Book Recommendations
If you are looking for a last-minute gift, or for something to read over the holiday season, here are some books that I would recommend. The categories are: physics, biology, history/archaeology, political fiction and philosophical/absurdist fiction.
Merry Christmas!
Hidden Unity in Nature’s Laws by John C. Taylor
This is an excellent overview of theoretical physics. It is not pop science, but it is readable, and it does not assume that you have a background in the sciences, just that you are intelligent and can handle a few equations. It goes over all the major theories of physics, and shows how they fit together into the conceptual framework of modern physics.
QED by Richard Feynman
This is a really good introduction to quantum theory. It discusses the observations that quantum theory explains, and then it shows how quantum theory explains those observations. It gives you the empirical basis for quantum theory in everyday observations and simple experiments. If you want a basic understanding of quantum theory, read this book, not some pop-science book on the “multiverse”.
Chaos by James Gleick
I first read this book when I was about 20 years old, and I have probably read it about five times since. It discusses various ideas that have come to be known as “chaos theory” (a bit of an oxymoron). Chaos theory deals with how feedback loops can produce chaos from order, or order from chaos. It applies to things like clouds, storms, turbulence, the growth of plants, the meandering of rivers, population fluctuations, traffic jams, etc. Chaos theory is part of what I call “systems theory”, which means trying to understand complex wholes, not just isolated parts.
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
This book contains a lot of fascinating information and it is an easy read, so I highly recommend it. I think it is the best book ever written on the story of life. It takes you on a pilgrimage back in time along pathways of genetic descent, from a leaf on the tree of life (you) back to the origin of life. As you travel down the tree of life, you are joined by other pilgrims from other branches, and you hear their stories. It is loosely based on The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. By telling the story in this way, going backward in time, Dawkins emphasizes that evolution is not a ladder of progress, but rather a process that generates an explosion of complexity: the tree of life.
Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee
This book makes the case that the Earth is probably a very unusual planet, and that complex life is probably very rare in the cosmos. It describes all the properties of the Earth that make LAWKI (life as we know it) possible, and it argues that those properties might be very rare.
First, there are physical conditions. The planet must be in the right orbit around the right kind of star, in the right part of the galaxy (not in the center). The planet should have enough metals to sustain geological processes and generate a magnetic field. The planet must be the right temperature. It must have some water, but not too much. There must be no sterilizing impacts or other global catastrophes, such as runaway global warming or cooling. Then, there are all the evolutionary steps between a simple bacterium and a species capable of making a rocket ship or a radio telescope.
Read this book and ponder the rarity of the Earth and complex life in the universe.
I also recommend the Earth and Environmental Systems podcast by Christian Shorey. Lectures 43–51 tell the story of the Earth’s past and the evolution of life. They are loosely based on The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins.
In Search of the Indo-Europeans by J. P. Mallory
This book is an overview of the linguistic, archaeological and historic evidence regarding the Indo-Europeans. It mainly deals with the mystery of where they came from.
At some time around 3000 BC, there was a culture of people living somewhere in Eurasia, who spoke a language called “proto-Indo-European” (PIE). That language is the ancestor of almost all the languages of Europe and many languages in Asia, including the Latin languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc.), the Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian), the Germanic languages (German, Dutch, English, Swedish, etc.), the Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton), the Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Bulgarian, etc.), Greek, Armenian, the Iranian languages (Persian, Tajik, Pashto), the Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, etc), and some extinct languages once spoken in Asia, such as Tocharian and Hittite.
We know from linguistic evidence that these languages came from a common root language, which was spoken in some relatively small part of Eurasia. In the distant past, before recorded history, speakers of Indo-European languages spread from their ancestral homeland and occupied most of Europe, India, and large parts of western Asia. They were mixed agriculturalists who kept cattle and horses, had wheeled vehicles and some metal-working ability. They probably were the first domesticators of the horse. It is somewhat speculative where they originated, but the most widely accepted theory is that the Indo-European homeland was on the Eurasian steppe region north of the Black Sea, in what is now part of Ukraine and Russia.
As for why and how they spread, I think it was probably due to some new disease that they were relatively immune to, perhaps because it came from livestock. This is just a guess, but I think a disease depopulated the landscape ahead of them, allowing them to rapidly expand into new areas. Something similar happened in the Americas after European contact in the 1500s, which brings me to my next book.
1491 by Charles C. Mann
This book is about the Americas before Columbus. It argues against the conventional view of the pre-Columbian Americas as a sparsely populated wilderness. Instead, it makes the case that many parts of the Americas were quite densely populated. Most Native Americans were not nomadic hunter-gatherers, living in a wilderness little affected by humanity. They were settled farmers, living in a landscape that had been extensively modified by their activities. The flora and fauna of the Americas were profoundly impacted by the arrival of human beings roughly 15,000 years ago.
When humans first colonized the Americas, many large animals went extinct, including horses, saber tooth cats, mammoths, mastodons, giant beavers, ground sloths, giant armadillos, etc. After an initial population explosion, the human population of the Americas stayed at or near the carrying capacity of the environment for their food production methods.
Agriculture emerged quite early in the Americas, about 6000 years ago. By 1500 AD, most of the Native Americans were farmers, not hunter-gatherers. Even those who practiced hunting and gathering did not simply wander around in the wilderness looking for food. They managed the landscape, mostly with fire, to make it more productive, and used various methods to reliably harvest wild foods.
Some parts of the book are a bit speculative or exaggerated, but its basic point is true and important: the Americas were fairly densely populated prior to European contact, and they were rapidly depopulated by disease between 1500 and 1700 AD. The die-off of the human population created the wilderness that later explorers (but not early explorers) encountered. Even prior to the modern era, human beings profoundly affected ecosystems.
Ecological Imperialism by Alfred W. Crosby
This book tells the story of the recent spread of Europeans, especially the conquest of the Americas, from an ecological perspective. It is a like a better and shorter version of Guns, Germs, and Steel. It describes how European colonizers brought an entire ecological package with them, which included diseases, crops, animals and various other hitchhikers, and how this changed the ecology of the colonized areas, especially the Americas. It was not just white people who colonized the Americas; it was also cattle, pigs, horses, earthworms, honeybees, wheat, peaches and many other species. The landscape of the Americas was profoundly changed by the introduction of new species.
This book also explains how the European development of wind power and sailing technology led to world conquest. Europeans learned how to use the trade winds to navigate around the world in sailing ships. Without tapping into this natural energy source, long distance trade would not have been economical, and Europeans would not have colonized the New World. But they did, and now the Americas, Australia and New Zealand are “Neo-Europes” ecologically and culturally.
The Enemy at the Gate by Andrew Wheatcroft
This book tells the story of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. It also describes the preceding expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, and the subsequent reconquest of Eastern Europe, which was led mainly by the Austro-Hungarian alliance. It contains a lot of detailed information, but is also very readable.
The book contains excellent descriptions of warfare. I find it fascinating how they fought in those days, with a combination of guns, bombs, swords, spears, trenches, tunneling under fortress walls to blow them up, horse charges and even a precursor to barbed wire: a movable fence with boar spears sticking out of it.
The Turks tried again and again to breach the walls of Vienna by tunneling underneath and exploding bombs. Vienna was defended by a small force of determined men, fighting in the rubble of their defensive walls. The climactic final battle of the siege involved German foot-soldiers marching down a hillside and fighting entrenched Turks with swords and muskets, while a Polish cavalry force struggled down a wooded hillside onto an open plain, and then charged into a hail of gunfire and arrows, smashing into the Turkish host with their lances.
It’s a great story.
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
This work of political/psychological fiction deals with the intersection of the personal and the political. It shows that the political debates and struggles of our time are not that different from those that occurred over a century ago. It also shows how political beliefs often have more personal motivations.
It is set in London in the early 1900s, before WWI. It centers on a group of anarcho-communist revolutionaries, who are plotting to commit terrorist acts. It deals with the underlying motives of political action, which are personal and rather mundane. It deals with the hypocrisy and self-deception of human nature. It is a very dark, tragic book, in which there are no good guys and no glory, just people motivated by varying degrees of self-interest and hatred.
If you are interested in Ted Kaczynski, you should know that this was one of his favorite books. To some extent, he was inspired by a character in the book: the professor. The professor is working on a perfect detonation device. He goes around wired to explode at a moment’s notice, should the police try to arrest him. The professor is an interesting character, although peripheral to the story. He is inspired almost entirely by hatred of the world, with only a thin veneer of ideology.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
This is a comedic novel set in the early 1960s in New Orleans. It also deals with the intersection of the personal and the political. The main character is Ignatius Reilly, a fat NEET in revolt against the modern world. He lives with his mother, and spends his time writing philosophical treatises. The book tells the story of his misadventures dealing with reality.
His mother wants him to get a job. He tries various low-status professions, and fails at all of them. He has a long-distance love-hate relationship with a New York Jewish communist girl named Myra Minkoff. Essentially, he is a fedora-tipping reactionary, and she is an SJW. The book demonstrates that these stereotypes existed before the internet. Both characters are self-absorbed and almost completely oblivious to reality. They are spoiled children who failed to grow up, and instead live in a fantasy world in which they are heroic rebels, fighting on opposing sides.
It’s a very funny book.
Sadly, the author committed suicide, after failing to publish his book. It was only by the efforts of his mother that it was eventually published.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
I’m a big Lewis Carroll fan. His books are often considered to be for children, but adults will get more out of them. Lewis Carroll used the format of a children’s story to play with ideas, including problems of philosophy and psychology. In Wonderland, the presuppositions of ordinary life and ordinary discourse are not assumed, and so almost every conversation or situation involves some philosophical conundrum. Absurdist literature makes us aware of our ordinary assumptions by violating them.
In the first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice falls down a rabbit-hole into a strange world, which seems to have very different rules of causation. She meets a variety of strange creatures in this world, and has some very strange adventures. In the second book, Through the Looking Glass, Alice enters a strange world through a mirror, and has equally strange experiences. Both stories are framed as the dreams of a very imaginative little girl. However, the stories contain many ideas that are outside the knowledge of a little girl, such as philosophical paradoxes, political satire, etc.
There are claims that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile, although there is no evidence that he molested or harmed anyone. He did befriend several young girls, which seems creepy by modern standards. (Moral norms were different back then.) The Alice character was based on a young girl, Alice Liddell, who was 10 at the time he wrote the first story. The details of his inner life are unknown, but he was a shy, boyish man who never married. So, it is possible that he had pedophilic desires, but that doesn’t affect the merits of his writing, which has no sexual subtext that I can see.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series by Douglas Adams
This is another work of philosophical/absurdist fiction. It is a trilogy of 5 books that tells the story of Arthur Dent, an ordinary Englishman, who discovers one day that his best friend is from Betelgeuse and the Earth is about to destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. He escapes with his friend by sneaking aboard one of the destroyer ships, and they go on to have various random adventures throughout space and time. Randomness is a big part of the story, and it is one of the recurring themes of the book.
Douglas Adams conceived of the idea for the story when he was on a hitchhiking trip around Europe. He was lying in a field one night, somewhat drunk, looking up at the stars, and he wondered what it would be like to hitchhike through space. Hitchhiking is a metaphor for a random journey. The story is a random journey through time and space. It is also a random journey through ideas.
In a way, it is like an existentialist novel, such as The Stranger by Camus, or Nausea by Sartre. It deals with the absurdity of life and the human condition: that we are thrown into existence without an explicit raison d’etre or instruction manual. We exist and we have to deal with existence.
Arthur Dent is lost. He has no home to go back to, and nowhere else to go. He is just wandering around. He has a guidebook, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is something like Wikipedia as an e-book. (Douglas Adams anticipated both the e-book and Wikipedia.) However, the guidebook doesn’t tell you where to go or what to do. It just provides you with some information about where you are and the various places that you could go.
The main theme of the story is nihilism: the absence of a rational basis for life. The nihilism of Adam’s worldview is seen in the running joke about the question to the ultimate answer of life, the universe, and everything. The joke is that the answer is known to be 42, but no one knows what the question is.
The story begins as an absurdist comedy, and ends as an absurdist tragedy. Or perhaps it starts as a tragic comedy and ends as a comic tragedy. I think that is the natural arc of nihilism. Nihilism can be liberating and fun when you are young, but eventually it leads to despair.
The story is also a satire on human nature and modern society. Adams makes fun of human self-importance, bureaucracy, politics, religion, technology, academia and many other things. It is a very funny book.
Douglas Adams started writing the first book in his mid twenties, and he finished the last book when he was 40. To some extent, you can trace the outline of his life in the story. He died when he was only 49. I was stunned and saddened when I heard about his death.
Of course, I also recommend my books. Futurist Fantasies is an easy read and would make a good gift for someone interested in science and futurism. Debunking the Selfish Gene is a more challenging book on evolution and biological purpose. On the Edge and Immanentizing the Abyss are collections of essays on various topics.
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