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

Zusatztext 77528468 Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext 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. 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 huma...

Product details

• Authors: Leonard Mlodinow
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 19.04.2016
• EAN: 9780345804433
• ISBN: 978-0-345-80443-3
• No. of pages: 340
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 204 mm x 19 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS
• Subject: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general)