Katherine Eban – Bottle of lies
Impressive and concerning whistleblower story illustrating the subtleties in developing and producing effective generic drugs.
Rivalry and pursuit of personal glory are major drivers for scientific progress
Walter Isaacson – The Code Breaker
History blessed the author with a pandemic that made his subject even more topical, but unfortunately he could not resist the temptation to make it more a memoir than a biography.
The strive for ever greater precision has been a driving force behind all landmark engineering achievements
Simon Winchester – The perfectionists
Nice collection of anecdotes which struggles to become more than just that.
Earth is an unremarkable planet in an average solar system in a plain-vanilla galaxy in just one-of-many bubble universes
Neil de Grasse Tyson, Richard Gott, Michael Strauss – Welcome to the universe
The great thing about this book is the emphasis on HOW we know what we know about objects that are light years far away that are to our eyes not more than a dot in the sky.
The early 20th century provided a thriving pan-European intellectual and scientific environment, for those men who had the brains and could afford to participate
Margriet van der Heijden – Denken is verrukkelijk (“Thinking is delicious”; in Dutch)
Thorough biography of Paul Ehrenfest and Tatiana Afanassjewa.
The unlikely journey of a talented, black physicist from the hood shows the mechanics of ‘privilege’
Hakeem Oluseyi – A quantum Life
Impressive and heart-warming life story
Bayesian nets help prevent flawed statistical arguments and enable the leap from correlation to causation
Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie – The book of Why
The practical and relevant examples (health effect of smoking, impact of humanity on climate change) of causal inference alone make the book worthwhile.
Flawed data collection and interpretation hurt the position and prospects of women in many different ways
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible women
Great exercise in spotting biases, and understanding how these manifest themselves in how the world around us is shaped.
Folk tales about vampires and werewolves are based in an exaggerated fear for rabies
The detailed synopsis of (what seems like) every book, play, or movie that ever mentioned rabies gets boring pretty fast.
Feigning intelligence is not too difficult, considering that people can be fooled in many different ways
Brian Christian – The most human human
Unfortunately, the book does not explicitly challenge if humans are adequate judges in the Turing test.
Whenever you need to come to a rational decision: use Mathematics
Jordan Ellenberg – How not to be wrong
A cornucopia of charming mathematical anecdotes and facts
The left terrorizes the right while bathing in victimhood
The purposeful one-sided rant makes the book lose all credibility, in particular since the arguments can easily be reversed – especially in the wake of Trump’s desperate challenge the US election outcome.
20th century science gave rise to some truly mind-blowing concepts
Benjamin Labatut – When we cease to understand the world
A highly entertaining fictionalized history of landmark scientific breakthroughs.
Ongoing advances in technology make that ethical norms develop incredibly fast
Filled with highly interesting statistics about the evolution of public perception on ethical issues.
Natural philosophy transformed into science thanks to the commitment and sacrifice of some thrill-seeking geeks
Richard Holmes – The age of wonder
Conveys lively how science was considered an undertaking for daring adventurers.
Finding and copying manuscripts used to be a major factor in the preservation, transfer and loss of knowledge
Violet Moller – The Map of knowledge
Well narrated account of how Christian and Muslim scholars traveled the world in search of ancient knowledge and preserved it through diligent copying.
Turing’s suprisingly practical perspective on logic, intelligence, and machines was far ahead of his time
Andrew Hodges – Alan Turing: The imitation game
A quite complete account of the life and death of one of the most fascinating figures of early computing.
One can obtain elegant mathematical insights without becoming overly formalistic
An elegantly narrated exploration of mathematics , heavily lening on our intuition for time and space (thereby defyingL.E.J. Brouwer‘s adaption of Kant).
The human brain spends an incredible amount of energy on social interactions
Line of argument that primary characteristic of humans as a species is their social behavior dovetails nicely with Daniel Dennett’s thinking on evolution of memes.
There is magic in the chemistry of every day materials
Mark Miodownik – Stuff Matters
Skillfully composed , mind-blowing narrative at different scales.