Some books that generated new thoughts on Life, the Universe and Everything

• Lucretius, T. Cari: De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of the Universe] (55)
      (to remember that we stand on the shoulders of the old Greeks)
• Hofstadter, Douglas R.: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
      (why AI solves all problems and the turtle is a holist)
• Hofstadter, Douglas R.: Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985)
      (why AI solves no problems and Achilles is a reductionist)
• Schumaker, John F.: Wings of Illusion: The Origin, Nature and Future of Paranormal Belief (1990)
     (how to differentiate between belief [=absolute truth] and science [=provisonary truth])
• Garwood, Christine: Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea (2008)
      (how old ideas remain despite overwhelming evidence and the apparently hopeless
      struggle against pseudo-science)
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter: Other Minds - the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life (2017)
     (that shows that alien intelligence is found here on Earth - the last common ancestor of octopi and
      vertebra 700 million years ago might have had neuron-ish cells but not a nervous system!)
• Pepperberg, Irene M.: Alex & Me - how a scientist and a parrot discovered a hidden world
  of animal intelligence (2008)
     (if you never ask a question because you know it will not get an answer -    
  then you would miss talking to parrots and learning new things)
• Gould, Stephen Jay: Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989)
      (on the power of randomness in the in general and in evolution in particular and
      about slaughtering herds of sacred evolutionary cows)
• Pääbo, Svante: Neanderthal Man - In search of lost genomes (2015)
     (On how obsessed and persistent you have to be in your research to succeed)
• Diamond, Jared: Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (1997)
      (explains why Nobel prize winners are euro-asians not New Guinea natives
      - even though the latter are more intelligent)
• Finkel, Irving: The Ark before Noa - decoding the story of the flood (2014)
     (Were you learn that pieces of the ark was sold as souvenirs long before the bible versions(!)
     of the story were written - how it would have looked and why it is a fantasy)
• Ferguson, Kitty: Tycho and Kepler: The unlikely partnership that forever changed our understanding
  of the heavens (2002)
      (about the triumph of the heliocentric theory and why Kepler - differently from Galileo -
      never had problems with the inquisition (except when he saved is grandmother from
      being burned as a witch))
• Wootton, David: Bad Medicine: Doctors doing harm since Hippocrates (2006)
      (why doctors ignored new scientific results for centuries, which made it more dangerous
      to consult a doctor until 1865 and meaningless until the 1930s)
• Sokal, Alan D.:The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (2000)
      (the proof that apparently serious scientific journals can publish total crap - if well written.
      And the following attempts at whitewashing from the editors.)
• Hardy, G. H.: A Mathematician's Apology (1940)
      (a both naive and insightful description of the life of a scientist before Project Manhattan)
• Hitchens, Christopher: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995)
      (about a modern myth and what happens when bad conscience make people blind)
• Machiavelli, Niccoló: The Prince (1514)
      (about the art of politics and how to avoid its consequences by recognizing the methods)
• Bramson, Robert M.: Coping With Difficult People (1981)
      (as scientists are...)
• Ehrenreich, Barbara: Smile or Die (2009)
      (about the dangers to society and organisations that only accepts optimistic,
      smiling yes-men (and -women))
• Solnit, Rebecca: Men Explain Things to Me - and other essays (2014)
     (why you are not the only female scientist having your own work explained to you by an
     intellectually challenged man and other irritations on the professional woman's way)
• Deutscher, Guy: Through the Language Glass - why the world looks different in other languages (2010)
     (our mother tongue does influence how we see the world - but not how complex thoughts we can have)
• Foster, Don: Author unknown - on the trail on Anonymous (2000)
      (if you want to know who the evil reviewer of your paper is you get the methods here
     - nobody is "Anonymous" for the language detective)
• Truss, Lynne: Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003)
      (a book about English (and American) punctuation that was the unlikely winner of
      "Book of the Year 2004" in the U.K. - people do care about apostrophes and commas)
• Kalder, Daniel: Lost Cosmonaut (2006)
      (about how fun it is to travel to the most boring places you can think of and find
      yourself there - travels to four European capitals you have never heard of)
• William Shakespeare: MacBeth (?1600)
      (because Billy must appear in every book list and "The Scottish Play" because
      it warns about believing apparently positive predictions from uncertain sources -
     even if they happen to be true)

New entries 2018 in blue

Comments to Gunilla Borgefors.