12 Days of Reading Recommendations, Day 1: It's Elemental
Like a lot of people this year, I've availed myself of a few different excellent library systems and gotten a lot of reading done. I thought for an end-of-year treat, I'd share the books I'd recommend and what makes them worth reading. And wouldn't you know it, my reading just happens to sort of self-sift into twelve different subject areas, so it's twelve days of reading! Each day's recommendations newsletter will clock in at 600 words or less, so you can gulp this quick bite when you need a minute to yourself. Enjoy giving your Libby app a vigorous workout or making some independent bookseller very happy.
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IT'S ELEMENTAL
I realize it's called meditation practice and not meditation perfect, but believe me when I say that no amount of deep breath practice ever silences my mind's chorus of gibbering monkeys. What does drop me into a resting heart rate below 60 BPM and a state of focused flow is doing the Periodic Table of the Elements quiz on Sporcle. It's nine minutes of singular absorption and even the gibbering monkeys get in on it.
And like a lot of STEM undergraduates, I can tell you about the properties of elements -- how many electrons in their outer shells, how many protons per element, etc. -- but I wanted to know more about how they got their names and how they were discovered. Two excellent books provided those insights: The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean, and Cracking the Elements: You, This Book and 350 Years of Scientific Discovery, by Rebecca Mileham. The former is a history nerd's delight; I liked the latter because the structure of the book mirrors the structure of the periodic table -- thus reinforcing the unique properties of each group of elements per chapter -- and because the zippy writing is a masterclass in pithy explanatory reporting. The former is fantastic if you still have anything resembling the ability to concentrate on a book for more than 20 minutes at a time; the latter is great for retraining your doomscrolling troop of gibbering monkeys how to focus on reading words and absorbing them again.
What The Disappearing Spoon does especially well is show that scientific discovery does not spring from. an unbroken arc of resolutely objective researchers transcending the societal foolishness of their time. Instead, scientific discovery is the result of people who are the products of their present coming up with ideas that yank the world into a new direction for the future.
Reading both books, I was reminded of two quotes from two other books I'm glad I read this year:
Research is the ongoing process of learning new things that show us a little more of what’s true, which inevitably reveals how wrong we used to be, and it is never “finished.”
-- Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagosaki, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
And:
Here is the bad news: The scientific method can produce knowledge that is wrong. Here is the good news: the scientific method is still our best technology for uncovering , verifying and refining correct knowledge, because what the scientific method allows us to do is make wrong knowledge gradually more correct.
-- Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
If ever there were a year to fall in love all over again with the process of determining what we know to be true, this is it. These books can nudge the love along.
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
Cracking the Elements: You, This Book and 350 Years of Scientific Discovery by Rebecca Mileham
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagosaki
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North
BONUS INTERNET FUN:
YouTube: Tom Lehrer singing "The Elements," back when a fair fewer number of elements had not yet been confirmed
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