A book that scratched my itch for writing adjacent to both science and poetry. Prose so moving that at moments forced me to pause and collect my emotions. There are many more essays by the same author that I hope to read.

I was drawn to Neurogastronomy because of a fascination with my strong olfactory senses. In this, I learned about the difference between smell, taste and flavor and between `orthonasal' and `retronasal' smelling. Another core insight the author gives us is that even if our olfactory perceptors in our nose may be limited in capacity compared to say, a dog, the representation produced by our neuron-rich human brains can be rich enough to vividly discriminate between different smells. This is mostly an academic work, some in-between chapters describing the pathways can be somewhat dense, but it was still a smooth read.

This book made me notice and think more about my surroundings in nature, how there is almost an intentionality behind how things are the way they are---like how trees are shaped by wind or which part of the mountain slope looks green ---elements that you otherwise ignore as inanimate, thoughtless chaos.

During my time in New York City, I gradually fell in love with our little columbine friends, which this tiny book made intense. Since then, I have grown to appreciate birds in general for their comical, musical and gentle persona and their value of forming a community.

This (old) book made me more reflective of the design of day-to-day objects, in much the same way as 'The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs' shaped how I perceive nature. Now I find myself asking, why is this designed this way, and not some other? For instance, as the book asks, why do forks have 3 or 4 tines, not 5 or 2?

This book, which describes the intelligence and distinctive personalities of octopuses, was one of the first books that made me develop a softness and respect towards animals that goes beyond the respect I had held that came from viewing them as another form of life.

The essays here describe the emotional experience of a scientist and the intersection of being scientist and an artist (Alan’s writing about this is beautiful; it deeply resonated with me) and the power of metaphors in scientific thinking. There are also insightful historical accounts of some scientists and discoveries; my favorite is the essay titled “Megaton Man” which descibes the personality of Edward Teller who was involved in the Manhattan Project.

In Alan Lightman's writing, I found reflected my own thoughts on how I straddle between the scientist and the materialist in me, and the mystic in me. (I do not believe in spirits, so the word 'spiritiual' I avoid.) One anecdote in the book shocked me: it was something he calls `eye-to-eye epiphany` which was the first time I discovered someone describing a tremendous experience I had had. It is great injustice to describe this in one line, but it is the feeling of connectedness and ego dissolution that involuntarily swells in you from staring into the soul of an animal.

I read this textbook back in 2021 in parallel with Other Minds. It is crisp, surveys all related concepts and theories equidistantly, and is an easy read. Starter recommendation.

Above all, I prioritize creativity in both my technical, academic work and my daily life, so I studied this fairly canonical book that derives its insights from case studies. The book (which is *not* a self-help book) affirmed some of my own hypotheses about creativity including embracing and alternating between extreme feelings and traits (e.g., solitude/gregariousness, perfectionism/sloppiness) and being in a flow state where the task is neither too easy nor too hard, and where it is just you and your work and the joy that comes out of it. As an aside, I am also fascinated by (and like to reverse-engineer) how creative sparks get formed in the brain.

Felt Time emphasized an often-ignored dimension to sensory experiences: time. It made me realize how the passage of time is dictacted by my own head (a physicist may have their own contrarian task that it is merely an emergent illusion). An insight I learned was to not conflate to notions of passage of time: time as it seems to pass during an event, time as it seemed to have passed looking back at an event. For instance, waiting at a clinic feels like ages during the wait, but feels momentary in hindsight. This cleared up one of the foggiest aspects of discussing `how time flies`. At the end of the book, I asked myself a question that I cannot yet answer: if the physical world were to play in reverse, will our brains which simply traverse through the same states but in a reverse order, be able to experience the reversal?

This has had a profound effect on how I view language. Since reading it, I've begun noticing how pervasive metaphors are in speech, and to what extent they shape my thoughts. The book's first example is how English frames argumentation through metaphors for war (attack, defend, win). Even in this blurb, the word 'profound' is a metaphor for spatial depth; and the word `pervasive' paints metaphor as a thing with agency that has actively made its way into our speech. The book is written in a dry, academic style.

This describes the many general patterns by which languages across the world evolve. You also learn to broaden your attitude and unlearn some myths built around the labels of dialect and language. Interspersed between the broader story, are etymological facts given as illustration---these are mostly entertaining but can also be a bit tedious here and there; a few can be skipped if you want without hurting the coherence of the broader discussion. Overall, an easy read but needs to be broken down into smaller chunks.

The book that made me fall in love with the idea of sentences and in being intentional about the atmosphere of each sentence. It deepened my love for writing.

Longitude is a short book describing the story of how 18th century governments and monarchies funded a race to design the clock, a race that stemmed from colonial ambitions---you need clocks to track the longitude which until then was extremely cumbersome and prone to ship-wrecking errors. The book covers the competition and drama that ensued between inventors and powerful astronomers and the magnitude of grit that was involved in the inventor's process. This book also belongs in the scientists vs. scientists category.

A collection of essays on science and mathematics, each with a unique insight into one of the lessons in the paragraph above. Another easy and entertaining read even for a non-science-nerd. Falls into all three categories.

This thriller-like (true) story tracks the journey of a dozen astronomers (of many) in the 1760s as they raced to colonies in various corners of the globe. Their goal was to time the journey of the Venus across the Sun in a bid to measure the distance of the Sun from the Earth. The scientists and astronomers worked across imperial borders to consolidate resources and collaborate (or not!), and in their race against time, they faced one obstacle after another, political, logistical and meteorological. Many failed. The book details the competition that developed between various astronomers, and like Longitude, also how all of this was deeply tied to colonization.

A collection of (provocative, and sometimes very disagreeable) essays describing how various scientific discoveries were triggered by a political or social force; and also, how the natural sciences became more and more abstract and obscured in the public eye (beginning at the moment Galileo mathematized physics when in conflict with the Church), and how the ways of doing science have transformed from lone inventors to large highly-managed teams, a fact that is true of modern AI, for instance.

A collection of (provocative, and sometimes very disagreeable) essays describing how various scientific discoveries were triggered by a political or social force; and also, how the natural sciences became more and more abstract and obscured in the public eye (beginning at the moment Galileo mathematized physics when in conflict with the Church), and how the ways of doing science have transformed from lone inventors to large highly-managed teams, a fact that is true of modern AI, for instance.

An essay that details the rivalry between two British scientists and their approach to using radar for WWII, and who succeeded in influencing the political/military decisions. This essay also belongs in the scientists vs. scientists.

This discusses how chaos theory emerges as a discipline from multiple nascent threads. Read this to understand how formidable it is to develop a field from scratch, and the kind of pushbacks that come along the way.

This outlines instances across the vast history of science where two ideas or two people collided head-on. Some of these you may already be aware of, like the one between Newton and Leibniz or the one between Galileo and the Pope. But the book digs out little historical details which paint a picture of many of these debates nastier than what you’d have imagined.

This describes the serendipitous history leading up to many astronomical discoveries. The story of how radio astronomy came to be is absolutely fascinating. The book also led me to learning about the story of Jocelyn Bell who discovered the pulsars but was not awarded the Nobel Prize.

This narrates the long history behind how temperature began to measured like how it is right now. There are details about the physics of it (some of it was a bit dense for a casual read for me), but also details about the disputes and confusion that transpired along the way.

The first half of this book (by a mathematician) consists of vivid personality sketches of the various mathematicians of Princeton from the mid 1900s, detailing their approach to research, lectures, and also their quirks and flaws. It's an entertaining read! I also like his essay about the cafe culture in Europe where mathematicians and philsophers would congregate to converse, conjecture and collaborate.

Written by sociologists, this is a collection of case studies illustrating how science is messier than we think it is, how experimental results, at the time of a discovery of a result, were not as conclusive as they seem many years later and how there can be much controversy over interpreting an observation. The book was a fun read. The chapter on the Pasteur-Pouchet debates (about spontaneous generation of life) was my favorite.

This book presents a theory of why science emerged when it did; what stood out to me are examples of scientists making irrational or un-objective decisions e.g., such as in the Eddington eclipse experiment where scientists ignored some data that might have otherwise tipped the scales in favor of Newton.

This was recommended to me by one of the students I mentor. I'm still reading the essays in this book, but what deeply resonated with me was Poincare's approach to creativity as a sub-conscious process. As an aside, Grothendieck too draws analogous metaphors to creativity: it is like getting a hard-shelled nut to break open not by brute force but by letting it soak in water; he also compares it to crossing a rocky coastline in high-tide, not by swimming across, but by waiting for the tide to recede.

This is an easy and thrilling read even if one isn't too much of a science nerd.

Written by a small book shop owner, the book outlines the numerous ways in which Amazon hurts us---book publishers (by inserting itself into every part of the pipeline and selling books at a loss), the e-market (by copying ideas, by being an unfair market for sellers), delivery drivers (through third-party contractors that are heavily controlled, yet they have no accountability for), the postal service, climate activism. There is much to be learned here about the dangers of concentration of corporate power.

Roy's writing makes history effortless to read. This is an eye-opening and myth-shattering book for it reveals the sides of Gandhi that is not imparted as part of any mainstream medium (textbooks, movies). As a broader lesson, it tells us how there are ugly tensions to challenging power when there's a matryoshka of oppressors (which in the case of this book, involves imperialism, religion, the multi-layered hierarchy of casteism and class.).

It is rare to find humor presented in the form of such elegant prose.

All I want to say is: be intentional about whether or not you want to read about the author until after you've finished reading the story. Toole's life is tragic and affects the way you perceive the humor in this story.

David Sedaris was my first introduction to long-form humor, and this was my first book of his.

I got this book simply out of my love for trains and because of the dynamism of the scene described in the first chapter. The book is semi-fictitious, in that the story is inspired by a real-life event, and also describes many historic aspects of Victorian England, which was amusing to learn about.

This is a semi-fictitious, mind-bending collection of stories involving core aspects of the lives of the scientists and mathematicians of the 19th century.