I thought this started off interesting, talking about what makes humans different from other animals - about our ability to ask questions and seek answers about why things are the way they are. But eventually, I felt it got too bogged down in science, especially about the many obscure and known scientists and how they contributed to the subjects. I don't have a lot of formal education in most of the sciences he discussed, and I didn't really learn much, just a lot of details about how various things were discovered. Perhaps with more formal science education, I might have enjoyed reading about the people who made it all happen.

The author did do a good job of making some of the things interesting, and adding some humor here and there. Perhaps it would have been better to have read the actual hardcopy book instead of electronic version, so I could skim over material easier. But as it was, the more I read, the more I just wanted to finish the book and get on to something more interesting. ( )

Leonard Mlodinow's new book is a wonderful journey through the history of humanity. Of course, many books have made that journey, but this one focuses on the development of human intelligence/thought from the earliest stages when human beings were hardly distinguishable from their primate ancestors to the more recent human condition wherein human beings have generated tools which help expand human knowledge and understanding at an awesome rate that continues to accelerate.
Mlodinow's primary focus is on the development of science and scientific thought and he deals with some pretty complex scientific concepts including quantum physics. But molding is a gifted writer who is able to make even the most complex of topics understandable. The book won't make readers into physicists, but it will make them understand the work such scientists do.
What is most enjoyable about the book, however, is the general light tone in which it is written. personal stories, wise cracks, and other uses of personalized mnarative make the book a joy to read and one that the reader can relate to,
My friend gave me this book and all I can say is that gifts like this make me value my friendship even more. ( )

Fantástico! Sinto que o livro me expandiu a cabeça e me inspirou muito no quesito de criar, de dar a sociedade algo que ela não necessariamente sabe que precisa, de confiar no nosso instinto como profissional.
Meus parabéns ao autor, vou procurar mais livros dele, com certeza. ( )

This is a slightly strange book to review. I'm still not exactly sure what the author is trying to achieve. I was reading the book at a local cafe when some friends stopped to say hi! They asked me what was I reading ..and what was it about. I hesitated for a moment thinking ...."how can i summarise this in a sentence". And then, rather lamely, I fear, I simply said " It's kind-of a history of science". They seemed satisfied by that but I'm not. At the start Mlodinow (who has co-authored books with Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra and has a degree in theoretical physics) says something about humankind's insatiable curiosity...and in a way, this book is an exploration of that kind of curiosity. The will to know. He starts with an investigation of the roots of our culture and an investigation into Gobekli Tepe in Turkey , which dates back to 11,500 years ago and appears to have been some sort of religious site rather than a city. And it was constructed by people who were still hunter gatherers.
Mlodinow makes the observation that what sets humankind apart (from other animals) is that we seem to be able to build upon the knowledge and inventions of the past.
He has a chapter about the development of civilisation and the role of language and writing in holding the structure of cities and empires together. And a rational approach to nature started to emerge (around the Mediterranean)....that the universe was ordered not chaos. (Thales b.624BC, Pythagoras, 570-490BC). Both had travelled and Mlodinow makes the point, several times, that travel broadens the mind. Their work, leading on to Aristotle (D 322 BC) who was the first to write like a professional teacher rather than as an inspired prophet. Though his work tended to be qualitative rather than quantitative.
Then came the Romans and then Christianity and the the fall of the Roman Empire and stultifying hand of Christianity on science for 1000 years or so. Fortunately, the Islamic world maintained an interest in science during this period and kept alive the books of Aristotle and others.....though Islamic science seemed to have fallen into the same trap as Christianity. New ideas were frozen. Education became via the madrasas where religion was studied and the Koran learned by heart. (Though never subject to critical study on its origins, structure, content etc).
Mlodinow mentions a group called the Merton scholars at Oxford who laid some of the mathematical foundations for Newton. Their work was taken up by Nicole Oresme (1320-1382) in France who developed a geometric style proof. He suggest that the scientific revolution was driven primarily by innovation with water mills, windmills etc. not in terms of scientific knowledge but in terms of the pros, the Ripoli press would charge 3x what it cost for scribe to copy it....but Ripoli could produce a thousand copies whilst the scribe had only produced one.
Mlodinow runs through the familiar catalog of the renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, Galilelo....disproving Aristotle),......he hardly mentions Kepler, Newton. We get quite a lot about Newton which is quite interesting. Apparently he was pretty much a solitary curmudgeon.He had a pretty lonely awful life as a kid and this seemed to translate into his adult life. He was at the bottom of the pecking order in his undergraduate days in Cambridge...but worked 18 hrs a day x 7 days per week....and kept this up for decades.
I like his section on Newton. He appreciates the incredible contributions that Newton made to science but is also alive to his flaws: "Yes he invented calculus, but he also thought the floor plan of the lost temple of King Solomon, in Jerusalem, contained hints regarding the end of the world". "And even in 1684, Newton's insights about gravity and motion were not the sudden epiphanies suggested by the story of the falling apple. Instead the momentous idea that gravity is a universal seems to have dawned on Newton gradually as he worked on revisions of the early draft of his Principia."
He runs through a series of pen portraits (quite well done) of Paracelsus, Boyle, Hooke, Priestly, Lavoisier.....who were all instrumental in the development of chemistry and the discovery of elements like Oxygen. This let to Dalton and atomic weights and eventually to Mendeleev and the periodic table. (See nice biographical data on Mendeleev....had a tough life. (I like his mum's dying words to him: "Refrain from illusions, insist on work and not on words")).
Mlodinow then moves on to biology with the work of Hooke and Leeuwenhoek under the microscope..and then with a bit of a jump (of around 100 years) to Charles Darwin. Again, we have a rather nice pen portrait of Darwin...who "ended the voyage (of the Beagle) as he had begun it---with no doubts regarding the moral authority of the Bible". I hadn't realised that Darwin had given some of his collections to various experts....and it was the experts who corrected Darwin's misinterpretation of the finch specimens from the Galapagos Island. It was about a year after the Beagle returned ....in the Summer of 1837 that Darwin had become a convert to the idea of evolution. And it was actually Malthus's essay (read by Darwin in Sept 1838) that gave Darwin the glimmering of an idea for a mechanism for evolution. (He claimed in his autobiography that this was an epiphany for him though his notebooks show it took several years before he perceived the mechanism clearly enough to put it down on paper). And there is an interesting summary of Darwin's hesitancy to publish and the shock of Wallace's letter which precipitated "On the origin of species".
Mlodinow then moves into a review about the atom and the contribution of Planck. Like a lot of the prior pen portraits ...he gives a great essay about Planck and his formula for black body radiation. "When he proposed the quantum idea, no-one realised that it was a fundamental principle of nature". And thence to Einstein ... and in 1901, no-one was sufficiently impressed with Einstein's intellect to give him a job that was in any way suited to his abilities. It was his mate's (Marcel Grossman) father who introduced him to the director of the patent office in 1902. (I've always rather loved the idea of Einstein ...as a third class patent clerk...turning out scientific papers on the job...and eventually turning out three revolutionary papers in 1905 that propelled him into a first rate physicist. He considered the paper on relativity the least important. His paper on atoms (or molecules) and brownian motion was an immediate sensation. And his paper on the photo electric effect (and photons) was actually what got him the Nobel prize ...though as late as 1913 Planck et al were writing that Einstein had missed the target with his speculations. But again a great pen portrait of Einstein and his difficulties...he was expelled from high school.
Thence to Rontgen (X rays), Thompson (discovery of the electron), Rutherford (radiation and the nucleus....though it was Hans Geiger who did the hard yards...And an undergraduate who actually measured the large deflections of alpha particles), and Niels Bohr. Again another nice profile for Niels Bohr.....who developed the idea of quantitised orbits for electrons. He got the idea from a friend who mentioned spectroscopy lines. Rutherford criticised the idea on the grounds that the was no mechanism for the electron jump ...what did it consist of and what caused it? Great questions. but no answers. Apparently such questions have no answers.
And thence to Heisenberg....who ignored the pictures of atoms and just focused on mathematical relationships between measurable properties such as frequencies of light and amplitude emitted by atoms and position and velocity. Apparently it was Born and Jordan who translated the ideas into matrix algebra.
And then came Schrodinger in 1926 with his equation (which he soon showed was mathematically equivalent to Heisenberg's matrix). ....and 20 years later Feynman's theory was also equivalent. But it was Paul Dirac who gave the definitive explanation connecting the theories....(though there is no discussion of the mechanism by Mlodinow). A bit of a diversion here into WWII and the roles of the physicists in developing the atom bomb. And then the story sort of falls into a heap and Mlodonow is reminiscing about the death of his dad who was a holocaust survivor. And musing about the fact that the standard model which unifies electromagnetism and two of the nuclear forces...but doesn't account for gravity...so it can't be the whole story. And then of course there is dark matter and dark energy making up the other 95 percent of the universe. So still plenty for scientists to do. And there it ends. A bit lame to my way of thinking ....but he does have those delightful and insightful portraits of some of the key figures in his book. (Not all...and I wondered why some were chosen and others left out .....what about Dirac fo example?)
Overall, as I said at the start, a rather curious book. I give it 3.5 stars. ( )

Leonard Mlodinow's new book is a wonderful journey through the history of humanity. Of course, many books have made that journey, but this one focuses on the development of human intelligence/thought from the earliest stages when human beings were hardly distinguishable from their primate ancestors to the more recent human condition wherein human beings have generated tools which help expand human knowledge and understanding at an awesome rate that continues to accelerate.
Mlodinow's primary focus is on the development of science and scientific thought and he deals with some pretty complex scientific concepts including quantum physics. But molding is a gifted writer who is able to make even the most complex of topics understandable. The book won't make readers into physicists, but it will make them understand the work such scientists do.
What is most enjoyable about the book, however, is the general light tone in which it is written. personal stories, wise cracks, and other uses of personalized mnarative make the book a joy to read and one that the reader can relate to,
My friend gave me this book and all I can say is that gifts like this make me value my friendship even more. ( )