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When molecular biologist Max Delbrück received the Nobel Prize in 1969, he rejoiced but also had a lament. Samuel Beckett’s contributions to literature, which were honored at the same time, seemed to Max universally accessible, unlike his own. In his Nobel lecture, he imagined his imprisonment in an ivory tower of science. “The books of the great scientists,” he said, “are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers.”
That said, most of my favorite books are by physicists trying to make some communicable sense out of a quantum reality that cannot really be understood. There comes a time, in reading this type of book, when I think I’m about to get it, and then I realize I don’t understand it at all. Maybe I like the befuddled feeling and the assurance from the authors that nobody else really understands it either.
In The End of Time, for instance, Julian Barbour argues that time as we know it does not exist. It is a faulty perception, similar to our perception that the world is flat. In a twist on the Copernican revolution, Barbour portrays a silent world devoid of action, where nothing, neither heavens nor Earth, moves. David Bohm, in a classic called Wholeness and the Implicate Order, suggests rather convincingly that the structure of our language is what prevents us from being aware that nothing actually happens here. Bohm’s philosophy was way out there (he had a cult of devotees when he died), and you should come away from this book doubting your sanity.
Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos’s book, The Non-Local Universe, skillfully lures you to confront the same kind of madness, if you don’t instead pitch it into the nearest body of deep water. To appreciate this book, you must accept the disturbing fact that things can be immediately and intimately connected to each other even if they are light-years apart. In other words, there is nothing that corresponds to our classical concept of geometric distance, and every particle in existence since the so-called (and probably not singular) Big Bang is, in a way, the same stinking particle.
Dean Radin’s book, Entangled Minds, extends this diabolical puzzle to extrasensory perception. ESP usually implies people sensing what has happened to a loved one thousands of miles away, but Radin describes something different: mind influencing matter. For the Global Consciousness Project, scientists set up 36 computer programs running separately, in different labs scattered around the earth, whose job is to generate random numbers. They do this by timing the decay of radioactive nuclei, which any physicist will agree occurs at random. Yet the results seem to be inexplicably affected by worldwide psychological reactions, like the ones sparked by the horrible events of 9/11. That is, they become less random—an effect analogous to a coin toss turning up heads many, many times in a row. Radin describes this as an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in. I know Radin, and I know he’s not intentionally fooling himself or anybody else.
Books like Radin’s doggedly pursue scientific evidence for ideas that have been widely, but unreasonably, discredited for decades, or even centuries. Fortunately, scientists (at least in the Western world) no longer get confined to quarters or excommunicated for their books. But when an author puts himself on the line by embracing an unfashionable idea, even though he is guaranteed to generate scorn or indifference, this should somehow be recognized.
Moving toward biology, Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene made a lot of people uncomfortable by suggesting that our genes are not really ours and that they have no serious interest in us except as convenient vessels in which they can copy themselves. Minor errors in the copying process are what give natural selection room to operate. The novelty here is that the genes do the evolving, not us. This was a little difficult for people with a humanistic bent to swallow, but most of them have washed it down with a great many bottles of Scotch by now, and the arguments have faded.
I also recommend Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which may be the finest examples of the philosophical literature of our times. I recently watched an old Monty Python skit that portrayed a soccer match between philosophers from Greece and Germany. Archimedes, Heidegger, Kant, Socrates, Nietzsche—all contemplate the ball thoughtfully, murmuring, but nobody kicks it. Finally Archimedes, with a flash of insight (Eureka!), kicks the ball, and the Greeks win. Daniel Dennett, in his recent book Breaking the Spell, kicks the ball. He wants to know why we do not have the privilege to question other people’s personal religious convictions. He doesn’t say it with venom, and he is careful to avoid stating directly that, after much sincere questioning, many of us find certain religious beliefs socially destructive and morally repugnant.
I’d like to conclude with one of my favorite books, Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS, by Harvey Bialy, about the career of scientist Peter Duesberg. Though centered on one man, it speaks to issues of power in the scientific establishment that will outlive Bialy and his hero. Duesberg recanted his own much-celebrated theory of how cancers form—a theory that earned him the California Scientist of the Year Award—when he eventually saw the arithmetic illogic in it. Scientists don’t generally do this. I can’t think of a single one, including Einstein, who, when confronted with all the reasons in the world to back off from a bad position, ever did, except for Duesberg. As Bialy describes it, everybody cared about cancer, but the only man who understood that it was not caused by oncogenes was scorned by his peers for changing his mind. Bialy fills his book with direct quotes, allowing a number of the unsavory characters in this story to hoist themselves by their own inelegant petards. In the courage of both scientist and author, I see greatness.
Nobel laureate Kary B. Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction.
1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie]
One of the most delightful, witty, and beautifully written of all natural histories, The Voyage of the Beagle recounts the young Darwin's 1831 to 1836 trip to South America, the Galápagos Islands, Australia, and back again to England, a journey that transformed his understanding of biology and fed the development of his ideas about evolution. Fossils spring to life on the page as Darwin describes his adventures, which include encounters with "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, an accidental meal of a rare bird in Patagonia (which was then named in Darwin's honor), and wobbly attempts to ride Galápagos tortoises.
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Yet Darwin's masterwork is, undeniably, The Origin of Species, in which he introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection. Prior to its publication, the prevailing view was that each species had existed in its current form since the moment of divine creation and that humans were a privileged form of life, above and apart from nature. Darwin's theory knocked us from that pedestal. Wary of a religious backlash, he kept his ideas secret for almost two decades while bolstering them with additional observations and experiments. The result is an avalanche of detail—there seems to be no species he did not contemplate—thankfully delivered in accessible, conversational prose. A century and a half later, Darwin's paean to evolution still begs to be heard: "There is grandeur in this view of life," he wrote, that "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
"The most important science book of all time. Darwin revolutionized our understanding of life, the relationship of humanity to all creatures in the world, and the mythological foundation of all religions." —geneticist Lee M. Silver, Princeton University
3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)
Dramatic is an unlikely word for a book that devotes half its pages to deconstructions of ellipses, parabolas, and tangents. Yet the cognitive power on display here can trigger chills.
 Courtesy of Andrew Dunn |
Principia marks the dawn of modern physics, beginning with the familiar three laws of motion ("To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction" is the third). Later Newton explains the eccentric paths of comets, notes the similarity between sound waves and ripples on a pond, and makes his famous case that gravity guides the orbit of the moon as surely as it defines the arc of a tossed pebble. The text is dry but accessible to anyone with a high school education—an opportunity to commune with perhaps the top genius in the history of science.
"You don't have to be a Newton junkie like me to really find it gripping. I mean how amazing is it that this guy was able to figure out that the same force that lets a bird poop on your head governs the motions of planets in the heavens? That is towering genius, no?" —psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, Cornell University
4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)
 Courtesy of the University of Chicago |
Pope Urban VIII sanctioned Galileo to write a neutral treatise on Copernicus's new, sun-centered view of the solar system. Galileo responded with this cheeky conversation between three characters: a supporter of Copernicus, an educated layman, and an old-fashioned follower of Aristotle. This last one—a dull thinker named Simplicio—represented the church position, and Galileo was soon standing before the Inquisition. Galileo comes across as a masterful raconteur; his discussions of recent astronomical findings in particular evoke an electrifying sense of discovery. The last section, in which he erroneously argues that ocean tides prove Earth is in motion, is fascinatingly shoddy by comparison. Galileo, trying to deliver a fatal blow to the church's Aristotelian thinking, got tripped up by his own faith in an idea he was sure was true but couldn't prove.
"It's not only one of the most influential books in the history of the world but a wonderful read. Clear, entertaining, moving, and often hilarious, it showed early on how science writing needn't be stuffy." —cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Harvard University
5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)
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Copernicus waited until he was on his deathbed to publish this volume, then prefaced it with a ring-kissing letter to Pope Paul III explaining why the work wasn't really heresy. No furor actually ensued until long after Copernicus's death, when Galileo's run-in with the church landed De Revolutionibus on the Inquisition's index of forbidden books (see #4, above). Copernicus, by arguing that Earth and the other planets move around the sun (rather than everything revolving around Earth), sparked a revolution in which scientific thought first dared to depart from religious dogma. While no longer forbidden, De Revolutionibus is hardly user-friendly. The book's title page gives fair warning: "Let no one untrained in geometry enter here."
6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)
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By contrast, Aristotle placed Earth firmly at the center of the cosmos, and viewed the universe as a neat set of nested spheres. He also mistakenly concluded that things move differently on Earth and in the heavens. Nevertheless, Physica,Aristotle's treatise on the nature of motion, change, and time, stands out because in it he presented a systematic way of studying the natural world—one that held sway for two millennia and led to modern scientific method.
"Aristotle opened the door to the empirical sciences, in contrast to Platonism's love of pure reason. You cannot overestimate his influence on the West and the world." —bioethicist Arthur Caplan, University of Pennsylvania
7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)
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In 1543, the same year that Copernicus's De Revolutionibusappeared, anatomist Andreas Vesalius published the world's first comprehensive illustrated anatomy textbook. For centuries, anatomists had dissected the human body according to instructions spelled out by ancient Greek texts. Vesalius dispensed with that dusty methodology and conducted his own dissections, reporting findings that departed from the ancients' on numerous points of anatomy. The hundreds of illustrations, many rendered in meticulous detail by students of Titian's studio, are ravishing.
(Available on CD-ROM.)
(Available on CD-ROM.)
8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916)
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Albert Einstein's theories overturned long-held notions about bodies in motion. Time and space, he showed, are not absolutes. A moving yardstick shrinks in flight; a clock mounted on that yardstick runs slow. Relativity, written for those not acquainted with the underlying math, reveals Einstein as a skillful popularizer of his ideas. To explain the special theory of relativity, Einstein invites us on board a train filled with rulers and clocks; for the more complex general theory, we career in a cosmic elevator through empty space. As Einstein warns in his preface, however, the book does demand "a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader."