"The Upright Thinkers" by Leonard Mlodinow

Details: 

Full Title: The Upright Thinkers - The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. 

Completed on 24th of January 2018 

Rated: Three stars. 

Inspect the whole Physics Shelf -->

Review: 

Combination of science and cultural history. Describes how physics, chemistry and the natural sciences have been transformed from qualitative descriptions to quantitative scientific disciplines, and role of Newton, Mendeleev and Darwin. This is followed up by the description of developments in the quantum theory, and its major contributors. 

Notes: 

A Gobleki Tepe structure appears to be a religious sanctuary and suggests that the spiritual development preceded a settled lifestyle. It was located in the Urfa province in south-eastern Turkey. It was built 11,500 years ago - 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid. It predated the invention of writing. It is made up of circles of the T-shaped pillars up to 5.5 meters high and weighting up to 16 tons. There are various menacing animals carved on the pillars. No traces of human settlement around the structure have been found. Instead the bones of thousands of gazelles and aurochs have been found.

The first Neolithic village has been found in central Turkey around Catalhoyuk. It was built around 7500 BC., a few hundred kilometres west of Gobekli Tepe. It was a home to up to 8,000 people. They buried their dead under the floors of their homes. 

The first example of law dates back to 1750 BC and the Code of Hammurabi issued in Babylonian Empire. The rules were carved onto 2.25 m. high block of black basalt, and now in Louvre. 

City of Miletus is considered the vanguard of the Greek enlightenment. It population was up to 100,000. Among the scholars of Miletus, the first prominent was Thales (624 - 546 B.C.). He adopted Egyptian mathematics and was the first to prove geometric truths. He influenced Pythagoras (570-495 B.C.), who was born on the Greek island of Samos, not far from Miletus. He influenced Plato, who in turn thought Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) - a teacher of Alexander the Great. 

The author suggests that the Greek heritage was discontinued by the Romans, who conquered Greece in 146 B.C. After the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. Christianity dominated and scholarship became focused on religious issues. The medieval period lasted between 500 and 1500 A.D., and was dismissed in the nineteenth century as "a thousand years without a bath". 

The first clock to record hours of equal length was not invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, regardless of the seasons. 

The author presents an interesting explanation of the inverse square gravity law between the two bodies. It was proposed by Halley, who tried to find out some deeper thoughts behind the Kepler laws. It is easily shown on an example of Sun and a planet. The force that emanates from Sun in all directions, so at distance r1 it will have a certain value. If the distance, for example doubles, the same force will be applied to a sphere at 2r1 distance. At r1 the area of the sphere is 4 r12. As r2 is 2r1, the same force will be spread across the area 4 times larger, and will be 4 times smaller for the distance of 2. 

In 1925 Heisenberg built his quantum theory not on any traditional Newtonian "observables" like position and velocity, but instead on the observables that are appropriate to the atomic world, namely the frequencies of light that atoms emit, and the amplitude, or intensity, or those spectral lines. He based his model on matrix algebra with infinite number of columns and rows. 

In 1926 Schrodinger presented his own quantum theory based on waves of matter and energy. This theory was easier to use and based on physics of waves already familiar to the physicists.