Burlington Public Library MA

The upright thinkers, the human journey from living in trees to understanding the cosmos, Leonard Mlodinow

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

The upright thinkers

bibliography

900665553

Leonard Mlodinow

the human journey from living in trees to understanding the cosmos

Our drive to know; A starving man's hunger for knowledge. The human odyssey of discovery -- Curiosity; Lizards don't ask questions. From handy man to wise man. What infants ask, but chimps don't -- Culture; Humanity's first church. Knowledge, ideas, and values go viral. Human and primate culture -- Civilization; From the Savannah to the city. How the charms and headaches of neighbors led to the new arts of writing and arithmetic. The invention of law, from peasant: "don't vomit in streams" to planet: "don't stray from your orbit" -- Reason; Bad crops and angry gods. A new framework for looking at the world. The mystery of change and the tyranny of common sense. Aristotle, the one-man Wikipedia -- A new way to reason; Trusting your eyes over your ancestors. Castrated boars and universal laws of motion. The tactless Professor Galileo -- The mechanical universe; The good, the bad, and the ugly: Isaac Newton. The bet that turned Newton from alchemy to authoring the greatest scientific treatise ever written. The force of Newtonian thinking -- What things are made of; From embalming to alchemy. The similarities between burning and breathing. Lavoisier loses his head. Mendeleev and his periodic table -- The animate world; Cells and the complexity of life. A recipe for making mice and the revolution of the microscope. Tragedy, illness, and Darwin's secret research -- The limits of human experience; The billion billion tiny universes in a drop of water. Cracks in the Newtonian worldview. Accepting an unseeable reality. Planck and Einstein invent the quantum -- The invisible realm; The insights of a dreamer. The crazy ideas of a pale and modest young man. The early quantum laws, "awful nonsense, bordering on fraud" -- The quantum revolution; Heisenberg's new physics. The bizarre reality of the quantum universe. The empowering and humbling legacy of a new science -- Epilogue; The advance of human understanding as a succession of fantasies; the importance of critical and innovative thinking; Where we are and where we are going