The Upright Thinkers

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Our Drive to Know
 
My father once told me of an emaciated fellow inmate in the Buchenwald concentration camp who had been educated in mathematics. You can tell something about people from what comes to mind when they hear the term pi. To the mathematician it was the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Had I asked my father, who had but a seventh-grade education, he would have said it was a circle of crust filled with apples. One day, despite that gulf between them, the mathematician inmate gave my father a math puzzle to solve. My father thought about it for a few days but could not master it. When he saw the inmate again, he asked him for the solution. The man wouldn t say, telling my father he must discover it for himself. Sometime later, my father again spoke to the man, but the man held on to his secret as if it were a hunk of gold. My father tried to ignore his curiosity, but he couldn t. Amid the stench and death around him, he became obsessed with knowing the answer. Eventually the other inmate offered my father a deal he would reveal the puzzle s solution if my father would hand over his crust of bread. I don t know what my father weighed at the time, but when the American forces liberated him, he weighed eighty-five pounds. Still, my father s need to know was so powerful that he parted with his bread in exchange for the answer.
 
I was in my late teens when my father recounted that episode, and it made a huge impact on me. My father s family was gone, his possessions confiscated, his body starved, withered, and beaten. The Nazis had stripped him of everything palpable, yet his drive to think and reason and know survived. He was imprisoned, but his mind was free to roam, and it did. I realized then that the search for knowledge is the most human of all our desires, and that, different as our circumstances were, my own passion for understanding the world was driven by the same

LEONARD MLODINOW received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include the best sellers Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award), War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), and The Drunkard s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (a New York Times Notable Book), as well as Feynman s Rainbow and Euclid s Window. He also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Mlodinow never fails to make science both accessible and entertaining. Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time

An entrancing tale of scientific history. . . . Mlodinow provides many cultural touchstones and tells personal stories, both poignant and amusing, about his experiences as a theoretical physicist to draw us even closer to the history. The Washington Post
 
Mlodinow is an engaging narrator who leavens the proceedings with a mischievous wit.   The Wall Street Journal
 
An inspiring, exciting exploration of how our very inquisitive species has attempted to comprehend the cosmos.   The American Scholar
 
An audacious encapsulation of our species trek from savannah to city.   Nature
 
The Upright Thinkers playfully tracks the evolution of man s understanding of the world over millions of years. . . . An accessible and engaging read that brings science s brilliant minds to life.   Financial Times (London)

Mlodinow s thesis on the virtues of tenacity is paired with fascinating anecdotes to trot out at the next dinner party. Upright Thinkers synthesizes evolution, archeology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, a spot of poetry, and several character sketches, deftly capturing a handful of the oddballs who changed the course of human events to create a breezy overview of the history of the human brain specifically, how its propensity to ask bold questions first got us to bang rocks together into tools and then sent us on a quest to suss out the nature of reality itself. LA Weekly

Powerful. . . . Breath[es] new life into science history. [Mlodinow] frames narratives of great thinkers with serial scenes of his father s great courage and curiosity. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
Endlessly fascinating . . . consistently thought-provoking. . . . A selective, guided tour of the human accumulation of knowledge . . . [and] the striking characters who pioneered scientific discoveries.