The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

A few million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and began to stand upright, freeing our hands to create tools and our minds to grapple with the world around us. The Upright Thinkers takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, the book provides a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today’s technological world. Along the journey, we see cultural conditions that influenced scientific thought through the ages and the colorful personalities of some of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers: Galileo, Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg. The Upright Thinkers is a book for anyone interested in creative thinking and in our ongoing quest to understand our world. At once deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark wit, this insightful work is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity.

Speaker Details

Leonard Mlodinow was born in Chicago, and received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, Germany and is the author of five best-sellers. His books include Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award), War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), and The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (a New York Times Notable Book), as well as Feynman’s Rainbow and Euclid’s Window. Mlodinow has taught at Caltech, written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Forbes magazine, as well as for television series such as McGyver and Star Trek: the Next Generation.

Date:
Speakers:
Leonard Mlodinow
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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