Da: Brain Pickings Weekly newsletter@brainpickings.

org
Oggetto: Annual Special: The best science books of 2016
Data: 07 dicembre 2016 09:12
A: vincenzo vince.capriotti@gmail.com

From the sound of spacetime to time travel to the microbiome, by way of polar Email formatted oddly or
bears, dogs, and trees. truncated?
View it in your browser. No room
for me in your life anymore?
Unsubscribe. If a friend
forwarded this to you and you'd
like your very own, subscribe
here.

donating = loving Hello, vincenzo! In this season for reflection, the

time has come for the annual best-of reading
lists, beginning with science. The regular
newsletter will arrive, as always, on Sunday. If
I pour tremendous
you're enjoying it, please consider supporting my
time, thought, love,
labor of love with a donation I spend countless hours and
and resources into
tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps
Brain Pickings, which
enormously.
remains free. If you
find any joy and
stimulation here,
please consider
supporting my labor of The Best Science Books of 2016
love with a recurring
monthly donation of
I have long believed that E.B. Whites abiding wisdom on
your choosing,
between a cup of tea childrens books Anyone who writes down to children is
and a good dinner:
simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.
is equally true of science books. The question of what
makes a great book of any kind is, of course, a slippery one,
You can also become but I recently endeavored to synthesize my intuitive system
a one-time patron with for assessing science books that write up to the reader in a
a single donation in
any amount: taxonomy of explanation, elucidation, and enchantment.
And if you've already
donated, from the
bottom of my heart:
THANK YOU.

Share

Forward to a
friend

Connect
Gathered here are exceptional books that accomplish at
least two of the three, assembled in the spirit of my annual
Facebook
best-of reading lists, which I continue to consider Old Years

Twitter
resolutions in reverse not a list of priorities for the year
ahead, but a reflection on the reading most worth

Instagram prioritizing in the year being left behind.

BLACK HOLE BLUES

Tumblr

In Black Hole Blues and

Unsubscribe Other Songs from Outer

Space (public library),
cosmologist, novelist, and
unparalleled enchanter of
science Janna Levin tells the
story of the century-long vision,
originated by Einstein, and half-
century experimental quest to
hear the sound of spacetime by
detecting a gravitational wave. This book remains one of the
most intensely interesting and beautifully written Ive ever
encountered the kind that comes about once a generation
if were lucky.
Everything we know about the universe so far comes from
four centuries of sight from peering into space with our
eyes and their prosthetic extension, the telescope. Now
commences a new mode of knowing the cosmos through
sound. The detection of gravitational waves is one of the
most significant discoveries in the entire history of physics,
marking the dawn of a new era as we begin listening to the
sound of space the probable portal to mysteries as
unimaginable to us today as galaxies and nebulae and
pulsars and other cosmic wonders were to the first
astronomers. Gravitational astronomy, as Levin elegantly
puts it, promises a score to accompany the silent movie
humanity has compiled of the history of the universe from
still images of the sky, a series of frozen snapshots captured
over the past four hundred years since Galileo first pointed a
crude telescope at the Sun.

Astonishingly enough, Levin wrote the book before the

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
(LIGO) the monumental instrument at the center of the
story, decades in the making made the actual detection of
a ripple in the fabric of spacetime caused by the collision of
two black holes in the autumn of 2015, exactly a century
after Einstein first envisioned the possibility of gravitational
waves. So the story she tells is not that of the triumph but
that of the climb, which renders it all the more enchanting
because it is ultimately a story about the human spirit and
its incredible tenacity, about why human beings choose to
devote their entire lives to pursuits strewn with
unimaginable obstacles and bedeviled by frequent failure,
uncertain rewards, and meager public recognition.

Indeed, what makes the book interesting is that it tells the

story of this monumental discovery, but what makes it
enchanting is that Levin comes at it from a rather unusual
perspective. She is a working astrophysicist who studies
black holes, but she is also an incredibly gifted novelist an
artist whose medium is language and thought itself. This is
artist whose medium is language and thought itself. This is
no popular science book but something many orders of
magnitude higher in its artistic vision, the impeccable
craftsmanship of language, and the sheer pleasure of the
prose. The story is structured almost as a series of short,
integrated novels, with each chapter devoted to one of the
key scientists involved in LIGO. With Dostoyevskian insight
and nuance, Levin paints a psychological, even
philosophical portrait of each protagonist, revealing how
intricately interwoven the genius and the foibles are in the
fabric of personhood and what a profoundly human
endeavor science ultimately is.

She writes:

Scientists are like those levers or knobs or

those boulders helpfully screwed into a
climbing wall. Like the wall is some
cemented material made by mixing knowledge, which is a
purely human construct, with reality, which we can only
access through the filter of our minds. Theres an
important pursuit of objectivity in science and nature and
mathematics, but still the only way up the wall is through
the individual people, and they come in specifics So the
climb is personal, a truly human endeavor, and the real
expedition pixelates into individuals, not Platonic forms.

For a taste of this uncategorizably wonderful book, see

Levin on the story of the tragic hero who pioneered
gravitational astronomy and how astronomer Jocelyn Bell
discovered pulsars.

TIME TRAVEL

Time Travel: A History

(public library) by science
historian and writer
extraordinaire James Gleick,
another rare enchanter of
science, is not a science book
per se, in that although it draws
heavily on the history of
twentieth-century science and quantum physics in
particular (as well as on millennia of philosophy), it is a
particular (as well as on millennia of philosophy), it is a
decidedly literary inquiry into our temporal imagination
why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us
so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the
deepest mysteries of our consciousness. I consider it a grand
thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the
active agents, and literature as the catalyst.

Gleick, who examined the origin of our modern anxiety

about time with remarkable prescience nearly two decades
ago, traces the invention of the notion of time travel to H.G.
Wellss 1895 masterpiece The Time Machine. Although
Wells like Gleick, like any reputable physicist knew that
time travel was a scientific impossibility, he created an
aesthetic of thought which never previously existed and
which has since shaped the modern consciousness. Gleick
argues that the art this aesthetic produced an entire
canon of time travel literature and film not only
permeated popular culture but even influenced some of the
greatest scientific minds of the past century, including
Stephen Hawking, who once cleverly hosted a party for time
travelers and when no one showed up considered the
impossibility of time travel proven, and John Archibald
Wheeler, who popularized the term black hole and coined
wormhole, both key tropes of time travel literature.

Gleick considers how a scientific impossibility can become

such fertile ground for the artistic imagination:

Why do we need time travel, when we

already travel through space so far and
fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia.
For hope. To examine our potential and explore our
memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only
life, one dimension, beginning to end.

Wellss Time Machine revealed a turning in the road, an

alteration in the human relationship with time. New
technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the
electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of
Lyell and the life science of Darwin, the rise of archeology
out of antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. When
the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists
 and philosophers were primed to understand time in a
new way. And so were we all. Time travel bloomed in the
culture, its loops and twists and paradoxes.

I wrote about Gleicks uncommonly pleasurable book at

length here.

FELT TIME

A very different take on time,

not as cultural phenomenon but
as individual psychological
interiority, comes from German
psychologist Marc Wittmann
in Felt Time: The
Psychology of How We
Perceive Time (public library)
a fascinating inquiry into how
our subjective experience of
times passage shapes everything from our emotional
memory to our sense of self. Bridging disciplines as wide-
ranging as neuroscience and philosophy, Wittmann
examines questions of consciousness, identity, happiness,
boredom, money, and aging, exposing the centrality of time
in each of them. What emerges is the disorienting sense that
time isnt something which happens to us rather, we are
time.

One of Wittmanns most pause-giving points has to do with

how temporality mediates the mind-body problem. He
writes:

Presence means becoming aware of a

physical and psychic self that is temporally
extended. To be self-conscious is to
recognize oneself as something that persists through time
and is embodied.

In a sense, time is a construction of our consciousness. Two

generations after Hannah Arendt observed in her brilliant
meditation on time that it is the insertion of man with his
limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing
stream of sheer change into time as we know it,
Wittmann writes:

Self-consciousness achieving awareness

of ones own self emerges on the basis of
temporally enduring perception of bodily
states that are tied to neural activity in the brains insular
lobe. The self and time prove to be especially present in
boredom. They go missing in the hustle and bustle of
everyday life, which results from the acceleration of social
processes. Through mindfulness and emotional control,
the tempo of life that we experience can be reduced, and
we can regain time for ourselves and others.

Perception necessarily encompasses the individual who

is doing the perceiving. It is I who perceives. This might
seem self-evident. Perception of myself, my ego, occurs
naturally when I consider myself. I feel and think about
myself. But who is the subject if I am the object of my own
attention? When I observe myself, after all, I become the
object of observation. Clearly, this intangibility of the
subject as a subject and not an object poses a
philosophical problem: as soon as I observe myself, I
have already become the object of my observation.

More here.

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

All life is lived in the shadow of

its own finitude, of which we are
always aware an awareness
we systematically blunt through
the daily distraction of living.
But when this finitude is made
acutely imminent, one suddenly
collides with awareness so acute
that it leaves no choice but to fill
the shadow with as much light
as a human being can generate the sort of inner
illumination we call meaning: the meaning of life.

That tumultuous turning point is what neurosurgeon Paul

Kalanithi chronicles in When Breath Becomes Air
(public library) his piercing memoir of being diagnosed
with terminal cancer at the peak of a career bursting with
potential and a life exploding with aliveness. Partway
between Montaigne and Oliver Sacks, Kalanithi weaves
together philosophical reflections on his personal journey
with stories of his patients to illuminate the only thing we
have in common our mortality and how it spurs all of
us, in ways both minute and monumental, to pursue a life of
meaning.

What emerges is an uncommonly insightful, sincere, and

sobering revelation of how much our sense of self is tied up
with our sense of potential and possibility the selves we
would like to become, those we work tirelessly toward
becoming. Who are we, then, and what remains of us
when that possibility is suddenly snipped?

Paul Kalanithi in 2014 (Photograph: Norbert von der

Groeben/Stanford Hospital and Clinics)

A generation after surgeon Sherwin Nulands foundational

text on confronting the meaning of life while dying,
Kalanithi sets out to answer these questions and their
myriad fractal implications. He writes:

At age thirty-six, I had reached the

 At age thirty-six, I had reached the
mountaintop; I could see the Promised
Land, from Gilead to Jericho to the
Mediterranean Sea. I could see a nice catamaran on that
sea that Lucy, our hypothetical children, and I would take
out on weekends. I could see the tension in my back
unwinding as my work schedule eased and life became
more manageable. I could see myself finally becoming
the husband Id promised to be.

And then the unthinkable happens. He recounts one of the

first incidents in which his former identity and his future
fate collided with jarring violence:

My back stiffened terribly during the flight,

and by the time I made it to Grand Central to
catch a train to my friends place upstate, my
body was rippling with pain. Over the past few months, Id
had back spasms of varying ferocity, from simple
ignorable pain, to pain that made me forsake speech to
grind my teeth, to pain so severe I curled up on the floor,
screaming. This pain was toward the more severe end of
the spectrum. I lay down on a hard bench in the waiting
area, feeling my back muscles contort, breathing to
control the pain the ibuprofen wasnt touching this
and naming each muscle as it spasmed to stave off tears:
erector spinae, rhomboid, latissimus, piriformis

A security guard approached. Sir, you cant lie down

here.

Im sorry, I said, gasping out the words. Bad back

spasms.

You still cant lie down here.

[]

I pulled myself up and hobbled to the platform.

Like the book itself, the anecdote speaks to something larger

and far more powerful than the particular story in this
case, our cultural attitude toward what we consider the
failings of our bodies: pain and, in the ultimate extreme,
death. We try to dictate the terms on which these perceived
failings may occur; to make them conform to wished-for
realities; to subvert them by will and witless denial. All this
we do because, at bottom, we deem them impermissible
in ourselves and in each other.

I wrote about the book at length here.

THE CONFIDENCE GAME

Try not to get overly attached

to a hypothesis just because its
yours, Carl Sagan urged in his
excellent Baloney Detection Kit
and yet our tendency is to do
just that, becoming increasingly
attached to what weve come to
believe because the belief has
sprung from our own glorious,
brilliant, fool-proof minds. How
con artists take advantage of this human hubris is what New
Yorker columnist and psychology writer Maria
Konnikova explores in The Confidence Game: Why
We Fall for It Every Time (public library) a
thrilling psychological detective story investigating how con
artists, the supreme masterminds of malevolent reality-
manipulation, prey on our hopes, our fears, and our
propensity for believing what we wish were true. Through a
tapestry of riveting real-life con artist profiles interwoven
with decades of psychology experiments, Konnikova
illuminates the inner workings of trust and deception in our
everyday lives.

She writes:

Its the oldest story ever told. The story of

belief of the basic, irresistible, universal
human need to believe in something that
gives life meaning, something that reaffirms our view of
ourselves, the world, and our place in it For our minds
are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there
arent ready ones available, we create them. Stories
about our origins. Our purpose. The reasons the world is
the way it is. Human beings dont like to exist in a state of
uncertainty or ambiguity. When something doesnt make
sense, we want to supply the missing link. When we dont
 sense, we want to supply the missing link. When we dont
understand what or why or how something happened, we
want to find the explanation. A confidence artist is only too
happy to comply and the well-crafted narrative is his
absolute forte.

Konnikova describes the basic elements of the con and the

psychological susceptibility into which each of them plays:

The confidence game starts with basic

human psychology. From the artists
perspective, its a question of identifying the
victim (the put-up): who is he, what does he want, and
how can I play on that desire to achieve what I want? It
requires the creation of empathy and rapport (the play):
an emotional foundation must be laid before any scheme
is proposed, any game set in motion. Only then does it
move to logic and persuasion (the rope): the scheme (the
tale), the evidence and the way it will work to your benefit
(the convincer), the show of actual profits. And like a fly
caught in a spiders web, the more we struggle, the less
able to extricate ourselves we become (the breakdown).
By the time things begin to look dicey, we tend to be so
invested, emotionally and often physically, that we do
most of the persuasion ourselves. We may even choose
to up our involvement ourselves, even as things turn
south (the send), so that by the time were completely
fleeced (the touch), we dont quite know what hit us. The
con artist may not even need to convince us to stay quiet
(the blow-off and fix); we are more likely than not to do so
ourselves. We are, after all, the best deceivers of our own
minds. At each step of the game, con artists draw from a
seemingly endless toolbox of ways to manipulate our
belief. And as we become more committed, with every
step we give them more psychological material to work
with.

Needless to say, the book bears remarkable relevance to the

recent turn of events in American politics and its ripples in
the mass manipulation machine known as the media.

More here.

THE GENE

This is the entire essence of life:

Who are you? What are you?
Who are you? What are you?
young Leo Tolstoy wrote in his
diary. For Tolstoy, this was a
philosophical inquiry or a
metaphysical one, as it would
have been called in his day. But
between his time and ours,
science has unraveled the
inescapable physical dimensions
of this elemental question, rendering the already
disorienting attempt at an answer all the more complex and
confounding.

In The Gene: An Intimate History (public library),

physician and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha
Mukherjee offers a rigorously researched, beautifully
written detective story about the genetic components of
what we experience as the self, rooted in Mukherjees own
painful family history of mental illness and radiating a
larger inquiry into how genetics illuminates the future of
our species.

Mukherjee writes:

Three profoundly destabilizing scientific

ideas ricochet through the twentieth century,
trisecting it into three unequal parts: the
atom, the byte, the gene. Each is foreshadowed by an
earlier century, but dazzles into full prominence in the
twentieth. Each begins its life as a rather abstract
scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple human
discourses thereby transforming culture, society,
politics, and language. But the most crucial parallel
between the three ideas, by far, is conceptual: each
represents the irreducible unit the building block, the
basic organizational unit of a larger whole: the atom, of
matter; the byte (or bit), of digitized information; the
gene, of heredity and biological information.

Why does this property being the least divisible unit of

a larger form imbue these particular ideas with such
potency and force? The simple answer is that matter,
information, and biology are inherently hierarchically
organized: understanding that smallest part is crucial to
 organized: understanding that smallest part is crucial to
understanding the whole.

Among the books most fascinating threads is Mukherjees

nuanced, necessary discussion of intelligence and the dark
side of IQ.

THE POLAR BEAR

In wildness is the preservation

of the world, Thoreau wrote
150 years ago in his ode to the
spirit of sauntering. But in a
world increasingly unwild,
where we are in touch with
nature only occasionally and
only in fragments, how are we to
nurture the preservation of our Pale Blue Dot?

Thats what London-based illustrator and Sendak Fellow

Jenni Desmond explores in The Polar Bear (public
library) the follow-up to Desmonds serenade to the
science and life of Earths largest-hearted creature, The Blue
Whale, which was among the best science books of 2015.
The story follows a little girl who, in a delightful meta-touch,
pulls this very book off the bookshelf and begins learning
about the strange and wonderful world of the polar bear, its
life, and the science behind it its love of solitude, the
black skin that hides beneath its yellowish-white fur, the
built-in sunglasses protecting its eyes from the harsh Arctic
light, why it evolved to have an unusually long neck and
slightly inward paws, how it maintains the same
temperature as us despite living in such extreme cold, why it
doesnt hibernate.

Beyond its sheer loveliness, the book is suddenly imbued

with a new layer of urgency. At a time when we can no
longer count on politicians to protect the planet and educate
the next generations about preserving it, the task falls on
solely on parents and educators. Desmonds wonderful
project alleviates that task by offering a warm, empathic
invitation to care about, which is the gateway to caring for,
one of the creatures most vulnerable to our changing
climate and most needful of our protection.

Look closer here.

THE BIG PICTURE

We are as far as we know

the only part of the universe
thats self-conscious, the poet
Mark Strand marveled in his
beautiful meditation on the
artists task to bear witness to
existence, adding: We could
even be the universes form of
consciousness. We might have
come along so that the universe
could look at itself Its such a lucky accident, having been
born, that were almost obliged to pay attention. Scientists
are rightfully reluctant to ascribe a purpose or meaning to
the universe itself but, as physicist Lisa Randall has pointed
out, an unconcerned universe is not a bad thing or a
good one for that matter. Where poets and scientists
converge is the idea that while the universe itself isnt
inherently imbued with meaning, it is in this self-conscious
human act of paying attention that meaning arises.

Physicist Sean Carroll terms this view poetic naturalism

and examines its rewards in The Big Picture: On the
Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
(public library) a nuanced inquiry into how our desire to
matter fits in with the nature of reality at its deepest levels,
in which Carroll offers an assuring dose of what he calls
existential therapy reconciling the various and often
seemingly contradictory dimensions of our experience.

With an eye to his lifes work of studying the nature of the

universe an expanse of space and time against the
incomprehensibly enormous backdrop of which the dramas
of a single human life claim no more than a photon of the
spotlight Carroll offers a counterpoint to our intuitive
cowering before such magnitudes of matter and mattering:

I like to think that our lives do matter, even if

the universe would trundle along without us.

[]

I want to argue that, though we are part of a universe that

runs according to impersonal underlying laws, we
nevertheless matter. This isnt a scientific question
there isnt data we can collect by doing experiments that
could possibly measure the extent to which a life matters.
 could possibly measure the extent to which a life matters.
Its at heart a philosophical problem, one that demands
that we discard the way that weve been thinking about
our lives and their meaning for thousands of years. By the
old way of thinking, human life couldnt possibly be
meaningful if we are just collections of atoms moving
around in accordance with the laws of physics. Thats
exactly what we are, but its not the only way of thinking
about what we are. We are collections of atoms,
operating independently of any immaterial spirits or
influences, and we are thinking and feeling people who
bring meaning into existence by the way we live our lives.

Carrolls captivating term poetic naturalism builds on a

worldview that has been around for centuries, dating back at
least to the Scottish philosopher David Hume. It fuses
naturalism the idea that the reality of the natural world is
the only reality, that it operates according to consistent
patterns, and that those patterns can be studied with the
poetic notion that there are multiple ways of talking about
the world and of framing the questions that arise from
natures elemental laws.

I wrote about the book at length here.

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES

Trees dominate the worlds the

oldest living organisms. Since
the dawn of our species, they
have been our silent
companions, permeating our
most enduring tales and never
ceasing to inspire fantastical
cosmogonies. Hermann Hesse
called them the most
penetrating of preachers. A forgotten seventeenth-century
English gardener wrote of how they speak to the mind, and
tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.

But trees might be among our lushest metaphors and

sensemaking frameworks for knowledge precisely because
the richness of what they say is more than metaphorical
they speak a sophisticated silent language, communicating
they speak a sophisticated silent language, communicating
complex information via smell, taste, and electrical
impulses. This fascinating secret world of signals is what
German forester Peter Wohlleben explores in The
Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They
Communicate (public library).

Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers

Grimm fairy tales

Wohlleben chronicles what his own experience of managing

a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany has taught him
about the astonishing language of trees and how trailblazing
arboreal research from scientists around the world reveals
the role forests play in making our world the kind of place
where we want to live. As were only just beginning to
understand nonhuman consciousnesses, what emerges from
Wohllebens revelatory reframing of our oldest companions
is an invitation to see anew what we have spent eons taking
for granted and, in this act of seeing, to care more deeply
about these remarkable beings that make life on this planet
we call home not only infinitely more pleasurable, but
possible at all.

Read more here.

BEING A DOG

The act of smelling something,

anything, is remarkably like the
act of thinking itself, the great
science storyteller Lewis
Thomas wrote in his beautiful
1985 meditation on the poetics
of smell as a mode of
knowledge. But, like the
conditioned consciousness out
of which our thoughts arise, our
olfactory perception is beholden to our cognitive, cultural,
and biological limitations. The 438 cubic feet of air we
inhale each day are loaded with an extraordinary richness of
information, but we are able to access and decipher only a
fraction. And yet we know, on some deep creaturely level,
just how powerful and enlivening the world of smell is, how
intimately connected with our ability to savor life. Get a life
in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on
a breeze over the dunes, Anna Quindlen advised in her
indispensable Short Guide to a Happy Life but the
noticing eclipses the getting, for the salt water breeze is lost
on any life devoid of this sensorial perception.

Dogs, who see the world through smell, can teach us a

great deal about that springlike sensorial aliveness which
E.E. Cummings termed smelloftheworld. So argues
cognitive scientist and writer Alexandra Horowitz,
director of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, in
Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of
Smell (public library) a fascinating tour of what
Horowitz calls the surprising and sometimes alarming feats
of olfactory perception that dogs perform daily, and what
they can teach us about swinging open the doors of our own
perception by relearning some of our long-lost olfactory
skills that grant us access to hidden layers of reality.
Art by Maira Kalman from Beloved Dog

The book is a natural extension of Horowitzs two previous

books, exploring the subjective reality of the dog and how
our human perceptions shape our own subjective reality.
She writes:

I am besotted with dogs, and to know a dog

is to be interested in what its like to be a
dog. And that all begins with the nose.

What the dog sees and knows comes through his nose,
and the information that every dog the tracking dog, of
course, but also the dog lying next to you, snoring, on the
couch has about the world based on smell is
unthinkably rich. It is rich in a way we humans once knew
about, once acted on, but have since neglected.

Savor more of the wonderland of canine olfaction here.

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES

I have observed many tiny

animals with great
admiration, Galileo marveled
as he peered through his
microscope a tool that, like
the telescope, he didnt invent
himself but he used with in such
a visionary way as to render it
revolutionary. The revelatory
discoveries he made in the
universe within the cell are increasingly proving to be as
significant as his telescopic discoveries in the universe
without a significance humanity has been even slower
and more reluctant to accept than his radical revision of the
cosmos.

That multilayered significance is what English science

writer and microbiology elucidator Ed Yong explores in I
Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a
Grander View of Life (public library) a book so
fascinating and elegantly written as to be worthy of its
Whitman reference, in which Yong peels the veneer of the
visible to reveal the astonishing complexity of life thriving
beneath and within the crude confines of our perception.

Early-twentieth-century drawing of Radiolarians, some of the first

microorganisms, by Ernst Haeckel

Artist Agnes Margin memorably observed that the best

things in life happen to you when youre alone, but Yong
offers a biopoetic counterpoint in the fact that we are never
offers a biopoetic counterpoint in the fact that we are never
truly alone. He writes:

Even when we are alone, we are never

alone. We exist in symbiosis a wonderful
term that refers to different organisms living
together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while
they are still unfertilised eggs; others pick up their first
partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through
our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they.
When we travel, they come along. When we die, they
consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right
a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species
collective. An entire world.

[]

All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand

the lives of animals without understanding our microbes
and our symbioses with them. And we cannot fully
appreciate our own microbiome without appreciating how
those of our fellow species enrich and influence their
lives. We need to zoom out to the entire animal kingdom,
while zooming in to see the hidden ecosystems that exist
in every creature. When we look at beetles and
elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and
friends, we see individuals, working their way through life
as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single
brain, and operating with a single genome. This is a
pleasant fiction. In fact, we are legion, each and every
one of us. Always a we and never a me.

There are ample reasons to admire and appreciate microbes,

well beyond the already impressive facts that they ruled
our Earth for the vast majority of its 4.54-billion-year
history and that we ourselves evolved from them. By
pioneering photosynthesis, they became the first organisms
capable of making their own food. They dictate the planets
carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus cycles. They can
survive anywhere and populate just about corner of the
Earth, from the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the
ocean to the loftiest clouds. They are so diverse that the
microbes on your left hand are different from those on your
right.
But perhaps most impressively for we are, after all, the
solipsistic species they influence innumerable aspects of
our biological and even psychological lives. Young offers a
cross-section of this microbial dominion:

The microbiome is infinitely more versatile

than any of our familiar body parts. Your
cells carry between 20,000 and 25,000
genes, but it is estimated that the microbes inside you
wield around 500 times more. This genetic wealth,
combined with their rapid evolution, makes them virtuosos
of biochemistry, able to adapt to any possible challenge.
They help to digest our food, releasing otherwise
inaccessible nutrients. They produce vitamins and
minerals that are missing from our diet. They break down
toxins and hazardous chemicals. They protect us from
disease by crowding out more dangerous microbes or
killing them directly with antimicrobial chemicals. They
produce substances that affect the way we smell. They
are such an inevitable presence that we have outsourced
surprising aspects of our lives to them. They guide the
construction of our bodies, releasing molecules and
signals that steer the growth of our organs. They educate
our immune system, teaching it to tell friend from foe.
They affect the development of the nervous system, and
perhaps even influence our behaviour. They contribute to
our lives in profound and wide-ranging ways; no corner of
our biology is untouched. If we ignore them, we are
looking at our lives through a keyhole.

In August, I wrote about one particularly fascinating aspect

of Yongs book the relationship between mental health,
free will, and your microbiome.

HIDDEN FIGURES

No woman should say, I am

but a woman! But a woman!
What more can you ask to be?
astronomer Maria Mitchell, who
paved the way for women in
American science, admonished
the first class of female
astronomers at Vassar in 1876.
astronomers at Vassar in 1876.
By the middle of the next
century, a team of unheralded
women scientists and engineers were powering space
exploration at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Meanwhile, across the continent and in what was practically

another country, a parallel but very different revolution was
taking place: In the segregated South, a growing number of
black female mathematicians, scientists, and engineers were
steering early space exploration and helping American win
the Cold War at NASAs Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Virginia.

Long before the term computer came to signify the

machine that dictates our lives, these remarkable women
were working as human computers highly skilled
professional reckoners, who thought mathematically and
computationally for their living and for their country. When
Neil Armstrong set his foot on the moon, his giant leap for
mankind had been powered by womankind, particularly by
Katherine Johnson the computer who calculated Apollo
11s launch windows and who was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by President Obama at age 97 in 2015,
three years after the accolade was conferred upon John
Glenn, the astronaut whose flight trajectory Johnson had
made possible.
Katherine Johnson at her Langley desk with a globe, or Celestial
Training Device, 1960 (Photographs: NASA)

In Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-

American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
(public library), Margot Lee Shetterly tells the untold
story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our
cultural leaps and since sidelined by the selective collective
memory we call history.

She writes:

Just as islands isolated places with

unique, rich biodiversity have relevance
for the ecosystems everywhere, so does
studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and
events from the past turn up unexpected connections and
insights to modern life.

Against a sobering cultural backdrop, Shetterly captures the

enormous cognitive dissonance the very notion of these
black female mathematicians evokes:

Before a computer became an inanimate

object, and before Mission Control landed in
Houston; before Sputnik changed the
course of history, and before the NACA became NASA;
before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact
not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King
Jr.s I Have a Dream speech rang out over the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial, Langleys West Computers were
helping America dominate aeronautics, space research,
and computer technology, carving out a place for
themselves as female mathematicians who were also
black, black mathematicians who were also female.

Shetterly herself grew up in Hampton, which dubbed itself

Spacetown USA, amid this archipelago of women who
were her neighbors and teachers. Her father, who had built
his first rocket in his early teens after seeing the Sputnik
launch, was one of Langleys African American scientists in
launch, was one of Langleys African American scientists in
an era when words we now shudder to hear were used
instead of African American. Like him, the first five black
women who joined Langleys research staff in 1943 entered
a segregated NASA even though, as Shetterly points out,
the space agency was among the most inclusive workplaces
in the country, with more than fourfold the percentage of
black scientists and engineers than the national average.

Over the next forty years, the number of these trailblazing

black women mushroomed to more than fifty, revealing the
mycelia of a significant groundswell. Shetterlys favorite
Sunday school teacher had been one of the early computers
a retired NASA mathematician named Kathleen Land.
And so Shetterly, who considers herself as much a product
of NASA as the Moon landing, grew up believing that black
women simply belonged in science and space exploration as
a matter of course after all, they populated her fathers
workplace and her town, a town whose church abounded
with mathematicians.

Embodying astronomer Vera Rubins wisdom on how

modeling expands childrens scope of possibility, Shetterly
reflects on this normalizing and rousing power of example:

Building 1236, my fathers daily destination,

contained a byzantine complex of
government-gray cubicles, perfumed with
the grown-up smells of coffee and stale cigarette smoke.
His engineering colleagues with their rumpled style and
distracted manner seemed like exotic birds in a sanctuary.
They gave us kids stacks of discarded 1114 continuous-
form computer paper, printed on one side with cryptic
arrays of numbers, the blank side a canvas for crayon
masterpieces. Women occupied many of the cubicles;
they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but
they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides
and conferred with my father and other men in the office
on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That
so many of them were African American, many of them
my grandmothers age, struck me as simply a part of the
natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face
of science was brown like mine.
 []

The community certainly included black English

professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and
dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black
cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and
undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black
Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so
many African Americans working in science, math, and
engineering that I thought thats just what black folks did.

Katherine Johnson, age 98 (Photograph: Annie Leibovitz for Vanity

Fair)

But despite the opportunities at NASA, almost

countercultural in their contrast to the norms of the time,
life for these courageous and brilliant women was no idyll
persons and polities are invariably products of their time
and place. Shetterly captures the sundering paradoxes of the
early computers experience:

I interviewed Mrs. Land about the early days

of Langleys computing pool, when part of
her job responsibility was knowing which
bathroom was marked for colored employees. And less
than a week later I was sitting on the couch in Katherine
Johnsons living room, under a framed American flag that
had been to the Moon, listening to a ninety-three-year-old
 had been to the Moon, listening to a ninety-three-year-old
with a memory sharper than mine recall segregated
buses, years of teaching and raising a family, and working
out the trajectory for John Glenns spaceflight. I listened
to Christine Dardens stories of long years spent as a data
analyst, waiting for the chance to prove herself as an
engineer. Even as a professional in an integrated world, I
had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms
and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took
for an African American woman in a segregated southern
workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her
calculations would put a man on the Moon.

[]

And while the black women are the most hidden of the
mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA,
they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white
women who made up the majority of Langleys computing
workforce over the years have hardly been recognized for
their contributions to the agencys long-term success.
Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily
Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in
1958. Everyone said, This is a scientist, this is an
engineer, and it was always a man, she said in a 1990
panel on Langleys human computers. She never got to
meet any of the women. I just assumed they were all
secretaries, she said.

These womens often impossible dual task of preserving

their own sanity and dignity while pushing culture forward
is perhaps best captured in the words of African American
NASA mathematician Dorothy Vaughan:

What I changed, I could; what I couldnt, I

endured.

Dive in here.

THE GLASS UNIVERSE

Predating NASAs women

mathematicians by a century
was a devoted team of female
amateur astronomers
amateur being a reflection not
amateur being a reflection not
of their skill but of the dearth of
academic accreditation available
to women at the time who
came together at the Harvard
Observatory at the end of the
nineteenth century around an unprecedented quest to
catalog the cosmos by classifying the stars and their spectra.

Decades before they were allowed to vote, these women,

who came to be known as the Harvard computers,
classified hundreds of thousands of stars according to a
system they invented, which astronomers continue to use
today. Their calculations became the basis for the discovery
that the universe is expanding. Their spirit of selfless
pursuit of truth and knowledge stands as a timeless
testament to pioneering physicist Lise Meitners definition
of the true scientist.

The Harvard computers at work, circa 1890.

Science historian Dava Sobel, author of Galileos

Daughter, chronicles their unsung story and lasting legacy
in The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the
Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the
Stars (public library).

Sobel, who takes on the role of rigorous reporter and

storyteller bent on preserving the unvarnished historical
integrity of the story, paints the backdrop:
integrity of the story, paints the backdrop:

A little piece of heaven. That was one way to

look at the sheet of glass propped up in front
of her. It measured about the same
dimensions as a picture frame, eight inches by ten, and
no thicker than a windowpane. It was coated on one side
with a fine layer of photographic emulsion, which now
held several thousand stars fixed in place, like tiny insects
trapped in amber. One of the men had stood outside all
night, guiding the telescope to capture this image, along
with another dozen in the pile of glass plates that awaited
her when she reached the observatory at 9 a.m. Warm
and dry indoors in her long woolen dress, she threaded
her way among the stars. She ascertained their positions
on the dome of the sky, gauged their relative brightness,
studied their light for changes over time, extracted clues
to their chemical content, and occasionally made a
discovery that got touted in the press. Seated all around
her, another twenty women did the same.

The computers working at the Harvard Observatory, with Williamina

Fleming (standing) supervising. (Harvard University Archives)

Among the Harvard computers were Antonia Maury, who

had graduated from Maria Mitchells program at Vassar;
Annie Jump Cannon, who catalogued more than 20,000
variable stars in a short period after joining the observatory;
Henrietta Swan Levitt, a Radcliffe alumna whose discoveries
later became the basis for Hubbles Law demonstrating the
expansion of the universe and whose work was so valued
that she was paid 30 cents an hour, five cents over the
standard salary of the computers; and Cecilia Helena Payne-
Gaposchkin, who became not only the first woman but the
first person of any gender to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy.

Helming the team was Williamina Fleming a Scotswoman

whom Edward Charles Pickering, the thirty-something
director of the observatory, first hired as a second maid at
his residency in 1879 before recognizing her mathematical
talents and assigning her the role of part-time computer.

Dive into their story here.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE

For a lighter
companion to the
two books above, one
aimed at younger
readers, artist and
author Rachel
Ignotofsky offers
Women in
Science: 50
Fearless Pioneers
Who Changed the
World (public library) an illustrated encyclopedia of
fifty influential and inspiring women in STEM since long
before we acronymized the conquest of curiosity through
discovery and invention, ranging from the ancient
astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Hypatia in the
fourth century to Iranian mathematician Maryam
Mirzakhani, born in 1977.

True as it may be that being an outsider is an advantage in

science and life, modeling furnishes young hearts with the
assurance that people who are in some way like them can
belong and shine in fields comprised primarily of people
drastically unlike them. It is this ethos that Igontofsky
embraces by being deliberate in ensuring that the scientists
included come from a vast variety of ethnic backgrounds,
nationalities, orientations, and cultural traditions.
There are the expected trailblazers who have stood as
beacons of possibility for decades, even centuries: Ada
Lovelace, who became the worlds first de facto computer
programmer; Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel
Prize and to this day the only person awarded a Nobel in
two different sciences; Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who once
elicited the exclamation Miss Bell, you have made the
greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century!
(and was subsequently excluded from the Nobel she
deserved); Maria Sybilla Merian, the 17th-century German
naturalist whose studies of butterfly metamorphosis
revolutionized entomology and natural history illustration;
and Jane Goodall another pioneer who turned her
childhood dream into reality against tremendous odds and
went on to do more for the understanding of nonhuman
consciousness than any scientist before or since.

Take a closer look here.

***

On December 2, I joined Science Friday alongside Scientific

American editor Lee Billings to discuss some of our favorite
science books of 2016:

Step into the cultural time machine with selections for the
best science books of 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND / READ ONLINE /

 If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest donation.

You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the
week's most unmissable articles.

Our mailing address is:

Brain Pickings ::
NO UNSOLICITED MAILINGS, PLEASE.
47 Bergen Street, 3rd floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Add us to your address book

unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences