10 books like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This is a book that is at once a biography, a testament to human genius in the face of imminent danger, and a story of human injustice. Alan Turing had an idea about a ‘universal machine’. A machine, when built at Bletchley Park, allowed the Allies in World War II to crack the German Enigma ciphers. This universal machine laid the foundations for modern computing and all the amazing advances we enjoy today. But at a price for Turing, he fought inner demons about his homosexuality and eventually paid the ultimate price.

I marveled at his genius, cheered his cryptographic successes with each cipher cracked, shouted against the tragedy of his arrest, cried at his untimely death. A death at his own hand at the age of 41. The world lost a genius due to a society’s labelling of homosexuality as a crime.

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Wittgenstein is the key philosopher of how what we do and what we think combine to give us a view of the world and a set of things we take for granted – our ‘form of life’.  It is almost impossibly hard to read his book, Philosophical Investigations and, in any case, philosophers disagree about what it means.  But Monk entertainingly and interestingly explains his ideas through his biography: he makes Wittgenstein’s later philosophy readily comprehensible. 

This book gives an excellent overview of Freud’s thoughts about human psychology, and also shows the way he thought. Freud’s brilliance shines through. I hasten to say most, though not by any means all of his hypotheses are wrong. I read this book at 15 and knew when I finished it I was going to be a psychologist. Some of my work gives strong support to a few of his hypotheses about the unconscious. Ironically, Freud himself didn’t believe his ideas could be tested by psychology experiments.

The book, written in mid-century, has some of the most powerful hypotheses of social psychology, which, along with the ideas of fellow émigré from Germany, Kurt Lewin, gave birth to the field of social psychology. Read Chapter 4 at least. I do every 5 years or so. The chapter gave rise to both dissonance theory and attribution theory, two of the major accomplishments of social psychology.

A remarkably charming book by a physicist who was a student of Hans Bethe. It shows the power and elegance of a scientific approach to matters that one might think would not be susceptible to scientific research.

The book shows some of the remarkable ways that Eastern and Western thought differs. I read the book 10 years before a brilliant Chinese student named Kaiping Peng came to work with me and told me right off the bat that I thought linearly and logically and he thought non-linearly and dialectically. That sounded like an exaggeration, but Nakamura’s book encouraged me to take Peng seriously. Our research together showed he was absolutely right. East Asian thought was shown by our experiments to be radically different in many ways from Western thought.

Ever Since Darwin is a compilation of essays Gould published in the magazine Natural History. The beauty of the book for me is its multifarious subject matter. He writes of biological and socio-political oddities—from matricidal flies, whose young, conceived without a father, eat their mother from the inside, to anthropocentric bias. 

In the late nineteenth century, scientists were able to prove what they already believed—that white male humans were the pinnacle of life. They did this by pouring sand into skulls to measure brain size, taking meticulous measurements, and always managed to fit a little more into those of white males.

Another of his topics is the theory that humans evolved from neotenous apes—apes which never matured to adulthood and retained their juvenile form.

He talks of slime mold which has the capacity to move as individual spores or combine into one organism, depending on environmental conditions.

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A Natural History of the Senses is gorgeously written and poetic while simultaneously presenting accurate basic science about our five senses. Diane Ackerman stunningly shows how a gifted writer can decipher a field, captivate the general public, and elicit the fascination and wonder that a topic deserves. I am also ever delighted by the fact that the book starts with the sense of smell, rather than relegating it to the least and last section as most books on our senses do. A Natural History of the Senses is a beautiful compendium of biology and a tour of human perception.

As a fan of historical novels, I love when past worlds open up through colourful and evocative descriptions.

Although a work of fiction, not a historical text, reading Perfume helped me think differently about arguably the most ephemeral and complex sense – smell.

Set in the sensorially rich world of eighteenth-century France, the story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with a sense of smell so extraordinary he can differentiate between a range of odours far greater than anyone else.

Whilst at times a gift, his ability leads him into the realms of obsession and murder in an attempt to own and recreate particular, yet fleeting, scents.

This novel is a great starting place for opening up the transient world of smell and its emotional impacts on people.

While stuck on a layover in Georgia, my travelling companion kept chuckling at the book he was reading, which turned out to be Running with Scissors. Having six more hours of our layover, I picked up a copy at the airport bookshop and hunkered down with it. What I found was a “memoire” that burned bridges, exposed alleged atrocities, and explored Burroughs’ extremely unconventional upbringing. It took me a few weeks to digest Running with Scissors after I had finished it. But don’t let that turn you off from it. I say this in the best way possible, if you like dumpster fire, unsettling, off-the-wall books, this one is for you.