Leonard Mlodinow. (2015). The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Leonard Mlodinow. 2015. The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Leonard Mlodinow, The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Leonard Mlodinow. The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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keywords

1. • value: History of Science
2. • value: Biography
3. • value: Physics
4. • value: Nature
5. • value: autobiographies
6. • value: Stephen Hawking
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9. • value: critical thinking
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11. • value: Theoretical Physics
12. • value: extinction
13. • value: bestsellers
14. • value: biographies
15. • value: Tech
16. • value: History
17. • value: subliminal
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19. • value: science books
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21. • value: biographies of famous people
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25. • value: science books for adults
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27. • value: The Grand Design
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Mlodinow, Leonard
   • bioText: 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.
   • name: Leonard Mlodinow

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2015-05-05T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Upright Thinkers

fullDescription

A few million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and began to stand upright, freeing our hands to create tools and our minds to grapple with the world around us.
 
Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, he presents a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today’s technological world.
 
Along the way he explores the cultural conditions that influenced scientific thought through the ages and the colorful personalities of some of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers: Galileo, who preferred painting and poetry to medicine and dropped out of university; Isaac Newton, who stuck needlelike bodkins into his eyes to better understand changes in light and color; and Antoine Lavoisier, who drank nothing but milk for two weeks to examine its effects on his body. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and many lesser-known but equally brilliant minds also populate these pages, each of their stories showing how much of human achievement can be attributed to the stubborn pursuit of simple questions (why? how?), bravely asked.
 
The Upright Thinkers is a book for science lovers and for anyone interested in creative thinking and in our ongoing quest to understand our world. At once deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark wit, this insightful work is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity.
 
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time
   • content: "Mlodinow never fails to make science both accessible and entertaining."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Marcia Bartusiak, The Washington Post
   • content: "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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Alan Hirshfeld, The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Mlodinow is an engaging narrator who leavens the proceedings with a mischievous wit."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Louise Fabiani, The American Scholar
   • content: "An inspiring, exciting exploration of how our very inquisitive species has attempted to comprehend the cosmos."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Nature
   • content: "An audacious encapsulation of our species' trek from savannah to city."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Financial Times (London)
   • content: "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."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
   • content: "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."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Ray Olson, Booklist
   • content: "[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."
9. • premium: False
   • source: David Eagleman, PhD, Neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
   • content: "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."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Library Journal
    • content: "[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."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
    • content: "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."
12. • premium: False
    • source: V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    • content: "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."
13. • premium: False
    • source: David Christian, co-author of Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, and professor, Macquarie University, Sydney
    • content: "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."
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 9, 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.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 1, 2015
      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.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 15, 2015
      Mlodinow, Stephen Hawking's sometime coauthor (A Briefer History of Time, 2005; The Grand Design, 2010) and fellow physicist, is a whiz of a popular-science writer, as this amazingly compact yet satisfying history of technical and scientific discovery attests. Spanning from Homo habilis noticing that certain stones could be split to make scraping blades to the questions of physics, chemistry, and biology that remain to be either answered or retired, the book's scope is breathtaking, though its pace never seems so. Attending to the real people involved in the story he tells, and gifted with a knack for inserting a personal anecdote, a biographical tidbit, or a laugh line just when one is needed, Mlodinow never bores or exhausts. His structuring of the book is also exemplary. It's in three sections, the first ranging from H. habilis to Aristotle and the formalization of reason, the second from Renaissance cosmology to Darwin, and the third from Planck's and Einstein's invention of the quantum onward. Amateur science mavens couldn't ask for a better brief, introductory text.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 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.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A few million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and began to stand upright, freeing our hands to create tools and our minds to grapple with the world around us.
 
Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, he presents a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today’s technological world.
 
Along the way he explores the cultural conditions that influenced scientific thought through the ages and the colorful personalities of some of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers: Galileo, who preferred painting and poetry to medicine and dropped out of university; Isaac Newton, who stuck needlelike bodkins into his eyes to better understand...

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