15 books like Nobel Dreams

Like many folks, I am fascinated with the “where we came from” question. And for me, this is the quintessential book to dive into this topic from an evolutionary biology perspective.

Correct or not, I fancy myself someone that knows a decent amount about evolution and the human body, but I was captivated by the parts of the human body that have endured, for good or for bad, the long journey of us crawling out of the ocean and eventually into the office cubicle.

This book isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as some others I generally like, but it really is a great book, and I had a hard time putting it down.

“The face that launched a thousand ships,” as Homer would say. Pollan’s witty and well-written treatment of how plants think and act to modulate their environments inspired 21st-century “critical plant studies” in the Anglophone world, including mine.

The book starts you thinking about the thousands of ways plants elbow into your world and how much they matter to your existence on earth, in economic but also spiritual senses. You end up agape in wonder.

If you’ve ever wondered how the universe could have originated from a speck and expanded in a big bang, or why scientists came to believe such a thing, this book explains it all in an accessible, gripping story. Overbye, who is a science writer for the New York Times, paints a sweeping history of big bang cosmology through the colorful characters who put it together in the second half of the 20th century. The story revolves around astronomer Allan Sandage, who was a student of the famed Edwin Hubble. After Hubble discovered that the stars were arranged in galaxies that were speeding away from each other, he died, leaving Sandage to finish his quest to understand the implications of this expansion, measure the age of the universe, and determine whether the cosmos is eternally spreading out into an ever more sparse and lonely place.  

What ideas do you have about what the first peoples were like, and how human society developed?

Maybe you’ve even read the popular authors on this topic such as Diamond, Harari, Pinker, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Prepare to have all of your notions and received opinions upended and turned to dust by David Graeber (a man universally acknowledged as a genius) and the book he worked on for the last ten years of his life, which brings revolutionary ideas to 30,000 years of civilization.

I’m a gay Black man, and I’ve worked as a television writer (The Chi, Bel-Air) for more than a decade, so I know from experience the burdens of representation. There is tremendous pressure to make sure we craft Black and/or gay characters that remain relatable or sympathetic. Otherwise, we risk losing the general audience.

That’s why it brought revolutionary joy to my heart when I read 100 Boyfriends in 2021. With this story collection, Brontez Purnell lays our collective burdens down and gives us Black queer men with messy lives. The result is characters that can be infuriating, endearing, disturbing, and hilarious. The book challenges readers to recognize the facets of humanity—commendable, questionable, and despicable—in Black queer men. It feels like the dawn of a new age.

In the 1950s it was discovered that the cosmos was broken, a thing we boringly call parity violation. Physicists were shocked as they realized that the universe was not as perfect and symmetrical as they assumed. In his wonderful book, Gardner explores the meaning of symmetry and asymmetry in nature, from the fact that life prefers molecules with a particular twist, to the startling revelation that our universe seen in a mirror is not our universe. Whilst physicists have made their peace with a fundamentally broken universe, for the uninitiated the discovery is still disturbing.   

Tyson Klein, a quantum physicist at CERN, analyzes data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. He discovers a highly intelligent pattern in data broadcast over what he terms a “Quantum Radio.” The data has the potential to answer the deepest questions about human existence and the cosmos itself, a Theory of Everything. Because the data accurately describes history and alternate histories and projects their future outcome, he first questions whether it’s from another universe or from the future. 

As he closes in on how to control the quantum radio, he finds that someone else is after it and will stop at nothing to get it. The first one to uncover its operation will control the world and probably more.

Riddle seamlessly weaves grandiose ideas in science, psychology, history, and time travel throughout the fabric of the personal relationships of several individuals who “coincidentally” enter Tyson’s life to help in… show more.

I love this book because of its excellent job of tackling the nature of free will and consciousness and their impact on the human condition.

In 2009, particle physicist Lloyd Simcoe designed a high-energy experiment for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed to detect the Higgs Boson. Success would bring him the Nobel Prize. During the experiment, all those present lost consciousness for two minutes and seventeen seconds.

As it happens, the loss of consciousness is global. Without warning, seven billion people on Earth black out for those two minutes and seventeen seconds. Millions die as planes fall from the sky, people tumble down staircases, and cars plow into each other. People experience a glimpse of their life twenty-one years and six months in the future. Some see only darkness, death? The interlocking mosaic of these visions threatens the present and the future.

This book pursues profound questions. Do we… show more.

In my opinion, this is the best book ever written. By anyone. Of all time.

Sure, that is a bold statement, but A Short History has everything I personally want in a book: thoughtfully presented information that explains things I previously did not know and, of course, humor. Importantly, Bill Bryson has Bill Shakespearean abilities at storytelling, without all that troublesome early modern English obscuring the prose.

Bryson’s preeminent work is singularly responsible for getting me into reading (and writing) as an adult, and even played a big role in me doing the science I do today.

To properly understand where women fit in to the history of science, we need to have a fair grasp of what science and the history of science is, and this book offers a perfect introduction. It is the antidote to many linear “progress” driven narratives that insist that the history of western science is simply a straight line from the Greeks with each generation building and improving on the one before. This book attempts to tell the whole story of science, science from across the world, the internationalism of it, the politics, the interrelation between ideas and culture. Although not strictly about historical women in science, I’ve included it here as a kind of foundation to understanding the rest.