The Best Science Books of 2014

On the heels of the year's most intelligent and imaginative children's bookscome the most stimulating science books published this annum. (Step into the nonfictional time machine by revisiting the selections for 2013,2012, and 2011.)

1. THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE

"If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from," Carl Sagan wrote in histimeless meditation on science and religion,"we will have failed." It's a sentiment that dismisses in one fell Saganesque swoop both the blind dogmatism of religion and the vain certitude of science – a sentiment articulated by some of history's greatest minds, fromEinstein to Ada Lovelace to Isaac Asimov, all the way back Galileo. Yet centuries after Galileo and decades after Sagan, humanity remains profoundly uneasy about reconciling these conflicting frameworks for understanding the universe and our place in it.

That unanswerable question of where we came from is precisely what physicist Alan Lightman – one of the finest essayists writing today and the very first person to receive dual appointments in science and the humanities at MIT – explores from various angles in The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew (public library |IndieBound).

At the intersection of science and philosophy, the essays in the book explore the possible existence of multiple universes, multiple space-time continuums, more than three dimensions. Lightman writes:

Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils.

[...]

Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion.

In one of the most beautiful essays in the book, titled "The Spiritual Universe," Lightman explores that intersection of perspectives in making sense of life:

I completely endorse the central doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree with [scientists who argue] that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. Obviously, vast territories of the arts concern inner experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. The humanities, such as history and philosophy, raise questions that do not have definite or unanimously accepted answers.

[...]

There are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. The previous questions are questions of aesthetics, morality, philosophy. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.

[...]

Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

Dive deeper with Lightman on science and spirituality, our yearning for immortality in a universe of constant change, and how dark energy explains our accidental origins.

2. THE HUMAN AGE

In the most memorable scene from the cinematic adaptation of Carl Sagan's novelContact, Jodi Foster's character – modeled after real-life astronomer and alien hunter Jill Tarter – beholds the uncontainable wonder of the cosmos, which she has been tasked with conveying to humanity, and gasps: "They should've sent a poet!"

To tell humanity its own story is a task no less herculean, and at last we have a poet – Sagan's favorite poet, no less – to marry science and wonder. Science storyteller and historian Diane Ackerman, of course, isn't only a poet – though Sagan did send her spectacular scientifically accurate verses for the planets to Timothy Leary in prison. For the past four decades, she has been bridging science and the humanities in extraordinary explorations of everything from the science of the senses to the natural history of love to the slender threads of hope. In The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us (public library |IndieBound), Ackerman traces how we got to where we are – a perpetually forward-leaning species living in a remarkable era full of technological wonders most of which didn't exist a mere two centuries ago – when "only moments before, in geological time, we were speechless shadows on the savanna."

With bewitchingly lyrical language, Ackerman paints the backdrop of our explosive evolution and its yin-yang of achievement and annihilation:

Humans have always been hopped-up, restless, busy bodies. During the past 11,700 years, a mere blink of time since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, we invented the pearls of Agriculture, Writing, and Science. We traveled in all directions, followed the long hands of rivers, crossed snow kingdoms, scaled dizzying clefts and gorges, trekked to remote islands and the poles, plunged to ocean depths haunted by fish lit like luminarias and jellies with golden eyes. Under a worship of stars, we trimmed fires and strung lanterns all across the darkness. We framed Oz-like cities, voyaged off our home planet, and golfed on the moon. We dreamt up a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels. We may not have shuffled the continents, but we’ve erased and redrawn their outlines with cities, agriculture, and climate change. We’ve blocked and rerouted rivers, depositing thick sediments of new land. We’ve leveled forests, scraped and paved the earth. We’ve subdued 75 percent of the land surface – preserving some pockets as “wilderness,” denaturing vast tracts for our businesses and homes, and homogenizing a third of the world’s ice-free land through farming. We’ve lopped off the tops of mountains to dig craters and quarries for mining. It’s as if aliens appeared with megamallets and laser chisels and started resculpting every continent to better suit them. We’ve turned the landscape into another form of architecture; we’ve made the planet our sandbox.

But Ackerman is a techno-utopian at heart. Noting that we've altered our relationship with the natural world "radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad," she adds:

Our relationship with nature is evolving, rapidly but incrementally, and at times so subtly that we don’t perceive the sonic booms, literally or metaphorically. As we’re redefining our perception of the world surrounding us, and the world inside of us, we’re revising our fundamental ideas about exactly what it means to be human, and also what we deem “natural."

Dive deeper with Ackerman on what the future of artificial intelligence reveals about the human condition.

3. THE BOOK OF TREES

Why is it that when we behold the oldest living trees in the world, primeval awe runs down our spine? We are entwined with trees in an elemental embrace, both biological and symbolic, depending on them for the very air we breathe as well as for our deepest metaphors, millennia in the making. They permeate our mythology and our understanding of evolution. They enchant our greatest poets and rivet our greatest scientists. Even our language reflects that relationship – it's an idea that has taken "root" in nearly every "branch" of knowledge.

How and why this came to be is what designer and information visualization scholar Manuel Lima explores in The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (public library | IndieBound) – a magnificent 800-year history of the tree diagram, from Descartes to data visualization, medieval manuscripts to modern information design, and the follow-up to Lima's excellent Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information.

'Genealogical distribution of the arts and sciences' by Chrétien Frederic Guillaume Roth from Encyclopédie (1780)

'Tree of virtues' by Lambert of Saint-Omer, ca. 1250

'Plan of Organization of New York and Erie Railroad' by Daniel Craig McCallum (1855)

Lima writes in the introduction:

In a time when more than half of the world's population live in cities, surrounded on a daily basis by asphalt, cement, iron, and glass, it's hard to conceive of a time when trees were of immense and tangible significance to our existence. But for thousands and thousands of years, trees have provided us with not only shelter, protection, and food, but also seemingly limitless resources for medicine, fire, energy, weaponry, tool building, and construction. It's only normal that human beings, observing their intricate branching schemas and the seasonal withering and revival of their foliage, would see trees as powerful images of growth, decay, and resurrection. In fact, trees have had such an immense significance to humans that there's hardly any culture that hasn't invested them with lofty symbolism and, in many cases, with celestial and religious power. The veneration of trees, known as dendrolatry, is tied to ideas of fertility, immortality, and rebirth and often is expressed by the axis mundi(world axis), world tree, or arbor vitae (tree of life). These motifs, common in mythology and folklore from around the globe, have held cultural and religious significance for social groups throughout history – and indeed still do.

[...]

The omnipresence of these symbols reveals an inherently human connection and fascination with trees that traverse time and space and go well beyond religious devotion. This fascination has seized philosophers, scientists, and artists, who were drawn equally by the tree's inscrutabilities and its raw, forthright, and resilient beauty. Trees have a remarkably evocative and expressive quality that makes them conducive to all types of depiction. They are easily drawn by children and beginning painters, but they also have been the main subjects of renowned artists throughout the ages.

Dive deeper here.

4. THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

Just as the fracturing of our inner wholenessruptures the soul, a similar fissure rips society asunder and has been for centuries – that between science and the humanities. The former explores how we became human and the latter what it means to be human – a difference at once subtle and monumental, polarizing enough to hinder the answering of both questions. That's what legendary naturalist, sociobiologist, and Pulitzer-winning writer E.O. Wilson explores with great eloquence and intellectual elegance in The Meaning of Human Existence (public library | IndieBound).

Three decades after Carl Sagan asserted that "if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed," Wilson – a longtime proponent of bridging the artificial divide between science and the humanities – counters that "we’ve learned enough about the Universe and ourselves to ask these questions in an answerable, testable form."

And that elusive answer, he argues, has to do with precisely that notion ofmeaning:

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.

Whether in the cosmos or in the human condition, the second, more inclusive meaning exists in the evolution of present-day reality amid countless other possible realities.

The idea that we are a cosmic accident is far from new and, to the unexamined existential reflex, far from comforting. And yet, Wilson suggests, there is something enormously gladdening about the notion that out of all possible scenarios, out of the myriad other combinations that would have resulted in not-us, we emerged and made life meaningful. He illustrates this sense of "meaning" with the particular evolutionary miracle of the human brain, the expansion of which was among the most rapid bursts of complex tissue evolution in the known history of the universe:

A spider spinning its web intends, whether conscious of the outcome or not, to catch a fly. That is the meaning of the web. The human brain evolved under the same regimen as the spider’s web. Every decision made by a human being has meaning in the first, intentional sense. But the capacity to decide, and how and why the capacity came into being, and the consequences that followed, are the broader, science-based meaning of human existence.

Premier among the consequences is the capacity to imagine possible futures, and to plan and choose among them. How wisely we use this uniquely human ability depends on the accuracy of our self-understanding. The question of greatest relevant interest is how and why we are the way we are and, from that, the meaning of our many competing visions of the future.

Perched on the precipice of an era when the very question of what it means to be human is continually challenged, we stand to gain that much more from the fruitful cross-pollination of science and the humanities in planting the seeds for the best such possible futures. Like an Emerson of our technoscientific era, Wilson champions the ennobling self-reliance embedded in this proposition:

Humanity ... arose entirely on its own through an accumulated series of events during evolution. We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.

Dive deeper here.

:: SEE NUMBERS 5–8 ::

9. NEUROCOMIC

Scientists are only just beginning to understand how the brain works – from what transpires in it while we sleep to how to optimize its memoryto what love does to it to how music affects it – and the rest of us fall somewhere on the spectrum between fascinated and confused when it comes to the intricate inner workings of our master-controller.

From British indie press Nobrow – who also brought us Freud's graphic biography and Blexbolex's magnificent No Man's Land – comes Neurocomic (public library |IndieBound), a graphic novel about how the brain works. This remarkable collaboration between neuroscientist Dr. Hana Roš and neuroscience-PhD-turned-illustrator Dr. Matteo Farinella, with support from the Wellcome Trust, explains the inner workings of the brain in delightful and illuminating black-and-white illustrations, covering everything from perception and hallucinations to memory and emotional recall to consciousness and the difference between the mind and the brain.

We take a stroll through a forest of neurons, then learn about neuroplasticity. ("This is the great power of the brain, it's plastic!" they tell us in one of the most heartening and reassuring parts. "Once you learn something it is not set in stone, it's continuously shaped by experience.") We meet Pavlov and his famous studies of memory in 1897 Russia. We visit the haunting memory caves and the convoluted castles of deception.

See more here.

10. WHAT IF?

For years, NASA-roboticist-turned-comic-creator Randall Munroe has been delighting the world with his popular xkcdwebcomic, often answering readers' questions about various aspects of how the world works with equal parts visual wit and scientific rigor. The best of these, as well as a number of never-before-answered ones, are now collected in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (public library | IndieBound) – questions like what would happen if a submarine was hit by lightning to what it would actually take to eradicate the common cold to the physics of trying to hit a baseball pitched at the speed of light.

Munroe writes in the introduction:

I’ve been using math to try to answer weird questions for as long as I can remember. When I was five years old, my mother had a conversation with me that she wrote down and saved in a photo album. When she heard I was writing this book, she found the transcript and sent it to me. Here it is, reproduced verbatim from her 25-year-old sheet of paper:

Randall: Are there more soft things or hard things in our house?

Julie: I don’t know.

Randall: How about in the world?

Julie: I don’t know.

Randall: Well, each house has three or four pillows, right?

Julie: Right.

Randall: And each house has about 15 magnets, right?

Julie: I guess.

Randall: So 15 plus 3 or 4, let’s say 4, is 19, right?

Julie: Right.

Randall: So there are probably about 3 billion soft things, and . . . 5 billion hard things. Well, which one wins?

Julie: I guess hard things.

To this day I have no idea where I got “3 billion” and “5 billion” from. Clearly, I didn’t really get how numbers worked.

My math has gotten a little better over the years, but my reason for doing math is the same as it was when I was five: I want to answer questions.

They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.

Dive deeper with Munroe exploration of the math of finding your soul mate.

:: SEE NUMBERS 11–13 ::

14. DATACLYSM

In Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) (public library |IndieBound), writer, musician, and entrepreneur Christian Rudder takes a remarkable look at how person-to-person interaction from just about every major online data source of our time reveal human truths "deeper and more varied than anything held by any other private individual," and how the tension "between the continuity of the human condition and the fracture of the database" actually sheds light on some of humanity's most immutable mysteries.

Rudder is the co-founder of the dating siteOKCupid and the data scientist behind its now-legendary trend analyses, but he is also – as it becomes immediately clear from his elegant writing and wildly cross-disciplinary references – a lover of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and all the other humanities that make us human and that, importantly in this case, enhance and ennoble the hard data with dimensional insight into the richness of the human experience. Rudder writes:

I don’t come here with more hype or reportage on the data phenomenon. I come with the thing itself: the data, phenomenon stripped away. I come with a large store of the actual information that’s being collected, which luck, work, wheedling, and more luck have put me in the unique position to possess and analyze.

For the reflexively skeptical, Rudder offers assurance by way of his own self-professed "luddite sympathies":

I’ve never been on an online date in my life and neither have any of the other founders, and if it’s not for you, believe me, I get that. Tech evangelism is one of my least favorite things, and I’m not here to trade my blinking digital beads for anyone’s precious island. I still subscribe to magazines. I get the Times on the weekend. Tweeting embarrasses me. I can’t convince you to use, respect, or “believe in” the Internet or social media any more than you already do—or don’t. By all means, keep right on thinking what you’ve been thinking about the online universe. But if there’s one thing I sincerely hope this book might get you to reconsider, it’s what you think about yourself. Because that’s what this book is really about. OkCupid is just how I arrived at the story.

Dive deeper with the data on what it really means to be extraordinary.