Books like Laboratory Life

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

Of course I love an exposé, heavily seasoned with gossip. Wade’s book tells the story of a race between two teams of scientists to discover the structure of an important brain hormone.

The reality of science is laid out in all its guts and glory: each team leader’s vaulting ambition to win the race, the complicated, error-prone nature of scientific research, and the tremendous and tedious effort involved from day to day—one of the team leaders later estimated he had processed 100,000 pig brains, just to extract enough of the vital substance to run through a testing regime.

In a delightful twist, one of the labs involved in the race is the very place that Latour infiltrated a few years later, and like Latour, Wade shows how the crucial decision to claim that the structure of the molecule had been discovered was as political as it was scientific.

In a cancer research lab, a young scientist thinks he might have found a cure for cancer. But his colleague, who just happens to be his ex-girlfriend, is convinced there are flaws in his work.

I loved the way this novel evokes the reality of scientists’ lab work and their struggles to try and determine what is ‘really’ going on. Too often, science is presented in the media as a straightforward yes-no/right-wrong pursuit, whereas in reality, it’s messy and full of dead ends. This novel portrays scientists as human beings who bring their own passions and prejudices into the lab, which struck me as all too relatable.

I live in the world of words. This book plunged me delightfully into the world of images—photographs of distant galaxies and of artworks inspired by those photographs. The subject of the book is the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose patient, painstaking scrutiny of astronomical photographs at Harvard 100 years ago led her to discover the patterns in the behavior of Cepheid variable stars that opened the doors to the mapping of the universe.

The author of the book is Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist working with charcoal and textiles who juxtaposes the story of Leavitt’s breakthrough, the work of other women like Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory, the images that provided the foundation for Leavitt’s thinking, and Von Mertens’ own inspired riffs on those images.

When I first read this book as a history student, it just blew my mind.

Keith Jenkins is an expert at criticizing the roots of historiography in the clearest but also most hilarious way. I learned so much about understanding historical texts and was excited by Jenkin’s urge to move historical thinking beyond narratives of good and evil.

Main lesson learned: Don’t take things too seriously, especially if they already happened!

A classical book on anarchy within science. I find the proposed pluralist approach as the right way to avoid the monopolies of truth in present-day science. Feyerabend identified science as an ideology, which I might have found exaggerated and difficult to understand when I started to study science, but I understand it much better now, after 30 years of working as a researcher.

Forgetting about the relativism implicit in his proposal, focusing on the sociological aspect, I think there are many good and brave observations there that can enlighten us.

So, what, exactly is this ‘world’ or ‘global history’? Authors slap the two words on their books, universities offer new courses in it, and government officials across the planet now speak of ‘global this’ and ‘global that’. One could be forgiven for throwing up one’s hands in exasperation for failing to understand what exactly these two words mean. That is until Sebastian Conrad published this gem of a book aptly entitled: What is Global History? Yes, it’s a bit academic, but it’s also clearly written, logically organized, and succeeds brilliantly in explaining what global history is and is not without losing the reader in theoretical jargon. If you want to try something beyond the ‘nation’ and ‘empire’, Conrad’s global history is a great place to start.

Science has revolutionized the way we live and the way we understand reality, but what accounts for its success? What method sets science apart from other forms of inquiry and ensures that it yields ever-more accurate theories of the world? Strevens argues that the scientific method is not a special kind of logic, like deriving hypotheses from first principles or narrowing hypotheses through falsification, but a simple commitment to arguing with evidence. Strevens shows, with historical case studies, how this commitment is seemingly irrational, as it provides no constraints on what counts as evidence or how evidence should be interpreted, but also incredibly powerful, fostering ingenuity and discovery.

This book written in 1922 by the Austrian economist at the University of Vienna is one of the few truly foundational works in political economy. Mises takes apart the theory of the Marxist moneyless planned economy which Lenin and then Stalin tried to apply to the Soviet Union. Mises lucidly explains why not only that it could never work but would lead to catastrophic and unending shortages, dictatorship, repression, and arbitrary rule enforced by a militarized one-party state. Although Mises had no knowledge of China, it is the best book to read in order to understand what happened in China in the 20th century.

The proverbial scientist at work conjures the image of a solitary investigator bent over a workbench cluttered with arcane instruments nestled among reams of scribbled notes just waiting to be transformed into creative answers to pressing questions about the natural world. The image's simplicity belies the complexity of the process it purports to represent. Adding descriptions of the what, how, and why of scientific inquiry, observation, and analysis still misses a crucial element that makes the improvement, dissemination, and acceptance of new knowledge possible, namely the active behind-the-scenes collaboration between scientists and the illustrators, photographers, printers, and other artisans who use visual representation to shape and successfully communicate that knowledge. 

Mapping the Spectrum is not just an exhaustive and illuminating history of spectrum analysis. In it, author Klaus Hentschel brilliantly exposes the essential role of visual culture in bringing this all-important tool of modern science to useful life. He has… show more.