questions.
They say there are no stupid questions. that is obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. but it turns out trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.
Dive deeper with Munroe’s exploration of mathematics to find your soulmate.
12. nothing
In 2013, Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a mind-bending debate on the nature of “nothing” — an inquiry that has occupied thinkers since the dawn of recorded thought and permeates everything from Hamlet’s iconic question to the boldest frontiers of quantum physics. That’s precisely what New Scientist editor-in-chief Jeremy Webb explores with a kaleidoscopic lens in Nothing: Surprising Insights Everywhere from Zero to Oblivion (public library | IndieBound) — a terrific collection of essays and articles exploring everything from vacuum to the birth and death of the universe to how the concept of zero gained wide acceptance in the 17th century after being shunned as a dangerous innovation for 400 years. Webb writes:
You might think that a book about nothing sounds suspiciously like an oxymoron. but fortunately there is much to explore, because nothing has been a topic of discussion for more than 2000 years: in fact, the ancient Greeks had a lively disagreement about it. and such have been the changing fortunes of nothing that you can practically tell where you are in history simply by finding out the prevailing opinions about nothing.
Take zero, for example, the symbol for the absence of things. part of it was born in babylon around 300 b.c. the rest arose 1,000 years later when indigenous people fused that idea with an ancient symbol out of nowhere. It was another 400 years before it reached Europe, where it was initially rejected as a dangerous innovation. by the 17th century it had gained acceptance, and today it is central to the definition of every number you use.
[…]nothing becomes a lens through which we can explore the universe around us and even what it is to be human. reveals past attitudes and present thoughts.
[…]nothing can be hard to reach: we haven’t reached absolute zero and most likely never will. nothings can also be disordered: what is described as the void of space turns out to be not one, but many. and nothings can be powerful: sufferers can get better after talking to a doctor even if nothing material happens between them.
Dig deeper with Jo Marchant’s mind-blowing tale of the Ultimate Power of Nothing: A look at the new science of the placebo effect and how our minds actually affect our bodies.
13. 30 days
“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science. A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz — the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology. In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo — an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month. Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London. Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.
Tilsley’s choice of pseudonym is itself remarkably poetic: scientific sensibility aside, xyz was the pseudonym of his grandfather, the late British novelist and war correspondent Frank Tilsley.
tilsley wrote and illustrated his quantum poems simultaneously, using his vast collection of ephemera scanned from old paper, vintage typewriter fonts, and 19th century artwork (I acknowledge benjamin betts’ “geometric psychology” illustrations ), which he digitally manipulated into beautiful backgrounds for his verses. Much like the work of William Blake, the text and image work together to channel a cohesive atmosphere.
It is also interesting that Tilsley chose to capitalize nouns and pronouns in the style of religious texts: a poignant juxtaposition with the scientific sensibility of the poems, hinting, consciously or not, at the spiritual element of science.
14. dataclysm
In Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) (public library | IndieBound), writer, musician, and entrepreneur Christian Rudder takes a remarkable look at how person-to-person interaction from just about every major online data source of our time reveal human truths “deeper and more varied than anything held by any other private individual,” and how the tension “between the continuity of the human condition and the fracture of the database” actually sheds light on some of humanity’s most immutable mysteries.
rudder is the co-founder of the dating site okcupid and the data scientist behind his now-legendary trend analyses, but he’s also, as is immediately clear from his elegant writing and wildly interdisciplinary references, a lover of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and all the other humanities that make us human and, more importantly in this case, enhance and ennoble hard data with a dimensional view of the richness of human experience. rudder writes:
I’m not here with more hype or reporting on the data phenomenon. I come with the thing itself: the data, the stripped phenomenon. I come with a lot of the actual information being collected, which luck, work, persuasion and more luck have put me in a unique position to own and analyze.
for the reflexively skeptical, the helm offers reassurance through its self-proclaimed “Luddite sympathies”:
I’ve never dated online in my life and neither have any of the other founders, and if not for you, trust me, I get it. Tech evangelism is one of my least favorite things, and I’m not here to trade my blinking digital accounts for nobody’s precious island. I still subscribe to magazines. I have the times on the weekend. tweeting makes me embarrassed. I can’t convince you to use, respect, or “believe in” the internet or social media any more than you already do, or don’t. by all means, keep thinking what you’ve been thinking about the online universe. But if there’s one thing I sincerely hope this book can make you reconsider, it’s what you think of yourself. Because that’s what this book is really about. okcupid is how I got into the story.
Dive deeper with the facts about what it really means to be extraordinary.
15. evolution
We were once amoebae, and here we are today, singing opera and typing on iPhones with opposable thumbs. That alone is enough marvel to put the petty nuisances of everyday life in perspective and fill our human hearts with humility.
As a lover of unusual coloring books and science-oriented children’s books, especially those that replace myth with science, I instantly fell in love with evolution: a coloring book ( public library | indiebound) by london-based finnish illustrator annu kilpeläinen: the best since darwin’s graphic biography, and also a great addition to the year’s best children’s books.
This simple yet imaginative primer on science through art explores natural selection, continental drift, what killed the dinosaurs, how birds descended from them, and all the other processes and phenomena that got us where we are today. . die-cut treats add an element of interactive fun to the classic coloring book experience.
A particularly apt application of the die-cutting technique is a series of pages that, through strategically placed cutouts, invite exploration of how human facial features evolved.
supplement with the adult version of bill nye, undeniable: evolution and the science of creation.
For more thought-provoking science reading, keep an eye out for this evolving virtual library.
See Also: Wrexford & Sloane Mystery Series by Andrea Penrose