100 books like Timaeus

This book persuasively answers our question why science originated exactly when and where it did: the advent of a unique method of writing, the Greek alphabet, in the context of cosmopolitan democratic societies.

As a result, Greek culture underwent a transition from “orality” to “literacy.” And with that revolution in communications technology came a rewiring of human consciousness. Literacy fostered individual rather than community identity and abstract conceptual rather than concrete narrative thinking. These are the necessary conditions of science as opposed to myth.

Individual thinkers, liberated from the self-proclaimed divinely inspired myth makers, wrote down bold theories about the stuff, forces, and laws of nature, which were available to other individual thinkers not by word of mouth, but in stable visual form, thus inspiring them to formulate better theories. 

A renowned historian of science, Clagett carries the story of Greek science forward all the way to the sixth century CE—a span of 1200 years. From that point in time, Greek science passed into the hands of Islamic scholars who advanced it further, especially the mathematical sciences.

This book is not, like ours, organized chronologically and developmentally but according to modern scientific domains—biology and medicine, mathematics, physics, and astronomy. And it focuses on specific scientific inquiries, while we focus on more general and fundamental things like ontology (what exists), cosmology (the overall structure of the universe), the laws of nature, and the drivers of change and motion.

This book is thus a complement to ours in its wide historical sweep and in what it highlights.

According to the Bible the world was created by God. In Greek mythology, the world was born of Gaia (Earth) sired by Ouranos (Sky).

The Greek natural philosophers retained this assumption but demythologized it. Their word “phusis“ translates into English as “nature” (which is of Latin origin, itself originally meaning “birth”). The words “physics,” “physical,” “physician,” etc. are derivatives. As Nadaff explains, the primal meaning of “phusis“ is “growth” and the principal project of early Greek science was to explain the birth and growth of the cosmos.

Because humans and human society are worldly things, they are parts of nature and the order of nature is reflected in the human social order. But actually the human social order was projected onto nature. Thus, for example, do we speak of the “laws” of nature.

MIT scientist Tegmark directly connects contemporary physics and cosmology with our story of the Presocratic natural philosophers.

In his view the universe is not only described in the language of mathematics, it is a huge purely mathematical object. This was precisely the view of the Pythagoreans. In the course of expounding his theory of a mathematical universe, Tegmark brings the lay reader up to date on the latest developments in natural philosophy (aka theoretical physics and cosmology) and demonstrates their continuity with those of their ancient predecessors.   

As I recall, this short summary ranges a bit more widely than the two volumes I've listed above. It is short, accessible and to the point, with rather more emphasis on the theory than the observations. I like the fact that it looks forward to possible new discoveries about our Universe and provides a glimpse of topics that lie outside the mainstream of contemporary cosmology. Quantum cosmology, anyone?

This Harvard-trained cosmologist takes us on a journey into the universe, from colliding black holes to neutrons and protons “faking it” as elementary particles. If you ever wondered why the universe has more matter than antimatter, and what is dark matter made of, this book is for you. And physics is about more than theories; it’s about people doing physics. Black lives matter, and Black lives are the stuff of stars. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her exploration of a universe that is “bigger than the bad things that are happening to us.” Along the way, we gain new clues to the fate of our galaxies full of stars.

I love Stephan Hawking’s A Brief History of Time because it was the first book that inspired me to become a cosmologist. It is a terrific overview of the science behind the modern belief in the Big Bang and what has followed.

It is told with Hawking’s wry sense of humor and unique ability to make complex concepts understandable to the layperson and budding scientist, which I was at the time. It is a fantastic start for my readers of all persuasions.

I first read The Magic Furnace when I was a teenager thinking about what to study at university, and it left a deep impression on me. It tells the story of the search for the origin of atoms, tracing their origins from the lab out into space.

The way the narrative weaves the work of many scientists working over multiple generations as they piece together this amazing cosmic story is really inspiring.

I am recommending Alfred North Whitehead's magnum opus because, in common with a number of other philosophers, I have come to the conclusion that Whitehead is the most important philosophical cosmologist of the last four hundred years.

For the most part, American philosophy works with the assumption that the universe is meaningless. This conclusion follows from taking Newtonian science as the ultimate truth of the large-scale universe. But this depressing view of things needs to be rejected now that we have discovered quantum physics, relativity, and complexity science, all of which go beyond the view of Newtonian mechanics.

Whitehead, deeply versed in mathematical sciences, gathered up all of these new insights and presented a radically different cosmology, one rooted not in mechanical metaphors but in a keen appreciation of an ever-flowing creativity. The great benefit of studying Whitehead is the power he provides for uprooting the subconscious commitments to Newtonian… show more.

This often startling book provides a tour d'horizon of unsettled questions in modern physical science and, most importantly, of the intriguing directions the answers could take. It should inspire many in the rising generations of students to take the baton from their elders and seek a career in science at the edges of human understanding. A book I so wish had already been around when I began studying physics.

Tom Siegfried is a distinguished science journalist.