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

by Leonard Mlodinow

Overview

How did a near-extinct species, eking out a meager existence with stone axes, become the dominant power on earth, able to harness a knowledge of nature ranging from tiny atoms to the vast structures of the universe? Leonard Mlodinow takes us on an enthralling tour of the history of human progress, from our time on the African savannah through the invention of written language, all the way to modern quantum physics. Along the way, he explores the colorful personalities of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, and traces the cultural conditions—and the elements of chance—that influenced scientific discovery.

Deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark humor and insight, The Upright Thinkers is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity and an important book for any reader with an interest in the scientific issues of our day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345804433
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	264,128
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Upright Thinkers
1. Our Drive to Know     3
A starving man’s hunger for knowledge . . . The human odyssey of discovery
2. Curiosity        10
Lizards don’t ask questions . . . From Handy Man to Wise, Wise Man . . . What infants ask but chimps don’t
3. Culture          24
Humanity’s first church . . . Knowledge, ideas, and values go viral . . . Human and primate culture
4. Civilization    39
From the savanna 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)
5. Reason          61
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
 
Part II: The Sciences
6. A New Way to Reason      85
Trusting your eyes over your ancestors . . . Castrated boars and universal laws of motion . . . The tactless Professor Galileo
7. The Mechanical Universe        114
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
8. What Things Are Made Of       148
From embalming to alchemy . . . The similarities between burning and breathing . . . Lavoisier loses his head . . . Mendeleev and his periodic table
9. The Animate World     183
Cells and the complexity of life . . . A recipe for making mice and the revolution of the microscope . . . Tragedy, illness, and Darwin’s secret research
 
Part III: Beyond the Human Senses
10. The Limits of Human Experience        215
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
11. The Invisible Realm 247
The insights of a dreamer . . . The crazy ideas of a pale and modest young man . . . The early quantum laws, “awful nonsense, bordering on fraud”
12. The Quantum Revolution       264
Heisenberg’s new physics . . . The bizarre reality of the quantum universe . . . The empowering and humbling legacy of a new science
Epilogue           293
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

Acknowledgments      299
Notes    301
Index      321

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/09/2015
Mlodinow (Subliminal), a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, opens his powerful new book with a story about his father, who as a starving prisoner at Buchenwald once traded his bread for the answer to a riddle. He writes that upon hearing his father’s story, he “realized then that search for knowledge is the most human of all our desires.” That is the recurring theme as Mlodinow follows scientific thought from its birth in prehistoric man to its blossoming in Aristotle, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein, and beyond. He discusses the intransigence of belief in a natural world ruled by gods before Aristotle and the subsequent intransigence of belief in a natural world ruled by too many erroneous Aristotelean precepts. He notes the suffering that can accompany the pursuit of knowledge—such as that of Galileo—as well as the enormous, wordless satisfaction. Breathing new life into science history, he frames narratives of great thinkers with serial scenes of his father’s great courage and curiosity, despite only having a seventh-grade education. Mlodinow’s point has been made before, but rarely so well: the quality that best distinguishes—and honors—humankind is not an ability to answer questions, but that “after millennia of effort,” nothing stops us from asking them. (May)

Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher

12/01/2014
In this bracing scientific history, Caltech physicist Mlodinow shows that science advances when someone asks the questions why and how. Don't worry if quantum physics leaves you quaking. With three New York Times best sellers, Mlodinow knows how to talk to the science-challenged.

Library Journal

★ 2015-02-16
A selective, guided tour of the human accumulation of knowledge from American physicist and former CalTech instructor Mlodinow (Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, 2012, etc.).In this smooth celebration of the human project, the author places a decided emphasis on its cerebral aspects: "The thirst for knowledge is the most human of all our desires." If at times Mlodinow drifts into hubris—"we have shaped our environment to our needs, rather than allowing our environment to shape—or defeat—us"—it can be excused as a byproduct of his enthusiasm, the thrill of deciphering nature's puzzle and appreciating the striking characters who pioneered scientific discoveries. It is an endlessly fascinating story, this ineluctable quest that required getting out of the head's comfort zone and accepting change, and Mlodinow's explanations of often perplexing thinking are easy to digest. He throws out ideas and theories that are consistently thought-provoking—e.g., "Animal brains first evolved for the most primal of reasons: to better enable motion." The author divides the book into three sections: the development of the human mind, touching down at critical junctures; the revolutionary entrance of the hard sciences; and quantum physics, developed thanks to the "brainpower in Central Europe," which Mlodinow fittingly introduces via Tom Stoppard ("It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong"). Though the book has a snug cohesiveness, the author clearly enjoys his role as storyteller, introducing entertaining, illuminating asides—e.g., Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, "had a huge belly," because she was primarily vegetarian; and "fortunately for science, in the Arab world the ruling class did find value in Greek learning." Mlodinow also reacquaints readers with significant characters, from Galileo to Planck, who made the incomprehensible comprehensible.A breathtaking survey of the human mind exponentially accelerating the accumulation of knowledge, from pratfalls to ventures beyond the veil.

Kirkus Reviews