The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

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.”

This book was fun to read, for someone like me who has an interest in the evolution of how we got to be who we are. I appreciate that it is written not in "professor-ese" but in accessible every day English. The author connects the dots, from the earliest ideas humans had about our existence, to modern day quantum theory, and explains how each "break through" thinker (like Aristotle or Newton or Einstein) built off the work of other people and previous work. Also how break throughs in thinking many times included debunking what was previously thought of as empirical truth. All very interesting.

A consummate author who clarifies complex scientific topics with sensitivity for the non technically trained reader. And, his “self effacing” style makes this work eminently readable. My only “quarrel” is the short shrift shown to the contributions of Leibniz who, in fact, shares the development of the calculus with Newton. Moreover, Leibniz proposed a “mathematics “ of logic by which truth or falsity of statements could be determined. Furthermore, the results would be represented by single symbols for either truth or falsity (i.e. the Boolean algebra of the computer?)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.

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

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

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.

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.

I wrote a detailed review and I clicked away and it was gone. I don't have the heart to do it again, so I'll say you will love this book. He picks on his own teenage kids too much, but it's the same old story we love to hear, with enough new material to keep us even happier. Like about Gobeli Teke and the hunter-gathers that built it.Please read QED:The Strange Theory of Light and Matter again -- it matters because it tells you all you are ever going to know about guantum theory. You have to study that because unless your are eighteen and entering graduate school in mathematics, modern physics is a closed door for you (and me)!