Jim Al-Khalili

We tend almost always to be too generous to those who made the most recent steps in a scientific discipline, who inevitably reap the rewards of all antecedent discoveries, while not giving enough credit to those who made the first, and least profitable steps, even though those are often the most important ones.

Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of science in the Arabic world of the Middle Ages, an era too late to get the credit for the earliest foundations of science and too early to get the show more credit for the latest dazzling discoveries. Scientists in the Arab/Islamic world translated Greek scientific writing and added their own discoveries. European scientists continued to build on this body of knowledge and discovery in the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, sometimes translating the Arabic translations of the Greek works into Latin and European languages rather than translating directly from the Greek. In some cases, copies of the original Greek works have not survived, and the earliest known copies of these works are their Arabic translations.

Al-Khalili has a talent for writing about science for educated lay readers. Many of the advances made in Arabic science in the middle ages were concentrated in advanced mathematics and geometry. In fact, the word “algebra” and other terms have Arabic roots. Although my algebra, trigonometry, and geometry knowledge is very rusty, I was able to follow Al-Khalili's explanations with the aid of the diagrams provided. Before I read this book, I'm not sure I could have named a single scientist who was active in the Middle Ages. Recommended for readers who, like me, need to fill in a gap in their education. show less

The part that the history books leave out: that many of the Greek texts that inspired the European Renaissance were no longer actually available in Greek. Fortunately, they hadn't been lost entirely - just translated into Arabic by Arabic scholars ... translations that subsequently passed into the hands of the men who would end up reawakening European intellectual endeavor.

You see, while Europe was embroiled in the feudal disputes and religious extremism of the Middle Ages (the book focuses show more on the period between 500-1200 CE), aristocrats in the thriving international city of Baghdad, motivated by the city's rationalist, pro-science caliph (Abu Ja'far Abdullah al-Ma’mun), were competing with each other for the prestige of translating the greatest works of Greek scholars into Arabic. Arabic polymaths then combined this revealed wisdom with scholarship emerging out of India and other areas of their vast empire to road-test Greek ideas and contribute significant new insights, particularly in the areas of astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and medicine.

The book does a good job of addressing (and often debunking) common myths about the Renaissance in general and Arabic science in particular. Did the Arabs, for instance, “invent zero”? (Spoiler: no, but they did recognize its usefulness in facilitating advanced mathematical calculations.) Did Arabs physicists figure out refraction 600 years before European scientists? Were Arabic doctors the best in Europe – and if so, why? Among other revelations: we have Arabic science to thank for introducing the foundations of modern scientific method.

Found this to be an engrossing read. Yes, the author indulges in more introductory exposition than strictly necessary, but as someone unfamiliar with Middle Eastern history (back in my day, schools didn’t bother teaching non-European history) I derived a lot of value from the context that the information provided. And yes, al-Khalili does occasionally indulge in descriptions of scientific principals that are more in-depth than they need to be (but that fellow science-curious readers like me may appreciate). The book concludes with a reflection on the political, social, and religious factors that eventually brought the “Age of Arabic Science” to an end and that continue to impact Islamic scientific endeavor to this day.

Unlike some of the “click-baity” histories being marketed for popular consumption these days (How Davy Crocket Saved the World!), I get the sense that al-Khalili, while firmly stating the case for the value contributed by Arabic scientists, successfully resists the urge to overstate his case or draw hyperbolic conclusions. This hits as a balanced, user-friendly tale likely to engage armchair historians, scientists, religious historians, or anyone who enjoys learning more about the complicated and nuanced history of human endeavor. show less

I was fortunate enough to see Jim Al-Khalili speak about quantum mechanics a few months ago. The lecture hall was full to bursting, so I sat on the cold hard steps. An hour later I'd been treated to a fast-paced tour through fundamental physics and its possible applications to other sciences; and yet my head hurt less than my hind. I choose to interpret this as evidence that Jim Al-Khalili is an excellent speaker, able to get across complex ideas with clarity and enthusiasm. Or I might just show more have a delicate bottom. Either way, this is a nice book on quantum mechanics, albeit not the best starting point if you want to get into the subject. show less

There are a lot of books out now about exoplanets and extraterrestrial life. It’s hard to decide what to read. What makes this one a little different is that, although the authors are, with only one exception, scientists and academics, they step out of the constraints of academic writing to write informally about an entertaining variety of topics.

Some topics are the basics of the field — how life arose on earth, what makes an environment likely friendly to life, and how to detect the show more presence of life remotely. Others are a bit more imaginative— why do people believe in flying saucers, how alien might alien life really be, and might we be more likely to detect artificial than biological life.

The authors are both optimists and pessimists, and there are some hard realists in there as well. The broader topic is a great one to let scientists free to speculate about. While we do have facts to rely upon for answering some core questions concerning evolution on earth and the prevalence of planets around other stars, we are all educated guessers on so many others — How did life first appear on earth? What characterizes a planet’s ability to host life or its origin? What is the likelihood of life evolving something recognizable to us as intelligence? How do we really know life when we see it? Would we really even recognize “intelligence” if we encountered it?

Here are some highlights from my own reading.

Anil Seth’s chapter, “What Octopus Minds Can Tell Us about Alien Consciousness” — Seth asked the question, what is it like to be an octopus (taking off on Thomas Nagel’s famous philosophical paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”). What is the first “person” experience of life like for an octopus? Seth suggests that consciousness could be very different from our own first person experience of life. For an octopus, an intelligent creature with semi-autonomous limbs, a more distributed nervous system, and a less extensive communication system uniting the parts of its nervous system, conscious life could be unimaginably different from our own — “alien”. It could have a sense of self that was inherently collective, for example. Thought experiments like Seth’s make us realize how truly alien alien life could be — types of life and types of intelligence that are so different from ours that we cannot possibly know what to look for in our search.

Maybe not surprisingly, the chapters on the topic I know least about — the chemical origins of life — taught me the most dramatic lessons. Chemistry, as Andrea Sella says in her chapter on “Randomness vs. Complexity”, is not random. Life didn’t originate in the happenstance of collisions or interactions between various elements or molecules, like a jar of rattling marbles. There are biases built into chemistry itself. Likewise, in “Electric Origins in Deep Sea Vents”, Nick Lane describes how deep sea vents favor the interactions we see in living membranes.

We would certainly like to think that the origin of life is “easy”. And there is pretty good evidence that it happened quickly on Earth. That doesn’t mean it is “easy” though, in the sense that it will likely happen anywhere else, even under what we think are favorable conditions.

The difficulty we have in even talking reasonably about these topics is our sample size of one. One instance of the origin of life, one instance of its evolution, and one instance of the kind of technological intelligence we are looking for out there. But this is what opens the field to speculation. It’s refreshing to see scientists shake off the shackles a bit and tell us what they think. show less