Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

I’m not sure how I came across this book or even why it attracted me. I think that — wherever I encountered it — there must have been a description that mentioned simple but lyrical expositions of key ideas in Physics.

So, far, after having read the first two chapters, I’m liking it very much.

…And now, having completed it, I enjoyed it very much. While a few concepts, particular the issue of time, remain cloudy, over all I understand a lot more about the ‘shape’ of modern physics, and the current frontiers and challenges being addressed. I highly recommend the book.

Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King

October 2025

About the Book

I’m reading this book chapter by chapter with CJS.The topic is the emergence of cultural anthropology via the work of Franz Boas and his students, who included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Nealel Hurdson. The work described here laid the foundation for the belief that all humans are fundamentally equal in their abilities, and that much of what had been thought to be innate was culturally constructed.

The Book

C1: Away

This chapter is really a preface. It begins with a vignette of Margaret Mead arriving in Samoa, but then segues to the general aim of the book.

A little over a century ago, any educated person knew that the world worked in certain obvious ways. Humans were individuals, but each was also representative of a specific type, itself the summation of a distinct set of racial, national, and sexual characteristics.

Each type was fated to be more or less intelligent, idle, rule-bound, or warlike. Politics properly belonged to men, while women, when they were admitted to public life, were thought to be most productive in charitable organizations, missionary work, and the instruction of children. Immigrants tended to dilute a country’s natural vigor and breed political extremism. Animals deserved kindness, and backward peoples, a few rungs above animals, were owed our help but not our respect. Criminals were born to a life beyond the law but might be reformed. Sapphists and sodomites chose their depravities but were probably irredeemable. It was an age of improvement: an era that had moved beyond justifying slavery, that had begun to shake off the strictures of class, and that might eventually do away with empires.

—ibid., p 4

The claim of the book is that the work of Boas and his students was critical to overturning these understandings. Boas and his students invented (and named) cultural anthropology and developed the theory of cultural relativity. Their work challenged heretofore accepted ideas that people fell into natural categories that differed in their abilities and predilections. It did this via a scientific examination of cultures…

EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

EP #9*: On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks

*On the Move, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

These are my notes on On the Move, Oliver Sacks autobiography (billed as volume 2, but the publisher, volume 1 being Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, written a couple of decades earlier). This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ These are not, of course, essays, but we have become interested in Sacks, and it is interesting to see the essays against a fuller narrative of his life.