Modern Science Writings

In the book "The Oxford book of modern science writing", edited by Richard Dawkins, the selections are from the following books (some are articles or just poems). You may want to see how many of them you can finish in 2011 in its original glory. Please comment if there are any typos and errors in the compilation.

 

Alan Turing:::::Computing machinery and intelligence

Albert Einstein:::::Ideas and opinions

Alister Hardy:::::The open sea

Arthur Eddington:::::The expanding universe

Barbara & George Gamow:::::Said Ryle to Hoyle

Brian Greene:::::The elegant universe

C P Snow:::::Foreword to Hardy's Apology

Carl Sagan:::::The demon-haunted world

Carl Sagan:::::Pale blue dot

Claude E Shannon & Warren Weaver:::::The mathematical theory of communication

Colin Blakemore:::::The mind machine

D'Arcy Thompson:::::On growth and form

Daniel Dennett:::::Darwin's dangerous idea

Daniel Dennett:::::Consciousness explained

David Deutsch:::::The fabric of reality

David Lack:::::The life of the robin

Donald C Johanson & Maitland A Edey:::::Lucy-Beginnings of humankind

Douglas Hofstadter:::::Godel, Escher, Bach-The eternal golden braid

Edward O. Wilson:::::The diversity of life

Ernst Mayr:::::The growth of biological thought

Erwin Schrodinger:::::What is life?

Francis Crick:::::Life itself

Francis Crick:::::What mad pursuit

Fred Hoyle:::::Man in the universe

Freeman Dyson:::::Disturbing the universe

G C Williams:::::Adaptation and natural selection

G G Simpson:::::The meaning of evolution

G H Hardy:::::A mathematician's apology

Garrett Hardin:::::The tragedy of the commons

George Gamow:::::Mr. Tompkins

George Gaylord Simpson:::::The meaning of evolution

Helena Cronin:::::The ant and the peacock

Ian Stewart:::::The miraculous jar

J A Wheeler & Kenneth Ford:::::Geons, black holes and quantum foam

J B S Haldane:::::On being the right size

J B S Haldane:::::Cancer's a funny thing

J Robert Oppenheimer:::::War and the nations

Jacob Bronowski:::::The identity of man

James Jeans:::::The mysterious universe

James Watson:::::Avoid boring people

Jared Diamond:::::The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

John Maynard Smith:::::The importance of the nervous system in the evolution of animal flight

John Tyleer Bonner:::::Life cycles

Jonathan Kingdon:::::Self-made man

Julian Huxley:::::Essays of a biologist

Lancelot Hogden:::::Mathematics for the million

Lee Smolin:::::The life of the cosmos

Lewis Thomas:::::Seven wonders

Lewis Wolpert:::::The unnatural nature of science

Loren Eiseley:::::The immense journey

Mark Ridley:::::The explanation of organic diversity

Martin Gardner:::::The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game 'Life'

Martin Rees:::::Just six numbers

Matt Ridley:::::Genome

Max F Perutz:::::A passion for crystals

Nicholas Humphrey:::::One self - a meditation on the unity of consciousness

Niko Tinbergen:::::Curious Naturalists

Oliver Sacks:::::Uncle Tungsten

Paul Davies:::::The goldilocks enigma

Per Bak:::::How nature works

Peter Atkins:::::Creation revisited

Peter Medawar:::::Science and literature

Peter Medawar:::::Darwin's illness

Peter Medawar:::::The phenomenon of mind

Primo Levi:::::The periodic table

R A Fisher:::::The genetical theory of natural selection

Rachel Carson:::::The sea around us

Richard Feynman:::::The character of physical law

Richard Fortey:::::Trilobite!

Richard Fortey:::::Life - an unauthorized biography

Richard Gregory:::::Mirrors in mind

Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin:::::Origins reconsidered

Robert Trivers:::::Social Evolution

Roger Penrose:::::The emperor's new mind

Russell Stannard:::::The time and space of uncle Albert

S Chandrasekhar:::::Truth and beauty

Stephan Hawking:::::A brief history of time

Stephan Jay Gould:::::Hen's teeth and horse's toes

Steve Jones:::::The language of the genes

Steven Pinker:::::The language instinct

Steven Pinker:::::How the mind works

Steven Weinberg:::::Dreams of a final theory

Sydney Brenner:::::Theortical biology in the third millennium

Theodosius Dobzhansky:::::Mankind evolving

W D Hamilton:::::Geometry for the selfish herd

W D Hamilton:::::Narrow roads of geneland

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Feeling positive is not enough ...

Chomsky in one of his 1993 interviews was asked "Do you feel positive about the future?".

His answer:

Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on what happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is to try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose that you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance that it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent.

(from Chomsky for beginners by David Cogswell)

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

The entire collection is available here at Advaita Ashrama website.

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Truth - Relative and Absolute

... But I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him. I am prepared to sacrifice the things dearest to me in pursuit of this quest. Even if the sacrifice demanded be my very life, I hope I may be prepared to give it. But as long as I have not realized this Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by the relative truth as I have conceived it. That relative truth must, meanwhile, be my beacon, my shield and buckler...

- Mahatma Gandhi (from this wonderful site)

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Nature and the study of Nature

Ackoff in his book On purposeful systems, Fred E. Emery is the co-author, has written this:

The need to synthesize findings in the many disciplines of science arises because these disciplines have been developed with relatively unrelated conceptual systems. Scientific development has resulted in the groupings of phenomena into smaller and smaller classes, and in the creation of disciplines specializing in each. As disciplines multiply, each increases in depth and decreases in breadth. Collectively, however, they extend the breadth of scientific knowledge.

Nature does not come to us in disciplinary form. Phenomena are not physical, chemical, biological, and so on. The disciplines are the ways we study phenomena; they emerge from points of view, not from what is viewed. Hence the disciplinary nature of science is a filing system of knowledge. Its organization is not to be confused with the organization of nature itself.

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Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda:

It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.

*
Today is Swami Vivekananda's 105th death anniversary.

Links:

Complete Works
His prose, poems and tales
His Life in Snippets
His biography written by Swami Nikhilananda is available in this site

Lessons All Over

Jim Fedako, an anti-positivist, spots economics lessons during his travel:

1. Man does not need government in order to satisfy desired ends, even in a world of scarcity.

2. It's the arbitrary application of the whims of officials that gets you every time.

3. Government destroys character of the population. A proud population of fishermen is reduced to simple tax consumers.

4. What is sold as a benefit to the community is actually theft from one group of residents in order to benefit the group of residents who grasp the elbows of those in power.

5. Regardless of the obstacles, entrepreneurs will adjust their lives to satisfy consumer wants.

6. Private ownership provides a much better environment.

7. The state steals the wealth of future generations — the children — in order to provide social security for the current generation — the parents.

8. Either we learn our lessons from the Romans or we will be the archeological site of a subsequent generation.

Read more here.

Links:

What is positivism? In three sentences.

Positivism from Marxists site

A General view of Positivism from Marxists site

Positivism as research methodology

Wikipedia on positivism though the quality of that page is disputed.

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Source is One

Raja Rao writes:

"Whether it is through Dante or Shakespeare, through St Thomas Aquinas or Nietszche, you come back to the Upanishads and the Vedanta, realising that wheresoever you go, you always return to the Himalayas, and whatever the rivers that flow, the waters are of the Gangotri."

Worship

Dogen, a Zen Buddhist, had written this poem.

Worship

A white heron

Hiding itself

In the snowy field,

Where even the winter grass

Cannot be seen.

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1. To read more about heron, visit this link. There is an ethereal picture of heron there!!

2. To see winter grass, please go here. To know its family, visit this link.

3. To understand more about this poem and why Dogen had called worship, do create a link to your heart (following the tradition of Zen!).

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Body in the Ganga - Ganga in the Body ....

Saraha wrote in the eighth century:

Here, within this body, is the Ganges and Jumna ... here are Prayaga and Banares - here the sun and moon. Here are the sacred places, here the pithas and upa-pithas. I have not seen a place of pilgrimage and an abode of bliss like my own body.