The upright thinkers : the human journey from living in trees to understanding the cosmos / Leonard Mlodinow.

New York : Pantheon Books, [2015]

viii, 340 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Our drive to know. A starving man's hunger for knowledge ; The human odyssey of discovery -- Curiosity. Lizards don't ask questions ; From handy man to wise man ; What infants ask, but chimps don't -- Culture. Humanity's first church ; Knowledge, ideas, and values go viral ; Human and primate culture -- Civilization. From the Savannah to Uruk ; How the charms and headaches of neighbors led to the new arts of writing and arithmetic ; The invention of law, from peasant (Don't vomit in streams) to planet (Don't stray from your orbit) -- Reason. Bad crops and angry gods ; A new framework for looking at the world ; The mystery of change and the tyranny of common sense ; Aristotle, the one-man Wikipedia -- A new way to reason. Trusting your eyes over your ancestors ; Castrated boars and universal laws of motion ; The tactless Professor Galileo -- The mechanical universe. The good, the bad, and the ugly : Isaac Newton ; The bet that turned Newton from alchemy to authoring the greatest scientific treatise ever written ; The force of Newtonian thinking -- What things are made of. From embalming to alchemy ; The similarities between burning and breathing ; Lavoisier loses his head ; Mendeleev and his periodic table -- The animate world. Cells and the complexity of life ; A recipe for making mice and the revolution of the microscope ; Tragedy, illness, and Darwin's secret research -- The limits of human experience. The billion billion tiny universes in a drop of water ; Cracks in the Newtonian worldview ; Accepting an unseeable reality ; Planck and Einstein invent the quantum -- The invisible realm. The insights of a dreamer ; The crazy ideas of a pale and modest young man ; The early quantum laws, "awful nonsense, bordering on fraud" -- The quantum revolution. Heisenberg's new physics ; The bizarre reality of the quantum universe ; The empowering and humbling legacy of a new science -- Epilogue. The advance of human understanding as a succession of fantasies ; The importance of critical and innovative thinking ; Where we are and where we are going.

Includes bibliographical references and index.