Dava Sobel

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The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005 Published in Penguin Books 2006 Copyright © Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc., 2005 Illustrations copyright © Lynette R. Cook, 2006 All rights reserved Some of the ideas expressed in chapter one appeared in slightly different format in “A Reporter at Large: Among Planets” by Dava Sobel, published in The New Yorker, December 9, 1996. Parts of chapter six appeared in a “Hers” column, called “Moon Dust,” by Dava Sobel, in The New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1995. Excerpt from The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective by Carl Sagan, produced by Jerome Agel. Used with permission. Excerpt from “The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem.

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PENGUIN BOOKS THE PLANETS Dava Sobel, a former New York Times science reporter, is the author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, and Letters to Father. In her thirty years as a science journalist, she has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life, and The New Yorker, served as a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni, and coauthored six books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake and The Illustrated Longitude with William J. H. Andrewes. For her efforts to increase the public understanding of science, Sobel has been awarded the National Science Board’s prestigious Individual Public Service Award, the Bradford Washburn Award from the Boston Museum of Science, and the Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.

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For her efforts to increase the public understanding of science, Sobel has been awarded the National Science Board’s prestigious Individual Public Service Award, the Bradford Washburn Award from the Boston Museum of Science, and the Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. In recognition of her writing about astronomy, asteroid 30935 has been named in her honor. THE PLANETS DAVA SOBEL PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005 Published in Penguin Books 2006 Copyright © Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc., 2005 Illustrations copyright © Lynette R.

More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel

Astronomia nova, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

Rheticus wrote to his friend Paul Eber about their discovery, and Eber in turn reported it to Melanchthon in a surviving letter of April 15, 1541. A Note on the Author Dava Sobel is the acclaimed author of the New York Times and international bestsellers Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, and The Planets, and the coauthor of The Illustrated Longitude. She lives in East Hampton, New York. Also by Dava Sobel Longitude The Illustrated Longitude (with William J. H. Andrewes) Galileo’s Daughter The Planets Letters to Father (translated and annotated) Copyright © 2011 by Dava Sobel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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A More PERFECT HEAVEN How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos DAVA SOBEL Contents Cover Title Page Decdication “To the Reader, Concerning … This Work” Part One • Prelude Chapter 1 Moral, Rustic, and Amorous Epistles Chapter 2 The Brief Sketch Chapter 3 Leases of Abandoned Farmsteads Chapter 4 On the Method of Minting Money Chapter 5 The Letter Against Werner Chapter 6 The Bread Tariff Part Two • Interplay “And the Sun Stood Still”. ACT I “And the Sun Stood Still”. ACT II Part Three • Aftermath Chapter 7 The First Account Chapter 8 On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres Chapter 9 The Basel Edition Chapter 10 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy Chapter 11 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican Chapter 12 An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Thanksgiving Copernican Chronology Notes on the Quotations Illustration Credits Maps Bibliography Footnotes A Note on the Author Also by Dava Sobel Imprint To my fair nieces, AMANDA SOBEL and CHIARA PEACOCK, with love in the Copernican tradition of nepotism.

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ACT II Part Three • Aftermath Chapter 7 The First Account Chapter 8 On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres Chapter 9 The Basel Edition Chapter 10 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy Chapter 11 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican Chapter 12 An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Thanksgiving Copernican Chronology Notes on the Quotations Illustration Credits Maps Bibliography Footnotes A Note on the Author Also by Dava Sobel Imprint To my fair nieces, AMANDA SOBEL and CHIARA PEACOCK, with love in the Copernican tradition of nepotism. “To the Reader, Concerning … This Work” Since 1973, when the five hundredth anniversary of his birth brought his unique story to my attention, I have wanted to dramatize the unlikely meeting between Nicolaus Copernicus and the uninvited visitor who convinced him to publish his crazy idea.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

It was developed by John Ellman and Michael Pavia, and builds on the work of earlier pioneers in combinatorial chemistry. 6 Thomas A. Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Scientific American 5, no. 124 (1878): 1973-4, <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican05181878-1973supp> 7 Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995). 8 Dava Sobel, Longitude. 9 Unfortunately, Harrison never received his due. To test whether Harrison’s elaborate design could be manufactured by others, the Board of Longitude commissioned another watchmaker named Larcum Kendall to make a copy.

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It was developed by John Ellman and Michael Pavia, and builds on the work of earlier pioneers in combinatorial chemistry. 6 Thomas A. Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Scientific American 5, no. 124 (1878): 1973-4, <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican05181878-1973supp> 7 Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995). 8 Dava Sobel, Longitude. 9 Unfortunately, Harrison never received his due. To test whether Harrison’s elaborate design could be manufactured by others, the Board of Longitude commissioned another watchmaker named Larcum Kendall to make a copy.

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These crude approximations often led to disaster, as frigates wandered way off course. Faced with continued losses in their fleet, Parliament made a bold decision to inspire people to look beyond the usual solutions: it announced a prize of £20,000 (the equivalent of $1 million in today’s money) for anyone who devised a way to accurately measure longitude. As science historian Dava Sobel writes, “This power over purse strings made the Board of Longitude perhaps the world’s first official research-and-development agency.”8 The early results were not promising. The Board of Longitude evaluated proposals for a diverse array of devices with fanciful names like phonometers, pyrometers, selenometers and heliometers.

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clockwork universe, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius

LONGITUDE The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time DAVA SOBEL Contents 1. Imaginary Lines 2. The Sea Before Time 3. Adrift in a Clockwork Universe 4. Time in a Bottle 5. Powder of Sympathy 6. The Prize 7. Cogmaker’s Journal 8. The Grasshopper Goes to Sea 9. Hands on Heaven’s Clock 10. The Diamond Timekeeper 11. Trial by Fire and Water 12. A Tale of Two Portraits 13. The Second Voyage of Captain James Cook 14. The Mass Production of Genius 15. In the Meridian Courtyard Acknowledgments Sources For my mother, Betty Gruber Sobel, a four-star navigator who can sail by the heavens but always drives by way of Canarsie. 1.

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Wakefield, England: Wakefield Historical Publications, 1984. Williams, J. E. D. From Sails to Satellites: The Origin and Development of Navigational Science. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wood, Peter H. “La Salle: Discovery of a Lost Explorer,” in American Historical Review, Vol. 89 (1984) pp. 294-323. Copyright © 1995 by Dava Sobel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published in the United States of America in 1995 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

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First published in the United States of America in 1995 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Canada, Limited, Markham, Ontario Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sobel, Dava. Longitude : the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time / Dava Sobel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-802-77943-4 1. Longitude—Measurement—History. 2. Harrison, John. 1693-1776. 3. Clock and watch makers—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title. QB225.S64 1995 526’.62’09—dc20 95-17402 CIP Illustration of H-4 on title page spread used by permission of the National Maritime Museum, London.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

That diversity meant that the society was more likely to detect important problems that a more unified or specialized group might have missed. Once a premium had been established—and the reward publicly announced—the prize money created a much larger pool of minds working on the problem. John Harrison’s story, powerfully recounted in Dava Sobel’s bestselling Longitude, demonstrates how a prize-backed challenge extends and diversifies the network of potential solutions. Born in West Yorkshire, Harrison was the son of a carpenter, with almost no formal education, and notoriously poor writing skills. When he began working on his first iteration of the chronometer, his social connections to the elites of London were nonexistent.

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On the innovation threat posed by intellectual property restrictions, see Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas, and my own Where Good Ideas Come From. Ayn Rand’s views on patents come from an essay, “Patents and Copyrights,” included in the collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. John Harrison’s story is told in Dava Sobel’s popular Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Beth Noveck’s inspirational work with crowdsourced patent review, dubbed “peer to patent,” is described in her WikiGovernment. For more on Jon Schnur and the origin and implementation of the Race to the Top program, see Steve Brill’s entertaining Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools.

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets by Alan Boss

Albert Einstein, Dava Sobel, diversified portfolio, full employment, Gregor Mendel, if you build it, they will come, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, Silicon Valley, space junk, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Let them waste their time on this Gordian knot. The IAU Executive Committee mulled over the Working Group’s final report for a few months and then, in April 2006, decided to appoint a new committee to waste its time in trying to seek a consensus definition. This time the committee was small: just five astronomers, popular science writer Dava Sobel, and the chair, astronomy historian Owen Gingrich of the Harvard-Smithsonsian Center for Astrophysics. Iwan Williams agreed to work again on this impossible task. The new Planet Definition Committee went to work, knowing that they had to come up with something in time for the upcoming IAU General Assembly in Prague.

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The new Planet Definition Committee went to work, knowing that they had to come up with something in time for the upcoming IAU General Assembly in Prague. After meeting at the Paris Observatory on June 30-31, the seven-member group quickly decided on a definition they could all support: Stern’s roundness definition. They introduced their proposed resolution at the IAU’s Prague meeting on August 16, accompanied by an article by Dava Sobel published in the Washington Post that same day, buttressing their case. Clearly they had planned the release of their decision well ahead of time and had gathered supporters, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, who applauded their decision. Richard Binzel, an MIT planetary scientist who was one of the Magnificent Seven on the Planet Definition Committee, predicted that their proposal would be approved by a wide margin in Prague.

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

The translation of Galileo’s daughter’s letters from the original Italian are the author’s own. Copyright © 1999 by Dava Sobel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published in the United States of America in 1999 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sobel, Dava. Galileo’s daughter: a historical memoir of science, faith, and love/Dava Sobel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.

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DAVA SOBEL GALILEO’S DAUGHTER A Historical Memoir of Science, faith, and love CONTENTS PART ONE. TO FLORENCE [I] She who was so precious to you [II] This grand book the universe [III] Bright stars speak of your virtues [IV] To have the truth seen and recognized [V] In the very face of the sun [VI] Observant executrix of God’s commands [VII] The malice of my persecutors [VIII] Conjecture here among shadows PART TWO. ON BELLOSGUARDO [IX] How our father is favored [X] To busy myself in your service [XI] What we require above all else [XII] Because of our zeal [XIII] Through my memory of their eloquence [XIV] A small and trifling body [XV] On the right path, by the grace of god [XVI] The tempest of our many torments PART THREE.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Also by Dava Sobel Longitude Galileo’s Daughter Letters to Father The Planets A More Perfect Heaven And the Sun Stood Still (a play) VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by John Harrison and Daughter, Ltd. Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

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Here: Courtesy of Carbon County Museum, Rawlins, Wyoming Here: UAV 630.271 (E4116), Harvard University Archives Here: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory Here: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; here: Courtesy of Hastings Historical Society, New York Here: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory; here: Lindsay Smith, used with permission Here: HUGFP 125.82p, Box 2, Harvard University Archives; here: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library Here: HUPSF Observatory (14), olvwork360662, Harvard University Archives; pages here: UAV 630.271 (391), olvwork432043, Harvard University Archives Here: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory Here: HUGFP 125.82p, Box 2, Harvard University Archives; here: Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory Here: HUGFP 125.36 F, Box 1, Harvard University Archives; here: HUGFP 125.36 F, Box 1, Harvard University Archives Here and here: Courtesy of Katherine Haramundanis Here: Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives; here: Courtesy of Charles Reynes Here: Chart 1, Volume 105, Harvard College Observatory Annals Here: Courtesy of Hastings Historical Society, New York; here: Courtesy of Katherine Haramundanis Here: Lia Halloran, used with permission; here: Richard E. Schmidt, used with permission Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sobel, Dava. Title: The glass universe : how the ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the measure of the stars / Dava Sobel. Description: New York : Viking, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016029496 (print) | LCCN 2016030208 (e-book) | ISBN 9780670016952 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698148697 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Women in astronomy—Massachusetts—History. | Women mathematicians—Massachusetts—History. | Astronomy—History—19th century. | Astronomy—History—20th century. | Harvard College Observatory.

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Classification: LCC QB34.5 .S63 2016 (print) | LCC QB34.5 (ebook) | DDC 522/.19744409252—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029496 Printed in the United States of America Version_1 To the ladies who sustain me: Diane Ackerman, Jane Allen, KC Cole, Mary Giaquinto, Sara James, Joanne Julian, Zoë Klein, Celia Michaels, Lois Morris, Chiara Peacock, Sarah Pillow, Rita Reiswig, Lydia Salant, Amanda Sobel, Margaret Thompson, and Wendy Zomparelli, with love and thanks CONTENTS Also by Dava Sobel Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface PART ONE The Colors of Starlight CHAPTER ONE Mrs. Draper’s Intent CHAPTER TWO What Miss Maury Saw CHAPTER THREE Miss Bruce’s Largesse CHAPTER FOUR Stella Nova CHAPTER FIVE Bailey’s Pictures from Peru PART TWO Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Chapter Seven: Sandie Kanthal and Peter Higginson. Chapter Eight: Richard Wiseman. Although I did not interview them for this book, at certain points I drew heavily on the writing or broadcasting of the following people: Loren Graham, Thomas Ricks, David Cloud, Greg Jaffe, George Packer, Leo McKinstry, Dava Sobel, Ian Parker, Sebastian Mallaby, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jennifer Hughes, Gary Hamel, Peter Day, Michael Buerk, Twyla Tharp and Kathryn Schulz. I am indebted. I am also indebted for excellent research assistance to Elizabeth Baldwin, Kelly Chen, Bob Denham and Cosmina Dorobanu. My editors, Eric Chinski, Iain Hunt, Tim Rostron and Tim Whiting have been very supportive.

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See Gautam Naik, ‘R&D spending in U.S. expected to rebound’, wsj.com, 21 December 2009, sec. Economy, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703344704574610350092009062.html 104 ‘Firms are reluctant to risk their money’: McKinstry, Spitfire, pp. 34–5. 105 There is an inconvenient tale behind this: I have drawn much of this account from Dava Sobel’s Longitude (London: Fourth Estate, 1996). 106 Compared with the typical wage of the day: Officer, ‘Purchasing power of British pounds’, cited above, n. 10. 107 In 1810 Nicolas Appert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Appert 107 Ultimately the Académie began to turn down: Maurice Crosland, ‘From prizes to grants in the support of scientific research in France in the nineteenth century: The Montyon legacy’, Minerva, 17(3) (1979), pp. 355–80, and Robin Hanson, ‘Patterns of patronage: why grants won over prizes in science’, University of California, Berkeley, working paper 1998, http://hanson.gmu.edu/whygrant.pdf 108 Innovation prizes were firmly supplanted: Hanson, ‘Patterns of patronage’. 109 The prize was eventually awarded in September 2009: a follow-up prize was announced and then cancelled following a lawsuit over privacy.

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The cheap, easy-to-build and effective Hurricanes did indeed outnumber Spitfires in the early months of the war, but it was the Spitfire’s design that won the plaudits. * The Board of Longitude never gave Harrison his prize, but it did give him some development money. The British parliament, after Harrison petitioned the King himself, also awarded the inventor a substantial purse in lieu of the prize that never came. The sad story is superbly told by Dava Sobel in her book Longitude, although Sobel perhaps gives Harrison too much credit in one respect: it is arguable that by producing a seaworthy clock, albeit a masterpiece, he did not solve the longitude problem for the Royal Navy or society as a whole. To do that, he needed to produce a blueprint that a skilled craftsman could use to produce copies of the clock

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Age of Discovery: David Barrie, Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men Who Mapped the World’s Oceans (Glasgow, UK: William Collins, 2014); Ben Finney, “Nautical Cartography and Traditional Navigation in Oceania,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 3, ed. David Woodward and Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 443–92. device he called H4: David Landes, Revolution in Time, 145–57. popularized in Dava Sobel’s: Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker & Co., 1995). measure a planet’s parallax: Edmund Halley, “A New Method of Determining the Parallax of the Sun,” Philosophical Transactions 29 (1716): 454; Michael Chauvin, “Astronomy in the Sandwich Islands: The 1874 Transit of Venus,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993): 185–225.

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As the start of Cook’s first Pacific voyage neared, however, both approaches—clocks and astronomy—were finally on the verge of becoming practical. In 1759, after more than thirty years’ experimentation, the Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison came up with a device he called H4: a small clock, or chronometer, that could keep time on a ship (a story popularized in Dava Sobel’s 1995 best-seller Longitude). With the newly invented sextant, which allowed more accurate measurements of altitude at sea than ever before, navigators could compare local time at noon with the time back home. But the H4 was still being tested and argued over when Cook set sail in 1768. To find Tahiti, he relied instead on the Moon.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

Patented drugs would no longer be overpriced. With the technology freely available to all, the market would be competitive and the price would be driven down to manufacturing cost. An early precedent for a buyout is the prize the British Parliament offered in the eighteenth century for a method of determining longitude, as chronicled by Dava Sobel in her absorbing book Longitude. Untold lives had been lost in shipwrecks caused by navigation errors, so the prize offered was a rich £20,000. A host of inventors submitted ideas, most of them hare-brained. The problem of measuring longitude accurately was solved by a humble clockmaker, John Harrison, with his invention of the chronometer.

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Could a buyout mechanism be as successful in generating innovation in pharmaceuticals as it was in begetting the chronometer? With the design of the market, as always, the devil is in the details. Two difficulties must be resolved. The promise to pay must be credible. Following the invention of the chronometer, according to Dava Sobel, the British government balked at paying Harrison the £20,000 prize, raising spurious objections. Harrison struggled the rest of his life for acknowledgment, receiving the full money he was due only after forty years. Buying out a newly developed drug would mean paying many millions of dollars to an already highly profitable pharmaceutical company.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

In the LM, before he walks out into the dust, Buzz Aldrin takes Communion with bread and wine consecrated on another planet. “‘I am the vine’,” he says, “‘You are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.’” It is not the only lunar sacrament. In her book “The Planets” (2005), Dava Sobel recalls hearing that her friend Carolyn, on being presented with a speck of moondust by a planetary scientist boyfriend, impulsively ate it. The Apollo astronauts ingest it without choosing to. In their dust-dirtied LM tiny particles move through the alveoli of their lungs and across the microvilli of their guts into their blood, tissues and cells.

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There are terrific Bonestell Moon illustrations in Richardson (1961), which gives a very good sense of pre-Apollo understanding of the Moon. For the LM, see Kelly (2001) and Riley (2009); for spacesuits, see the magnificent and many-layered De Monchaux (2011) and also St Clair (2018); for simulation, see Mindell (2008). For black astronauts, see Logsdon (2014). Dava Sobel’s friend’s lunophagy is in Sobel (2005). Buzz Aldrin’s Communion is in Chaikin (1995). CHAPTER IV The political and social context of the Apollo and early-post-Apollo years is dealt with thoughtfully in Maher (2015). For an introduction to the Anthropocene and debates over its timing, see Lewis and Maslin (2018), and for a consideration of its impact on the humanities, see Chakrabarty (2009).

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

Having tested it against the lunar distance method for calculating longitude, Cook offered rave reviews of the chronometer when he returned to England in July 1775, calling it “our trusty friend” and “our never failing guide.” The chronometer soon became standard. The longitude problem was solved. The significance of the chronometer cannot be overstated. Its effect on the world rivals that of any other invention, including the printing press and the microchip. Dava Sobel, in her definitive history of Harrison’s creation, Longitude, notes (without endorsing) the theory that the chronometer “facilitated England’s mastery over the oceans and thereby led to the creation of the British Empire, for it was by dint of the chronometer . . . that Britannia ruled the waves.”

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Chapter 2: The When and the Where 24 the transit of Venus: Steven Cherry, Transit of Venus: The Other Half of the Longitude Story, Techwise Conversations, n.d., http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/geek-life/profiles/transit-of-venus-the-other-half-of-the-longitude-story. 26 “discovering the longitude”: Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker and Co., 1995), 56. 27 In 1800, Chevalier de Lamarck: Walter Sullivan, “The IGY—Scientific Alliance In a Divided World,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 14, no. 2 (February 1958): 68–72. 28 first international organization: Ibid., 68. 28 “the largest organized intellectual enterprise”: John A.

Asteroid Hunters (TED Books) by Carrie Nugent

Dava Sobel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kuiper Belt, TED Talk

But pressure from the other astronomers was mounting (Rule #2: “Share your observations”). Everyone was itching to see this new planet for themselves. Not everyone was being nice about it. Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, has been remembered by history as a bit of a jerk. (If you have read Dava Sobel’s Longitude, you may remember Maskelyne as John Harrison’s nemesis). At this time, he wrote a particularly nasty passage: “There is great astronomical news: Mr. Piazzi, Astronomer to the King of the two Sicilies, at Palermo, discovered a new planet the beginning of this year, and was so covetous as to keep this delicious morsel to himself for six weeks; when he was punished for his illiberality by a fit of sickness . . .”

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Hard to say for sure.23 Hipparchus’s 360-degree system of latitude and longitude, and the calculations it made possible, gave a big boost to the sciences of geography, cartography, and astronomy. The terms “latitude” and “longitude” derive from the Greek for “breadth” and “length,” respectively, denoting a binary directionality in early maps of the known world. But the difference between the two goes very deep. The American historian Dava Sobel describes it this way: The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.24 Though Polaris was not yet in place to serve as a convenient North Star, the Greeks understood that if the same star or stars barely skimmed the horizon in two different cities, those cities lay at the same latitude.

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Having faced these difficulties in 1764 when trying to observe Jupiter’s satellites at sea, Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, author of the British Mariner’s Guide and the first Nautical Almanac, opined, “I am afraid the complete Management of a Telescope on Shipboard will always remain among the Desiderata.”67 Surely a reliable portable timepiece would be a better solution. It would “enabl[e] mariners,” writes Dava Sobel, “to carry the home-port time with them, like a barrel of water or a side of beef.” The rub was reliability. In 1500, even a fine clock sitting firmly on solid ground would generally accumulate an error of ten or fifteen minutes with each passing day. But that didn’t faze Regnier Gemma Frisius, a Dutch mathematician who proposed that a good clock, set to the exact moment a ship left the dock, could serve as a stable point of comparison for the local time as ascertained at sea by Sun, star, or other means—assuming that the clock’s exactness could be preserved despite the moisture, cold, heat, salt, gravity, and tumult.68 Quite a task.

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In fact, only by going south of the equator can one see the Sun in such a position, so the very assertion Herodotus rejects is the one that best argues for the journey’s actually having taken place. See discussion of Necho’s seventh-century BC and Carthaginian king Hanno’s fifth-century BC voyages in Casson, Ancient Mariners, 116–24. 24.Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 2005), 4. 25.Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 12–13; Williams, Sails to Satellites, 8–9; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, 129–32, 314; B. Arunachalam, “Traditional Sea and Sky Wisdom of Indian Seamen and Their Practical Applications,” in Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, ed.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

I owe the following sources many thanks for their time and expertise: Roger Angel, Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Mike Arthur, William Bains, Natalie Batalha, Charles Beichman, David Bennett, Michael Bolte, Xavier Bonfils, Alan Boss, John Casani, Webster Cash, John Chambers, Phil Chang, David Charbonneau, Nick Cowan, Paul Davies, Drake Deming, Frank Drake, Alan Dressler, Michael Endl, Debra Fischer, Kathryn Flanagan, Eric Ford, Colin Goldblatt, Mark Goughan, Jeff Greason, John Grunsfeld, Javiera Guedes, Olivier Guyon, Robin Hanson, Tori Hoehler, Andrew Howard, Jeremy Kasdin, Jim and Sharon Kasting, Heather Knutson, Antoine Labeyrie, David Latham, Greg Laughlin, Doug Lin, Jonathan Lunine, Kevin McCartney, Claudio Maccone, Bruce Macintosh, Geoff Marcy, John Mather, Greg Matloff, Michel Mayor, Vikki Meadows, Jon Morse, Matt Mountain, Phil Nutzman, Ben Oppenheimer, Bob Owen, Ron Polidan, Marc Postman, Sean Raymond, Dimitar Sasselov, Jean Schneider, Sara Seager, Michael Shao, Seth Shostak, Rudy Slingerland, Chris Smith, Rémi Soummer, David Spergel, Alan Stern, Peter Stockman, Jill Tarter, Philippe Thébault, Wes Traub, Michael Turner, Stéphane Udry, Steve Vogt, Jim Walker, Bernie Walp, Andrew Youdin, and Kevin Zahnle. CHAPTER 1: Looking for Longevity Ronald N. Bracewell, The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1974). Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature, vol. 184 (1959), pp. 844–46. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delacorte Press, 1992). I quote Drake from page 27. Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; first edition, 1964). Translated by Joanna Zylinska, this is the first complete English translation of Lem’s prescient classic on cosmic evolution.

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Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Frank Drake, “Stars as Gravitational Lenses,” in Bioastronomy—The Next Steps, G. Marx, ed., Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol. 144 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), pp. 391–94. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delacorte Press, 1992). Drake’s calculation of how many boxes of corn flakes the Arecibo Observatory radio dish could hold appears on pages 73–74. Von R. Eshleman, “Gravitational Lens of the Sun: Its Potential for Observations and Communications Over Interstellar Distances,” Science, vol. 205 (1979), pp. 1133–35.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Barraclough, Steelmaking Before Bessemer, vol. 2: Crucible Steel (London: The Metals Society, 1984), 102. 11 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998), 215–220. 12 N. A. M. Rodger, Command of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 172. 13 Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Mystery of His Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1995); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 145–170. 14 K. R. Gilbert, “Machine-Tools,” in Singer, ed., The Industrial Revolution, 417–441; K.

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Great Britain made the shift to coke roughly a century before the rest of Europe and the United States. In part because of its greater heat potential, coke is the superior fuel for large-scale processing, so all serious competitor countries were eventually forced to follow the British lead. l Dava Sobel’s best-selling Longitude may be too hard on the astronomers. They certainly rallied against Harrison’s solutions, and several may have been motivated by personal animus toward Harrison (who was easy to dislike). But one could fairly argue that his clocks were not a true solution, despite their clear qualification under the rules.

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Dava Sobel, digital divide, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Silicon Valley, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair

Let Greenwich do her best to maintain her high position in administering to the longitude of the world, and Nautical Almanacs do their best, and we will unite our effort without special acclaim to the fictitious honour of a Prime Meridian. Airy’s conclusion strikes the scornful, above-the-battle stance to which astronomy often aspires. (One need only recall the arguments recorded in Dava Sobel’s Longitude, the contempt of an earlier astronomer-royal, Sir Nevil Meskalyne, for the provincial clock-maker John Harrison.) Airy’s recommendation to the Privy Council was to abstain from any “novelty” or “social usage,” on the principle that government intervention might prove more harmful than the recognized inconveniences enumerated in Fleming’s paper.

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

A fuller translation is given in Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (Anchor, New York, 1957), pp. 162–64. 25. A translation of the entire letter is given in Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, pp. 175–216. 26. Quoted in Stillman Drake, Galileo (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980), p. 64. 27. The letters of Maria Celeste to her father fortunately survive. Many are quoted in Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Walker, New York, 1999). Alas, Galileo’s letters to his daughters are lost. 28. See Annibale Fantoli, Galileo—For Copernicanism and for the Church, 2nd ed., trans. G. V. Coyne (University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend, Ind., 1996); Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005). 29.

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George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, Volume 1, From Homer to Omar Khayyam (Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, D.C., 1927). Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1954). Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996). Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Walker, New York, 1999). Merlin L. Swartz, Studies in Islam (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981). N. M. Swerdlow and O. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1984). R. Taton and C. Wilson, eds., Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics—Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989).

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The adverse effects of so-called incentive pay The Right, like many economists, tends to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs of incentive pay. There are certainly contexts in which monetary prizes have the potential to focus minds on a thorny problem and deliver a solution. A famous example is detailed in Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. As she reports, in the Longitude Act of 1714, the British Parliament set “a prize equal to a king’s ransom (several million dollars in today’s currency) for a ‘Practicable and Useful’ means of determining longitude.”

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Hoff, “Market Failures and the Distribution of Wealth: A Perspective from the Economics of Information,” Politics and Society 24, no. 4 (1996): 411–32; and Hoff, “The Second Theorem of the Second Best,” Journal of Public Economics 25 (1994): 223–42. 55. The exciting story is told in the bestseller by Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995). 56. Technically, the problems with incentive pay arise when there are information asymmetries. The employer doesn’t fully know the quality of the products produced by the worker (otherwise, he would specify that).

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The deflation began after the debacle of Murray Gell-Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar (1994), which Brockman sold for an advance of $550,000 for American rights alone. Gell-Mann returned much of the advance after failing to complete the book as promised, though it did eventually come out. The next year the phenomenon was Longitude by Dava Sobel and narrative non-fiction, rather than argument, became all the rage. Cod, tulips, salt, and zero were the themes of the moment, not to mention, on a grander and more analytical scale, guns, germs, and steel. In recent years, even as his imitators swarmed, the master continued to dominate the lists.

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern, David Grinspoon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, four colour theorem, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, space junk, SpaceShipOne

Then, in 2005, the discovery was reported of a Kuiper Belt planet later named Eris that was thought by its discoverer, Caltech scientist Mike Brown, to be slightly larger than Pluto (later this turned out to be wrong). This in turn resulted in the IAU appointing a planet-definition committee, which included the award-winning science writer Dava Sobel, along with six eminent astronomers. After long deliberations and debates, this august committee proposed a simple and straightforward planet definition: a planet is an object in orbit around any star that is large enough for gravity to make round but not so massive that it ignites in nuclear fusion to become a star.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

nitrogen gas is the least reactive diatomic substance: Schrock (2006). Haber-Bosch process: Standage (2010), Kean (2010), Perkins (1977), Edgerton (2007a). 12: TIME AND PLACE Adam Frank, About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang. Eric Bruton, The History of Clocks & Watches. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Epigraph: Denis Diderot as quoted by Goodman (1995). constancy of sand time (hourglass) compared to water clock: Bruton (2000). sundials: Oleson (2008). Manhattan as a city-size Stonehenge: Astronomy Picture of the Day, July 12, 2006, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060712.html.

Statistical Arbitrage: Algorithmic Trading Insights and Techniques by Andrew Pole

algorithmic trading, Benoit Mandelbrot, constrained optimization, Dava Sobel, deal flow, financial engineering, George Santayana, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market clearing, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, pattern recognition, price discrimination, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, transaction costs

3 The first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed (1646–1719), systematically mapped the observable heavens from the newly established Royal Observatory at Greenwich, compiling 30,000 individual observations, each recorded and confirmed over 40 years of dedicated nightly effort. ‘‘The completed star catalogue tripled the number of entries in the sky atlas Tyco Brahe had compiled at Uraniborg in Denmark, and improved the precision of the census by several orders of magnitude.’’ In Longitude by Dava Sobel. Monte Carlo or Bust 7 The questions are unanswerable here. One cannot offer a philosophy or sociology of finance. But one can strive for scientific rigor in data analysis, hypothesis positing, model building, and testing. That rigor is the basis of any belief one can claim for the validity of understanding and coherent actions in exploiting emergent properties of components of the financial emporium.

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

Jacob Berkowitz, “Lost World: How Canada Missed Its Moment of Glory,” Globe and Mail, September 25, 2009, available at 229 Notes to Pages 32–62 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. https://­w ww​.­t heglobeandmail​ .­c om​ /­t echnology​ /­s cience​ /­l ost​ -­world​-­how​-­canada​-­missed​-­its​-­moment​-­of​-­glory​/­article4290133​ /­​?­page​=­all. Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (New York: Walker & Com­pany, 2011); Konrad Rudnicki, “The Generalized Cosmological Copernican Princi­ple,” available at http://­southerncrossreview​.­org​/­51​/­rudnicki4​.­htm. Data available at http://­exoplanet​.­eu​/­catalog​/­hd​_­20782​_­b​/­.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Susan Sellers, 1994 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone, 1970 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, 2011 Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez, 2019 The I-Ching Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, Cordelia Fine, 2017 (and everything she has written and will write) The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, Gina Rippon, 2019 The Future Isn’t Female Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2002 Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, Marie Hicks, 2017 Algorithims of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018 The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel, 2016 Let it Go: My Extraordinary Story – from Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist, the memoir of Dame Stephanie Shirley, 2012 (If you don’t have time for this, just find her TED Talk.) Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, 2020 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy, 1984 Psychology of Crowds, Gustave Le Bon, 1896 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, 2013 Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis, 2020 A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 Your Computer Is on Fire, various editors, 2021 (haven’t read this at time of going to press but looks great) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, 2002 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich, 1976 The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, Sharon Moalem, 2020 Jurassic Car Park Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949 The War of the Worlds, H.

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

Prizes to incentivize innovation also have a long history. The race to win a £20,000 prize offered by the British Parliament in the eighteenth century for a solution to how to measure longitude, and the struggle of clockmaker John Harrison to convince the government-appointed panel that he had won, is described in Dava Sobel’s 1995 bestseller, Longitude. Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927 to win a $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, a hotelier. Now they are back in fashion. The breakthrough moment came when SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X Prize, created by Peter Diamandis, for the first privately funded space flight.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Chapter 9 – Crowdsource: The Wisdom of the Masses Wutbürger as German word of the year: Full list available from German Language Society at http://www.gfds.de/aktionen/wort-des-jahres/ Guessing the weight of an ox: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random, 2005), pp. xii-xiii. Pinpointing vessel lost at sea: Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, pp. xx-xxi. Public identifies Mars craters: Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, p. 276. Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem: Based on my interview with Scott Page. John Harrison: For the whole story check out Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). Teenager invents method for detecting pancreatic cancer: Jake Andraka won first place at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), a program of the Society for Science and the Public.

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger

Dava Sobel, fail fast, MITM: man-in-the-middle, North Sea oil, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal

Like victims of a perfect crime, readers of The Perfect Storm are first seduced into caring for the book's doomed characters, then compelled to watch them carried into the maw of a meteorological hell. And all the while, Sebastian Junger's compassionate, intelligent voice instructs us effortlessly on the sea life of the sword-fisherman, the physics of a sinking steel ship, and the details of death by drowning." —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude "A journalistic triumph, the perfect meeting of the awesome power of a storm at sea and our own fascination with it." —Arizona Republic THE PERFECT STORM A TRUE STORY OF MEN AGAINST THE SEA SEBASTIAN JUNGER Insert credits: Pages 1 (bottom), 2, 3, 4 (bottom), 6, 8 © TEUN VOETEN/HH; pages 4 (top), 5 courtesy of the Crow's Nest; pages 1 (top), 7 courtesy of the Gloucester Daily Times.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

This would make a great story for a cute little nonfiction book if the Royal Navy had immediately acted on this information and caused a revolution in scurvy care; in fact, though, it took forty years before the navy made lime juice compulsory on long voyages. (Note that the story of scurvy is a sequel to the story of longitude, as told by Dava Sobel in a book of that name: the ability to determine longitude made it possible for ships to regularly go on much longer voyages, which made scurvy a bigger problem.) costs Everyone knows what costs are. In economics, though, the word is used as a euphemism for “people,” so when a company or government talks about “cutting costs,” what it really means is “sacking people.”

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

Wilford, The Mapmakers, 64. 13. Ibid., 87–104. 14. Andrew D. Lambert, The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin’s Tragic Quest for the North West Passage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 74. 15. Frank Nothen Magill, Magill’s Survey of Science: Earth Science Series (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1990), 2:541. 16. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 24–27. 17. Wilford, The Mapmakers, 132–151. Chapter 2 1. Abigail Foerstner, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 50. 2.

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Viviani created the popular image: A thorough discussion of Galileo’s methods and thought process can be found in Shea 1972, and in Machamer 1998. “was ignorant not only”: Galileo 1589–92. Galileo profusely criticizes Aristotle in De Motu. See Galilei 1600a, b. Virginia, Livia, and Vincenzio: The life story of Virginia, later known as Sister Maria Celeste, is beautifully told in Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter (Sobel 1999). “About 10 months ago”: Galilei 1610a, b. An excellent description of the work that led to the telescope can be found in is Reeves 2008. As the historian of science Noel Swerdlow: Swerdlow 1998. For a detailed description of Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope, see Shea 1972, Drake 1990.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

A 30-minute delay on a one-hour flight is a far greater annoyance than a one-hour delay on a nine-hour flight. *Or the ones who want an excuse to cancel their bloody meeting in Frankfurt. *I will explain how later in this book. *Thirty nautical miles at the equator. *We owe it to Dava Sobel and her bestselling book Longitude (1995) that the name of John Harrison is now widely known. *They had hence proved not only that a heavier-than-air machine could fly, but also that snobbery is not an exclusively British vice. *Semmelweis was even more cruelly treated than Harrison: he died in a lunatic asylum, perhaps having been beaten by the guards, insisting to his last breath that his theory was right.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

Bernal, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969; first edition, 1929). James B. Pollack and Carl Sagan, "Planetary Engineering," in J. Lewis and M. Matthews, editors, Near-Earth Resources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 192 CHAPTER 20, DARKNESS Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (New York: Delacorte, 1992). Paul Horowitz and Carl Sagan, "Project META: A Five-Year All-Sky Narrowband Radio Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Astrophysical Journal, vol. 415 (1992), pp. 218-235. Thomas R. McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987).

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

conscripted into forced labor: Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). recalled in a video: Jeff Tsang, “WE NEARLY CRASHED! OUR ENGINE BROKE!? A Close Call with Pack of 200+ Ships Outside Shanghai,” YouTube, March 22, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1-wbV8PkmI. superaccurate marine clocks: Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London: Fourth Estate, 2014). age of the Titanic: “History of Sperry Marine,” Sperry Marine, https://www.sperrymarine.com/corporate-history/sperry-marine. electromechanical device: “‘Metal Mike’ Guides the Queen Elizabeth,” New York Times, September 26, 1946.

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

http://www.musicoftheprimes.com/ The website for this book contains a regularly updated news section and a huge amount of fascinating information related to prime numbers. BOOKSHOP Now you can buy any of these great paperbacks from Harper Perennial at 10% off recommended retail price. FREE postage and packing in the UK. Fermat’s Last Theorem Simon Singh 1 84115 791 0 £8.99 The Code Book Simon Singh 1 85702 889 9 £9.99 Longitude Dava Sobel 1 85702 5717 £6.99 Isaac Newton James GleickO 00 716318 5 £7.99 Nature via Nurture Matt Ridley 1 84115 746 5 £8.99 The Curious Life of Robert Hooke Lisajardine0007151756 £8.99 Total cost———— 10% discount———— Final total———— To purchase by Visa/Mastercard/Switch simply call08707871724orfaxon08707871725 To pay by cheque, send a copy of this form with a cheque made payable to ‘HarperCollins Publishers’ to: Mail Order Dept (Ref: BOM), HarperCollins Publishers, Westerhill Road, Bishopbriggs, G64 2QT, making sure to include your full name, postal address and phone number.

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £1.25 and £2 million = £130 million and £210 million today; £1 million = £105 million; £8 million = £840 million; £3.2 millon = £336 million; £1.1 million = £115 million; £6 million = £630 million. * Over £4 million today. * The Reverend Nevil Maskelyne was, of course, the villain of Dava Sobel’s bestseller Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, London, 1995. Here Maskelyne is painted, as one critic put it, as ‘a dull but jealous and snobbish Cambridge-trained cleric, whose elitism and privileging of astronomy over mechanical inventiveness prejudice him against the Yorkshire-born and Lincolnshire-bred [hero of the book, John] Harrison.

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Kitty Ferguson, The Nobleman and His Housedog (Review, 2002) A highly accessible account of the partnership between Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Martin Gorst, Aeons (Fourth Estate, 2001) A history of humankind’s attempts to measure the age of the universe, from Bishop Ussher to Hubble’s law. Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Fourth Estate, 2000) An account of the life of Galileo, which includes letters sent to him by his daughter, who lived in a convent from the age of thirteen. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Abacus, 1995) The book based on the famous television series, which must have been the inspiration for numerous careers in astronomy.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Sol Schwimmer is suing me”: Woody Allen, The Complete Prose of Woody Allen (New York: Wings Books, 1991), 105. 35 “when we think of information technology”: David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2011), xvi. 36 “the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution”: “‘Antichrist of Silicon Valley,’ Andrew Keen Wary of Online Content Sharing,” Economic Times, May 29, 2012. 37 they don’t always capture the historical complexity: on the longitude problem, see Dava Sobel’s accessible history Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, reprint ed. (New York: Walker & Company, 2007). On early crowdsourcing efforts by the Smithsonian, see “Smithsonian Crowd-sourcing since 1849!,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, April 14, 2011, http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-crowdsourcing-1849.

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

clockwork universe, dark matter, Dava Sobel, fail fast, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, power law, quantum entanglement

I made some changes in these texts, and many elisions that I did not mark, but I was always relying on the translators who translated the source material from Italian or Latin or French into English. In particular I would like to acknowledge and thank Mary Allan-Olney, Mario Biagioli, Henry Crew and Alfonso de-Salvio, Giorgio de Santillana, Stillman Drake, John Joseph Fahie, Ludovico Geymonat, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Pietro Redondi, James Reston, Jr., Rinaldina Russell, Dava Sobel, and Albert van Helden. Despite the work of these translators and many more, not all of Galileo’s writing has yet been translated into English. This is a real shame, not only for novelists writing novels about him, but for anyone who doesn’t speak Italian but does speak English, and wants to learn more about the history of science, or one of its greatest characters.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Quoted in Chris Alden, China in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2007), p. 19. 14 . Patrick L. Smith, ‘Museum’s Display Links the Birth of Golf to China’, International Herald Tribune, 1 March 2006. 15 . Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘Glory is as Ephemeral as Smoke and Clouds’, International Herald Tribune, 23 May 2005. 16 . Dava Sobel, Longitude (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). 17 . Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 235. 18 . Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 147-9. 19 .

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

If you measured the deflection accurately and worked out the mass of the mountain, you could calculate the universal gravitational constant—that is, the basic value of gravity, known as G—and along with it the mass of the Earth. Bouguer and La Condamine had tried this on Peru's Mount Chimborazo, but had been defeated by both the technical difficulties and their own squabbling, and so the notion lay dormant for another thirty years until resurrected in England by Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal. In Dava Sobel's popular book Longitude, Maskelyne is presented as a ninny and villain for failing to appreciate the brilliance of the clockmaker John Harrison, and this may be so, but we are indebted to him in other ways not mentioned in her book, not least for his successful scheme to weigh the Earth. Maskelyne realized that the nub of the problem lay with finding a mountain of sufficiently regular shape to judge its mass.

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

Gilbert and George’s studio (1968–), No. 12 The well-known performance artists Gilbert Proesch and Flete George Charles Ernestine Passmore, better known as Gilbert and George, moved to Spitalfields in the late 1960s, when the area was at its lowest ebb and one of the least fashionable enclaves of the capital (‘it was like walking into a book in the nineteenth century: amazing light, and few people in the street, more like literature than reality’, according to Gilbert), but decades later found that their locale had become one of the most fashionable places in central London, thanks to the surrounding gentrification and the influx of artists into Spitalfields and Shoreditch. Nos. 4–6 Built as a silk merchant’s house by Marmaduke Smith in 1726, Nos. 4–6 – used in the late-twentieth-century television version of Dava Sobel’s Longitude – is grander than most of the other properties on the street and features a rusticated central doorway, carved surround, cantilevered canopy and full height Doric pilasters, as well as being decorated internally with much mahogany, used because the duty on the wood had been lifted only four years previously.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Crowe, Modern Theories of the Universe from Herschel to Hubble, Chicago UP, 1994 Gale Christianson, Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995 Peter Whitfield, The Mapping of the Heavens, The British Library, 1995 John Carey (editor), The Faber Book of Science, Faber, 1995 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Volume I: Voyaging, and Volume 2: The Power of Place, Pimlico, 1995 and 2000 Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, Telling Lives in Science: Essays in Scientific Biography, CUP, 1996 Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, 1996 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, HarperCollins, 1997 John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, CUP, 1998 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1998 Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Little, Brown, 1999 Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, Picador, 2000 Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660-2000, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2000 Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius, Macmillan, 2000 Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routledge, 2001 Thomas Crump, A Brief History of Science as Seen Through the Development of Scientific Instruments, Constable, 2001 Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Picador, 2001 Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann, Oxygen (a play in 2 acts), Wiley, New York, 2001 Anne Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of P.H.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Kardashev, "Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Soviet Astronomy 8.2 (1964): 217–20. Summarized in Guillermo A. Lemarchand, "Detectability of Extraterrestrial Technological Activities," SETIQuest 1:1, pp. 3–13, http://www.coseti.org/lemarch1.htm. 68. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (New York: Dell, 1994); Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Scientific American (May 1975): 80–89. A Drake-equation calculator can be found at http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html. 69. Many of the descriptions of the Drake equation express fL as the fraction of the planet's life during which radio transmission takes place, but this should properly be expressed as a fraction of the life of the universe, as we don't really care how long that planet has been around; rather, we care about the duration of the radio transmissions. 70.

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017 by Rick Steves

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon footprint, Dava Sobel, Google Hangouts, index card, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wikimedia commons, young professional

Boccaccio’s collection of 100 hilarious, often bawdy tales is a masterpiece of Italian literature and inspired Chaucer, Keats, and Shakespeare. Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1321). Dante’s epic poem—a journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise—is one of the world’s greatest works of literature. Galileo’s Daughter (Dava Sobel, 1999). Sobel’s historical memoir centers on Galileo’s correspondence with his oldest daughter and confidante. The Light in the Piazza (Elizabeth Spencer, 1960). A mother and daughter are intoxicated by the beauty of 1950s Florence (also a 1962 movie and an award-winning Broadway musical). Murder of a Medici Princess (Caroline P.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, carried interest, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas by John S. Burnett

British Empire, cable laying ship, Dava Sobel, defense in depth, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, North Sea oil, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions