Insightology

The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss

Yes, there is such a book and as you would have guessed, it was written by a physicist who is a Star Trek fan. If you have interest in either topic this book would be a good and short read. The foreword is written by no less an eminent physicist than Stephen Hawking and starts appropriately enough at the time when along with Newton and Einstein he was invited to a game of poker on the Starship Enterprise by the android Data. While the book certainly provides plenty of explanation and speculation about the technologies used on the various Star Trek series, it is particularly interesting because of the excellent explanations of physics that are woven into it. On balance, the writers of the series do come out looking respectable. For the most part.     

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Given what has been happening in the economy recently, this book (written ten years ago) provides an excellent foundation for understanding how we ended up here. In telling the story of risk, Bernstein focuses on how much people believe the past determines the future. The more we believe we understand the past, the more certain we are of what will happen in the future. Quantifying the past helps enormously in bringing certainty to the future. But risk lurks in the shadows surrounding certainty and underestimating it because of our blind faith in numbers and computers can lead, he says, to disaster. But what makes this book a wonderful read is that it really does tell a story stretching back millennia and is populated with exotic places and interesting characters. For someone interested in this topic it is time well spent.

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Richard Feynman was one of the pre-eminent physicists of the 20^th century. The leader of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, had described him as the most brilliant young physicist, even among the elite group that came together to work on the bomb. While his primary contribution was to help physicists understand and think about physics in a new way, he also had several other noteworthy contributions such as pioneering the thinking on superconductivity and nanotechnology. Ultimately what made him famous to people outside physics were exploits in a wide range of fields and a quirkily unconventional personality. Considering the other things he has dabbled in, contributed to or mastered, it is very hard to imagine that he was also a Nobel prize-winning physicist for whom the word genius was considered acceptable even in the rarified air of particle physics. Two very different books provide insight into the personality and science of Richard Feynman. If you want an easy, funny read, go with "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" that he himself wrote. For a much more comprehensive immersion into the Feynman biography it's hard to beat James Gleick's account Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

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To be clear, Michael Pollan is not a food scientist, nutritionist, physician or a government employee. He is a journalist with a long interest in food and its impact on society. Consequently this book does not contain a specific diet nor does it focus on combating a particular condition such as weight loss. What it is, oddly enough, is what it says it is - a defense of food. It might seem strange that someone would need to write a book to defend something as fundamental and essential to life as food, but Pollan shows that this book is necessary because the very definition of "food" is under question. He wrote this book as a follow-up to his best seller The Omnivore's Dilemma, which explored the origins of four different meals and in the process explained where our food comes from and how that affects us. In this easy read he focuses on what we should eat, laying out an "eating algorithm" that is based on a very simple rule that is printed right on the book's cover: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. All the guidance you need to eat well and live long.

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Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres

As readers of their Forbes column know, Nalebuff and Ayres have a long history of suggesting quirky and unconventional ideas. In this book they show us how, with easy writing and plenty of examples. How do you ensure you don't forget your keys? Did you know a variation of the solution makes European hotels more energy efficient? Can you buy insurance to protect against a drop in your home value? How nice would it be if you didn't have to pay your mortgage for a month - especially when the shopping season depletes your wallet. How can you get your health insurance company to treat your life as if it were worth a million dollars? Sometimes the answers are real world solutions, sometimes they are simply interesting ideas. This is a book about problem solving - or as the authors put it, problem solving with a purpose. They want you to not only think in new ways, but also come up with solutions that could help society or seed new businesses. Their approach to problem solving is based on two perspectives: looking for problems in search of solutions, and solutions in search of problems. 

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The Reluctant Mr. Darwin - An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen

On the evening of July 1, 1858, six scientific papers were read to the Linnean Society in London. One of them was an idea independently discovered by two authors, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Neither author was there; the young man, Wallace, was in New Guinea collecting insects, while the older man, Darwin, was moaning the death of his young son at home. The idea, natural selection, had nearly zero impact and in the annual address given the following year, the president of the society said the past year hadn't seen "any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize" science. That was the official birth, 150 years ago, of the single biggest idea in the biological sciences.

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond 

Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Rather than point the finger at racial or ethnic differences to answer this question, Diamond focuses on environmental differences and proceeds to lay out a comprehensive case. Four sets of factors, he argues, contributed to the world as we see it today.

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 

How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? Fascinated by this question Lewis begins an investigation that takes him into an area of baseball that was shrouded in mystery about a decade ago. This was an area dominated by people who believed that to truly understand baseball you have to use numbers. Not just any number from a box score (such as an RBI) but those that were shown to be related to winning (such as on-base percentage).

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The Code Book - The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh

If you have any interest in the history of codemaking and codebreaking (or more accurately ciphermaking and cipherbreaking ), this would be a great place to start. Singh begins with early codebreaking ingenuity such as the Caesar shift (yes, that Caesar) where alphabets are substituted for others, and the powerful technique of frequency analysis for breaking substitution ciphers.

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