Book Recommendations

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.

QED by Richard Feynman

This is a really good introduction to quantum theory. 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. I have read it several times since, and I get more out of it every time. It discusses various ideas that together have come to be known as “chaos theory” (which is somewhat 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 is an excellent book on the story of life. It is long, but it is an easy read. 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.

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 type of star in the right part of the galaxy (not in the center). It must have enough metals to sustain geological processes and generate a magnetic field. It 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.

If those physical conditions are satisfied, life can arise and persist for a long time. But is evolution likely to produce something like the human species? There are many evolutionary steps along the way from bacteria to a species that can make a rocket ship, and some might be serendipitous.

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.

Around 3000 BC, somewhere in Eurasia, there was a culture that we now call "proto-Indo-European". This culture had a language, which is also called "proto-Indo-European. Almost all European languages sprang from that root, and so did many Asian languages. Proto-Indo-European is the ancestor of 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.

Of course, a culture is more than just a language. The proto-Indo-Europeans had a religion which seems to be ancestral to the pagan religions of ancient Europe. They had a tripartite division of labor within society: priests, warriors and farmers. They kept cattle, rode horses and grew grain. They had wheeled vehicles. They did some metal-working.

There are two great mysteries about the proto-Indo-Europeans:

• Where did they come from?
• Why and how did they expand across Eurasia, replacing and/or absorbing other people/cultures?

For the first question, the most widely accepted answer 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, my guess is that they carried a disease that they were relatively immune to, but other populations were susceptible to. Perhaps this disease came from cattle, and the Indo-European habit of drinking milk provided some immunity to it. Something similar happened in the Americas after European contact, leading to the second great expansion of the Indo-European languages. That brings me to the 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 pristine wilderness. 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.

See The Peopling of the Americas.

Agriculture emerged quite early in the Americas, around 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 they used various methods to reliably harvest wild foods.

Some parts of the book are a bit speculative, but the 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. Think of it as a much 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. Ecosystems were profoundly affected by the introduction of new species.

The book also explains the importance of wind power and sailing technology in the European expansion. This natural energy source made long-distance travel economical. It allowed Europeans to explore and colonize the the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, where they created cultural and ecological “neo-Europes”.

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 is packed with information, and yet very readable.

The book has detailed 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 book is political/psychological fiction, which focuses on the intersection of the personal and the political. It shows that the political issues of our time are not that different from those of a century ago. It also shows how political beliefs often involve hidden, personal motives.

The setting is London in the early 1900s, before WWI. The story revolves around a group of anarcho-communists who are plotting terrorist acts. But they are not motivated purely by political ideals. They have petty, personal motives.

The book exposes 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, in case 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. Like The Secret Agent, it 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. Of course, he lives with his mother, who supports him, while he spends his time writing philosophical treatises.

His mother wants him to get a job. Ignatius 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 assumptions of ordinary life are often violated, 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, 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 when 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. The author described it as a trilogy of 5 books. Together, they tell the story of Arthur Dent, an ordinary Englishman, who one day discovers that his best friend is from Betelgeuse, and that 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 had 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’être 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. There is a 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. 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 20s. 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.