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Gravity’s Kiss: The detection of gravitational waves by Harry Collins, MIT Press
On 14 September 2015, scientists detected ripples in space-time, confirming a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity. There’s no shortage of books celebrating the find, but Collins, a sociologist of science at Cardiff University, UK, has followed the hunt for gravitational waves for over 40 years. This book should crown his efforts to understand how humans use science to grapple with the edges of the knowable world.
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One Thousand and One Fossils: Discoveries in the desert at Al Gharbia, United Arab Emirates by Faysal Bibi, Andrew Hill and Mark Beech, Yale University Press
Berlin-based palaeontologist Faysal Bibi and his co-authors reveal a world of lush greenery some 7 million years ago, when Arabia’s Empty Quarter was full of all manner of mammals, now lost. It promises to be a scholarly volume, but is packed with colour photographs and meticulous reconstructions. Perfect for armchair time travellers.
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary scientists and a Siberian tale of jump-started evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, University of Chicago Press
In the late 1950s, Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev set out to trace how domestication alters wild animals. In a country that had outlawed genetics for a decade, his cover was that he was breeding foxes for the fur trade. His investigation was an extraordinary success: within just two or three generations, Belyaev’s fox cubs were beginning to behave more like dogs, wagging their tails and eagerly licking the researchers. US evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin and Soviet geneticist Lyudmila Trut explore the experiment’s implications.
“Within just two or three generations, Belyaev’s fox cubs were beginning to behave more like dogs”
The Imagineers of War: The untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that changed the world by Sharon Weinberger, Knopf
Many of us have a vague idea about the internet having its roots in defence spending, but no hard specifics about the agency involved. This is it: the covert Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has shaped technology and war in secret for nearly 60 years, providing solutions to Pentagon challenges. The astonishing story, told by a journalist, reeks of the cold war. The internet aside, DARPA’s “successes” (Agent Orange, self-driving cars) depend on perspective. Its failures are easier to agree about: who on earth proposed powering a missile-seeking particle beam by draining the Great Lakes?
Your Brain is a Time Machine: The neuroscience and physics of time by Dean Buonomano, W. W. Norton
Our experience of time is not the same as time itself; the former is largely our creation. French philosopher Henri Bergson once publicly debated this point with Einstein – and lost. If only he’d had recourse to this book, written by one of the first neuroscientists to ask how the human brain encodes time. Take that, Albert!
Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds by Cordelia Fine, Icon Books
With all deep and bloody controversies (racial differences, IQ, male vs female smarts, etc.), it is vital to keep up with the nuances of the latest research. Good writers such as Cordelia Fine remind us of that, and she finds engaging ways to serve it up – while we wait for the consensus to shift.
Beyond Infinity: An expedition to the outer limits of the mathematical universe by Eugenia Cheng, Hachette
As ideas go, they don’t get bigger and more beguiling than infinity, with everyone from Zeno (paradoxes) to Georg Cantor (infinite sets of different sizes) weighing in. Mathematician Eugenia Cheng, author of How to Bake π , takes us on a journey, checking in first at Hilbert’s Hotel, that most unrestful of thought experiments. It will be interesting to see what Cheng makes of that other little symbol:∞.
How Language Began: The story of humanity’s greatest invention by Daniel L. Everett, Liveright
The recent rush for the new frontier in the study of language (Vyvyan Evans’s evolutionary account, and Tom Wolfe’s bravura takedown of linguistics giant Noam Chomsky) gathers pace this year with a book by Daniel Everett, the man Wolfe called an “instant folk hero”. Everett, no believer in language instincts, argues that Homo erectus invented language and symbols, and that culture and language together are the pillars of human cognition.
Deep Thinking: Where machine intelligence ends and human creativity begins by Garry Kasparov, John Murray
When the Russian world chess champion Gary Kasparov lost to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue in May 1997, he inspired a generation to take up chess. The focus of his new book is the odd, sometimes painful, yet potentially fertile relationship between people and their machines. Given a second career as a human rights activist, Kasparov’s take on AI may make a welcome change from those disruptive, let-them-eat-cake pronouncements from Silicon Valley.
Another Economy is Possible: Culture and economy in a time of crisis by Manuel Castells, Polity
Since economics is something humans do, it is bound to be shaped by culture. In theory, the greater the diversity of cultures, the more kinds of economics that are possible. So says network and information theorist Manuel Castells, who cites the post-crisis flowering of co- ops, barter networks, ethical banking, and novel currencies that paved the way for sharing economies based on crashing a libertarian, entrepreneurial spirit with IT. Hopefully, if Castells is right about diversity, other kinds of innovation will soon flourish alongside the flawed sharing economies.
Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, fevers and the fate of population by Anthony McMichael, Oxford University Press
This is big-picture thinking by Tony Michael, a leading epidemiologist and pioneer in the field of how human health and societies are connected to climate change. It’s largely a history of human survival in the face of unpredictable, unstable climates. Think famine, pestilence, war and conquest – or more precisely, barbarian invasions of Rome, the Black Death in medieval Europe, the Irish potato famine ad nauseam. Who knows what comes next? Luckily, as McMichael’s quote for the final chapter (on the future) reminds us: “Where humans are concerned, trend is not destiny”. Let’s hope not, in a good way.
Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions by Alexander Todorov, Princeton University Press
No one will be surprised to learn that first impressions count. This book explores the much less well-publicised fact that they’re rubbish. We make better decisions when we don’t look at faces at all! So why are we hard-wired to take those glances across a crowded room so seriously?
The Emoji Code: How thumbs-ups, smiley faces and hearts shape our language by Vyvyan Evans, Michael O’Mara
Six billion emojis are sent every single day – and yet some people still think they don’t qualify as language, lol. You may think Vyvyan Evans, best known for his trenchant criticisms of Noam Chomsky’s concept of a “language instinct”, is taking a light-hearted break here. Yet the questions posed here are huge. What is a language? When and how do pictograms acquire grammar? And might emojis be the first truly successful committee-generated language?
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How culture made the human mind by Kevin Laland, Princeton University Press
The role of culture in human evolution (and especially in the development of cognitive skills such as language) has been the ultimate question for some evolutionary thinkers. Kevin Laland has long argued that culture is not just the terrific end product of an evolutionary process, but that it is a key driver of it: more of a reciprocal causation relationship than chicken and egg. A deep account of the relationship between culture and the human mind is now emerging, with The Secret of our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich blazing a trail in late 2015. Here Laland adds important layers to this new understanding.
Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds by Mary Shelley, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn and Jason Scott Robert, MIT Press
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the ultimate tales of scientific hubris. Finished 200 years ago in 1817, all human society has now become Victor, her “modern Prometheus”. We sanction tampering in all areas – from adding prosthetics to save/improve lives and growing new organs to making babies from three parents and trying to live forever. This edition of Frankenstein pairs the original version published in 1818 with annotations and essays by academics and writers such as Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, and Anne K. Mellor. A cautionary endeavour.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The year is 2017…”
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