The Upright Thinkers

Title: The Upright Thinkers – The human journey from living in trees to understanding the cosmos
Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Penguin, 2016 (First published 2015)
ISBN: 9780141981017
Pages: 340

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is so comprehensible”, said Stephen Hawking. There are two points here. One is that the profundity of the universe can be understood by the tiny electrical pathways in the brain of a developed ape species that is man. The second point is more inscrutable. Why, among the millions of living or dead species, Homo sapiens is the only genre which can think about its origins and its place in the world? This book is the story of the development of thought and how it went about redefining man’s position in the race for survival. The search for knowledge is the most human of all our desires. Man is a born thinker. The first two parts of the book summarizes the history of human intellect and the growth of science – with special reference to physics. It expounds how knowledge of the things which we can actually observe developed, following Newton’s methods. The final part deals with concepts that can’t be seen, felt or even where its reality is suspect – such as quantum objects. Leonard Mlodinow is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician, screen writer and author. In physics, he is known for his work on approximating the spectrum of atoms and the quantum theory of light.

The early part of the book explains the evolution of humans and what led to the growth of their thinking ability. Nature invested its resources in developing the human brain. Chimps and bonobos are very muscular and have the ability to pull with a force exceeding 550 kg. They also have sharp and rugged teeth to tear with ease through hard nutshells. Man is not endowed with any of these extraordinary facilities, but his brain is exceptionally gifted. The human brain, which accounts for only 2 per cent of the body weight, consumes nearly 20 per cent of the energy a body absorbs. This investment on brain helped us make thinkers who ask questions. Only humans exhibit the quest to understand its own existence. Late Paleolithic and early Neolithic people turned their focus away from mere survival and toward non-essential truths about themselves and their surroundings. This was one of the most meaningful steps in the history of human intellect. Instead of simply believing that somebody or something is at the root of happenings in this world, the early intellectuals stumbled upon the theory that natural forces are behind them. Understanding nature in terms of laws was a new mode of thinking that revolutionized the life of societies. To look at the workings of nature and infer the underlying abstract principle was an enormous advance in human development.

Mlodinow talks about the development of rational thinking in ancient Greece that was channeled to late-medieval Europe through translations made by Arabic scholars. In sixth century BCE, a group of Greek revolutionary thinkers came up with a rational approach to nature, which was claimed to be an ordered entity, and not at chaos. Knowledge was imparted from a master to his disciples directly. The term ‘academy’ owes its origin to the institution run by Plato. The middle ages saw the rise of religion and the eclipse of institutions of high learning. Europe started its dreary stroll through the dark ages. Learning was rekindled among the enfolding darkness by universities that sprang up here and there under the watch of a benign monarch. Scholars needed to be saved from the demands of daily toil to feed their families and to provide them with a pecuniary resource in return for the ‘thoughts’ they expended to push the envelope of useful knowledge at the societal level. Early universities were far different from what they are today. A statute in thirteenth century Germany forbade senior students from drenching freshmen with urine. Professors were paid directly by students, who could also hire and fire them. Students fined their professors for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions. If a lecture was not interesting or proceeded too slowly or quickly, they’d jeer and become rowdy. Leipzig town passed a rule against throwing stones at professors!

Human awareness reached its pinnacle in its quest for knowledge with the development of scientific thought after Renaissance. Falsifiability being one of the critical norms of scientific genuineness, many scientists’ work must inevitably end in failures or dead ends. Still, they are exhorted not to fear taking risks or to explore fields not frequented by others. The author advises the scientists to shed the anxiety of being wrong. Any innovator goes down more dead ends than glorious boulevards. To be afraid to take a wrong turn is to guarantee not going anywhere interesting. The book describes about the little known aspect of Newton’s experimentation with alchemy. Even though it ultimately ended in failure, the knowledge collected and documented by Newton helped to advance the experimental methods of various chemicals. There are many crazy schemes, even in modern science, that were proved wrong. The wrong ones are quickly forgotten and the time put into them having ultimately been wasted. Often we call the proponents of these schemes failures or crackpots. But heroism is about taking risks. Mlodinow highlights the factor that helped foster the scientific quest. Science had to overcome the natural human tendencies to feel that we are special and that deities or magic govern the world. That meant overcoming the God-centric doctrine of the church and the human-centric theories of Aristotle. The book illustrates several instances where the theories of Aristotle proved to be the bigger hurdles to innovation than religion. In the end, the author summarizes that it is a fine line that separates an outlandish, crackpot project and an innovative idea that changes everything.

The book then examines the development of the modern disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology based on the lives of the pioneering spirits of each stream. Galileo set the ball rolling in the sixteenth century, followed by glorious stars in the constellation such as Newton, Dalton, Mendeleev, Darwin and Einstein. The biographic sketches are refreshingly updated but the content is essentially the same as one could obtain from any book on popular science. What Mlodinow emphasizes is that these men were not superhuman, but possessed normal human fallibilities. Their life is portrayed as something that is fit for emulation rather than restricted to adoration or even worship in extreme cases.

This text nicely explains the limitations of Newton’s theory of classical mechanics and concludes that it is plain wrong when the domain is as small as the inside of an atom or as big as the gravitational neighbourhood of a star. In the first case, quantum theory has replaced Newtonian mechanics while in the latter, Einstein’s general relativity is the only theory to reach the truth. The inadequacy of Newton’s theory became apparent in failing to explain the phenomenon of black-body radiation which is narrated in detail. The book maintains a personal touch by elegantly roping in the comments made by the author’s late father whose remarks which appeared naïve at first sight exhibited a facet of truth and insight. The senior Mlodinow was tortured in the concentration camps on account of being Jewish and narrowly escaped death when his native country of Poland was run over by the Nazis. He didn't have much education, yet had the wisdom to accept facts foreign to him but process them in the right way. Even if you forgot all the arguments of the author on science, chances are that you are likely to remember some of the expressions or at least the attitude, of his father to science.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star