The Upright Thinkers summary

Shared knowledge was a huge leap forward for humans. However, since all this information was only being shared orally, people soon realized that they needed a standardized way to document it. This way, they could carry and share knowledge when they traveled, and the information could be preserved for future generations.

In order for this to happen, humans developed reading and writing, a process that took considerable time to advance. The first documented efforts at writing date back to Mesopotamia at around 3000 BCE.

Mathematics isn’t the only important building block of modern science; scientific advances also required rational minds that asked the right questions. And this is where the people of ancient Greece played a vital role.

Around 600 BCE, some important thinkers in Greece began developing an entirely new form of inquiry by questioning the common belief that the gods were responsible for the world’s natural phenomena.

The march toward modern science began sprinting ahead after 1450, when a new breed of scientific thinkers starting expanding upon old observations in bold and exciting new ways.

By this time, the physicist Galileo Galilei was conducting his own precise experiments while looking at the results of the primitive experiments of the past with a more modern and abstract scientific mind.

Unlike physics, chemistry didn’t really take off as a popular science until the seventeenth century. While chemistry might seem like a fundamentally important part of science today, in the early days of science, chemists were a lot like kids playing with test tubes and hoping for an interesting result.

In fact, rather than being the work of scientists, chemistry was once the work of craftsmen.

As the sciences continued to evolve and advance into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discoveries were beginning to influence the field of biology and our understanding of animals. Today, Darwin’s theory of evolution is considered common knowledge and modern genetics has answered many mysteries – but centuries ago, our understanding of the animal world was rather primitive.

For a long time, one common theory for the development of species was spontaneous generation, the idea that simple species could emerge out of other substances.

When groundbreaking discoveries were being made, it wasn’t uncommon for people to think that these revelations marked an end to the secrets that could be unlocked.

This was especially the case in physics after Isaac Newton’s findings: applicants to Harvard University were even told that there was nothing important left to study.

Planck and Einstein’s work was essentially telling people that their everyday lives were being affected by things they couldn’t see. This took some getting used to, and scientists were eager to continue unlocking the secrets of this atomic world.

In finding out what the atom is made of, physicist Joseph John Thomson discovered the electron and theorized that the atom consisted of a positively charged fluid in which a number of electrons circled.

With the revelations of the early 1900s, people were getting a good idea of what was going on in the world of atoms – but the question remained: how can you measure something that’s invisible?

To overcome this challenge and properly describe what goes on at the atomic level, a new theoretical approach to physics was created.