The Upright Thinkers Book Summary - The Upright Thinkers Book explained in key points

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The Upright Thinkers summary

Name: The Upright Thinkers
Rating: 4.4 (71 reviews)
Author: Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow

The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

4.4 (71 ratings)

20 mins

What is The Upright Thinkers about?

The Upright Thinkers (2015) takes you through the fascinating evolution of science, tracing the footsteps and influence of major figures along the way – from Galileo to Einstein to Heisenberg. These blinks will start with a trip back in time to the first moments humans learned to control fire, and will leave you with a brief summary of quantum mechanics.

Table of Contents

The Upright Thinkers
summarized in 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Learn how the sciences became what they are today.

Science plays an incredibly important part in our everyday lives, so it might be easy to think that the field of science itself has been around for as long as humans have. This is far from being the case.

In fact, science has developed in countless tiny steps, from the most basic observations of the natural world to the incredible technological advances of the modern world.

So how did it all start? How did humans start to think in scientific terms? And how did it all get this far? These are the key questions that these blinks will address. They will take a journey back in time, telling the story of science, how it came about and how it has evolved over the past 5,000 years.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

which piece of clothing a seventeenth century chemist thought mice were made of;
how arithmetic was used in Babylon in 2000 BCE; and
how the Dane Niels Bohr revolutionized the model of the atom.

The foundation of scientific thinking was laid when curious-minded humans began working together.

As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Similarly, scientific thinking didn’t spring up overnight; it took eons for human beings to develop scientific methods and analysis.

We can thank human nature and our inherent curiosity for this eventual breakthrough. Throughout human evolution, curiosity and inventiveness have been crucial to the survival of our species.

The tools that early humans created and the fire that we learned how to control were vital to keeping ourselves fed and keeping predators like saber-toothed tigers at bay.

This kind of curiosity and knack for problem solving has always been an innate and unique aspect of human nature.

Unlike chimpanzees, we can see how human children play with toys while diligently trying to figure out how they work, or why a tower of wooden blocks keeps toppling over.

With this curiosity already providing an advantage as compared to other species, innovation really took off once humans started living and cooperating with one another.

Around 11,500 years ago in modern-day Turkey, people formed the earliest communities to worship gods and exchange ideas.

Cohabitation came with a lot of advantages, chief among them being that it enabled people to share past experiences with one another, create a pool of knowledge to work with and use this knowledge to come up with early innovations such as irrigation systems.

This is essentially the same type of brainstorming and problem solving that happens among the employees of creative companies like Google and Apple.

Another advantage of cohabitation was that it allowed for the distribution of work. In Mesopotamia around 7000 BCE, people began to assign tasks within the community, which allowed individuals to focus on one job each day rather than fretting over all the daily activities that are essential to survival.

This eventually led people to have occupations, such as bakers, brewers and blacksmiths.

In turn, this division of labor gave rise to schools, which appeared roughly 5,000 years ago, giving people a place to learn professional knowledge from experts in their field.

Writing, reading and mathematics were central to the advancement of society and the sciences.

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.

The ancient Greeks were among the first to start thinking rationally and develop scientific theories.

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.

Physics emerged by expanding on previous theories through abstraction and hard work.

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.

Chemistry began as an experimental craft before turning into a science that changed the world.

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.

The rudimentary science of biology finally evolved with the hard work of Charles Darwin.

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 science embraced the world of atoms, the field of physics took a huge leap forward.

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.

Physics continued to advance as the disciplined work of two passionate researchers revealed the structure of atoms.

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.

The challenge of measuring the invisible led to the important development of quantum theory.

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.

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Best quote from The Upright Thinkers

There is nobility in chemistry, the nobility of the quest to know and conquer matter but there has also always been the potential for great greed.

—Leonard Mlodinow

About the Author

Leonard Mlodinow, PhD, is an American physicist, author and a leading researcher in the field of quantum theory. He has written books alongside colleagues such as Stephen Hawking, and is the author of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which was a New York Times notable book of the year and one of Amazon’s choices for best science book of 2008.

Who should read The Upright Thinkers?

Science geeks
Anyone who enjoyed science class but wants to refresh their memory
Students interested in the history of the natural sciences

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