Michael's Favourite Science Books

10:22Michael Stevens:Here's a question for you, Hannah, from Dway Chaudhary. Dway says, I have two German shepherds who shed aggressively while driving on the highway. I wondered whether there is an optimal way to use airflow and pressure differences to remove dog fur from a car while driving. Which windows should be open by how much and is there an optimal speed? OK, first of all, you have become the fluid dynamics go to air of the cues. I know.

10:51Hannah Fry:this is great do you know what I had such a fun afternoon thinking about this question I've done more fluid dynamics for this podcast than I have in the preceding 10 years it's absolutely great I'm loving it and I've got answers for you right so I'll tell you what the bad ideas are if you're in you know you're going down the motorway you want to get as much fur out as possible bad idea is to open one window don't do that that's just it's just terrible because um what happens when you do that it's a bit like when you blow air over a bottle neck so what happens is this this hunk of air that is right by the the one open window essentially starts acting like a plug and as air rushes past it from the outside it compresses the air inside the cabin inside inside the car which then decompresses and you end up with what is effectively acting like a solid block of air that's wobbling back and forward which is why when you're driving you open one window it goes like that's what you're hearing it's called a helmholtz resonance that's essentially to what you're hearing.

11:51Hannah Fry:Don't do that. The best thing that's going to happen in that scenario is the dog hair is going to float up into that trapped block of air and just vibrate next to your head. Bad idea, right? That's not going to work. The other thing that you might be tempted to do is to just wind down all of the windows. Okay, don't do that. Also a bad idea. This happened actually. I was in Florida last summer doing some filming. And I don't know if you spent much time in Florida, Miami in particular, the mosquitoes, I could not believe, I could not believe the level of mosquitoes. But we were in a car with a local and he said, no problem, here's what we do.

12:31Hannah Fry:We'll wind down all the windows and we'll just drive along with all the windows open for a few seconds. It'll blow them out and then we can close the windows safely. And I sat there and was like, no, no local man with your knowledge. The fluid dynamics of this situation is all you're going to do is you're just going to create loads of pockets of turbulence if you do that. You've got wind coming in and out in all directions. You're going to have little eddies, especially near the surfaces where the mosquitoes are sitting. They're going to be boundary layers. You know, you're going to give the mosquitoes a little roller coaster.

13:04Hannah Fry:Sure, they're going to have a wild ride, but you're not going to kick all of the air out. This is a bad approach. Bad approach. So what's the best approach? Right. There's two. There's two different approaches you can use. So what you want here is you want slick, fast-moving laminar air, right? That's what you want. You want the slippy stuff.

13:24Michael Stevens:How do I get that? Because I don't have a dog, but I do sometimes fart in the car and I don't want my family to notice or even suffer. And rolling down one window, it just produces a bad smell and a bad sound. So what do I do?

13:42Hannah Fry:if you know in advance that it's coming okay then then then what you can do is you you know that high pressure always is looking for low pressure areas right so what you can do keep the keep the windows closed turn on the air con full full whack make sure that it's drawing in air from the outside so you increase the pressure in the car and then crack both the back windows a tiny amount like one or two inches and then you've got high pressure in the front of the car and it's pushing the air through to the back that will be good right that will work but if your air con in your car isn't isn't strong enough you know you don't think it's going to be able to keep up with that the other option is to create this diagonal flow so you crack your window the driver's window by maybe two centimeters or so two inches maybe and then the back passenger window by a similar size gap maybe maybe like another couple of inches there do them both at the same time and then because you're driving like 60 miles an hour say there's this big high pressure area at the front of the car that will kind of roll around enter in the driver's window you've got high pressure there and then at the back of the car as the car's kind of moving through there's low pressure so you are you're effectively creating this physical bridge between a high pressure area outside the car, low pressure area outside the car.

15:03Hannah Fry:You're going to get this slip stream all the way through. Your doggies sitting in the backseat, they're going to be bald by the time you get home.

15:10Michael Stevens:Is cracking the window just a little bit part of it?

15:12Hannah Fry:If you open them all the way, what, too much turbulence? Too much turbulence, exactly right. So this, I mean, there's something called Reynolds number, which basically tells you about, in effect, how turbulent the flow is likely to be. I'm simplifying slightly, but you can go with me. And one of the things in Reynolds number is the size of the aperture. So if you want it to have this like a slightly smaller aperture so that it slips through, goes too big, you're going to get messy air. Do not want messy air from moving fluid through.

15:42Michael Stevens:There you go. Scientific life hack.

15:45Hannah Fry:Next time you fart in the car, your wife and daughter can thank me. Okay.

15:49Michael Stevens:They will. I'll make sure they do.

15:51Hannah Fry:This is also how you get hot air out of the car in the summer, by the way. This was actually my most viral video last year. You can do that while you're driving, the diagonal thing, or if you want to do it before you take off, when you get in the car and it's really, really crazy hot, leave your driver's window closed, crack the back passenger door a tiny bit, and then open and close your driver's door and it will take all of the air out.

16:15Michael Stevens:Like a bellow almost. You're pumping out the air because the air inside the car is warmer than the outside. Yeah, I'm always trying to like, Like, oh, I need new air to get in here.

16:24Hannah Fry:Yeah, exactly. That's the quickest way to do it. And like two or three open and close and you're done. You're good. Okay. We've had two pet themed questions so far. But here we go. This is a question from Minori who says, After listening to the recent podcast episode where you discussed the Cyclops effect, I was wondering what other experiments should I stockpile to do on my child? I don't intend on having one anytime soon. I just feel like I should be prepared when I do.

16:51Michael Stevens:Well, you don't have to experiment on your own children. I think other people's children are just as fine to do psychological experiments on. I really wish I had done more on my daughter. The one I want to try soon is about hypotheticals. So if you talk to like a five or six-year-old child and you ask them questions about the world, a really famous example I've seen going around on social media involves an experimenter saying, okay, if you hit a glass with a feather, what happens? And the kid says nothing. And they go, why? Well, because the feather is soft. It's not hard enough. Okay, well, what if there's a new rule, which is that if you hit a glass with a feather, it will break.

17:40Michael Stevens:if you hit a glass with a hammer, what'll happen? A young kid will be like, well, it won't break. But a 13-year-old goes, well, okay, in this made-up scenario, it will break because you said that's the rule. And it's amazing just how hard it is for the younger child to understand that you are describing a different, fantastical universe with different rules. And that switch to being able to understand hypotheticalities happens around like seven years old. And you should also test the difference between their ability to understand hypotheticals in the future and in the past because they don't happen simultaneously.

18:21Michael Stevens:Research has shown that young children understand future hypotheticals better. Like if it rains tomorrow, what should we do? But if you ask them, if it had rained this morning, what would we have done? That's a harder question. And I still don't know if it's because of the conceptual nature or if it's simply a language barrier of like, yeah, but it didn't. Or I don't know what conclusions to draw from this, but we need more studies. So let us know.

18:50Hannah Fry:I have one daughter who's younger than that and one daughter, if you think it happens around seven, I have one daughter younger than seven, one daughter older than seven. So I'm going to try that and I'll report back.

18:59Michael Stevens:Try it out and see if they have different answers. Obviously, there's also the famous consistency of matter experiments, which my daughter did fail when she was very young. I haven't tested her recently, but this is where you take a tall glass and a short glass and you fill the short one with water. And then you take that glass and you pour the water into the taller glass and you say, which one now has more? Sorry, does that make sense? I should explain this better.

19:32Hannah Fry:The tall glass is skinny, right?

19:34Michael Stevens:Yeah.

19:35Hannah Fry:So the water level sits, the same water level sits higher in this tall skinny glass than it does in the short wide one.

19:41Michael Stevens:That's right. And you start with the water in the short wide glass and you say, okay, there's a certain amount of water here. You pour it into the tall skinny glass and the water, of course, is higher. The water level is higher in altitude. And you say, which one has more water in it? Was it the one before or this tall one? and under a certain age, kids always choose the tall one.

20:05Hannah Fry:I think that's so gorgeous. I like that so much. It's so sweet.

20:10Michael Stevens:What I think is so fascinating is that you cannot explain the problem in that reasoning to a child. You can teach them, look, I've poured all the water from the small glass to the tall glass. None was added. None was taken away. So it should be the same amount. They still will get it wrong. The only way children have demonstrated that they learn the difference is by experimenting with this themselves, by playing with water, with blocks, with Lego, with whatever, with sand, and realizing, ah, it's always the same amount because there's a difference between the size of the pile and the amount in it.

20:51Michael Stevens:And they have to come to that realization through their own cognitive processes. It cannot be taught to them with words.

20:59Hannah Fry:I also think it's notable how incredibly well-tuned small kids are to portion size, basically, which is what I was thinking as you were describing it. You know, if you give two kids two glasses, one with slightly more than the other, you bet any amount, you know, the kid is going to notice and like pick the one with slightly more. that's sort of incredibly tuned to the height of a fluid in a glass, for instance. There is a book, actually, that I, whenever I have a friend who has a baby, it's the stock book that I give them. You know, you sort of do like a congratulations on being a parent box.

21:35Hannah Fry:And this is the book that I always put in it. And it's called Experimenting with Babies. And it's 50 science projects you can perform on your own kid. And they're all, it's so good. It's so good. none of them are little Albert, okay? None of them are like nasty things. They're all like very sweet stuff that you can look at the reflexes that your kid has when they're born. There's one that's particularly memorable about when a kid is just born, they have this reflex, which is where if you lie them on their backs facing upwards with their arms in the air, sort of like ready to give a high 10 and turn their head for them, they will straighten the arm that they're looking at.

22:13Hannah Fry:And And it doesn't matter whether you turn their head the other way. They will then straighten the arm they're looking at and bend the other one. It's called the en garde reflex because it's like you're fencing, right? En garde.

22:23Michael Stevens:So the arms are up like they're above their head. They're laying flat on their backs and their arms are like flat on the floor, basically. They're not straight up like this. Correct. Yeah, I love all these weird reflexes babies have that they lose. I've even heard people argue that the fact that we lose them is like a little micro form of metamorphosis that humans go through. where we become a different creature with different reflexes after a certain age. I got to get this book, Experiments to Do. And I'll have to have another baby too, but I think it's worth it.

22:55Hannah Fry:There is another one, Experimenting with Kids, which you can do with slightly older kids. But yeah, none of them are cruel. All of them are fine. They're all just very sweet little things that you can test on your children. The marshmallow test where you see if they have got an ability to delay reward. You say you can have one marshmallow now, or if you wait, you can have two later and loads of kids fail it. Yeah, lots of really sweet experiments that you can do.

23:21Michael Stevens:I need to look into more about the marshmallow experiment because I've seen a lot of videos about it in the last few years. I don't know if there's been updates on the conclusions or the results, but yeah, I've heard that the younger a kid is, if they're able to pass the marshmallow test and say, oh, I can either have this one or if I wait five minutes, I'll get to have two. A kid that chooses to wait to have two at an early and earlier age, it really does show that that child will have better outcomes later in their life.

23:52Hannah Fry:Yeah, it really does. It really does. Sort of like it demonstrates a kind of internal resilience, I guess, that then shows up in lots of other factors.

24:02Michael Stevens:That's right. It shows they have a better maybe concept of planning and time and also a stronger veto power over their non-conscious urges. So yeah, there's a lot of experiments you can do. I'm not sure how I feel about having a book on my shelf called Experimenting with Kids, but it'll make a good conversation piece.

24:21Hannah Fry:Because we're on the topic, can I just tell you one of my favorites ever? Just because we're on the topic. Okay, so if you want to work out what your kid's going to be like, there are very few things. I mean, the marshmallow test is one which is correlated. It's not deterministic, right? But it's like there's a chance, you know, sort of is indicative. If you want to work out what a kid's maths ability is going to be later in life, then I mean, pretty much everything you can measure, how quickly they know their times tables, how quickly they learn addition doesn't make a difference. Nothing, nothing, nothing makes a difference.

24:49Hannah Fry:The one thing that is correlated to future mathematical ability is if you take a five-year-old and you manufacture a toy scene in front of them, say a car crash right and you say oh look no what's happened here is that um this car's been driving and whoa they've crashed here and then you have all of these other toys that are watching on from the scene ask the five-year-old to tell you the story from different perspectives so you say okay what did what did the guy in the car think and they'll be like oh no whatever it's like okay but what did barbie think up the hill and some kids at five are really able to do that they're really able to just switch their mind from one perspective to another to another to another and other kids find it incredibly difficult just don't really understand it's like they all saw it from the same perspective as they themselves saw it from from the child perspective and no one is quite sure at least last time I checked on this research it may be that it's been updated since but no one is quite sure why this should be the thing that ends up connecting to future mathematical ability.

25:57Hannah Fry:But there is one idea, which is that when you take something like the number eight, right, the number eight is like this character in a kid's mind. But what that character does changes depending on what you do with that character. You know, you multiply by eight, it's doing something very different to dividing by eight or taking away eight. And it's sort of that ability to be mentally flexible based on what you see in front of you. There's an idea that that's the earliest sign of future mathematical ability.

26:32Michael Stevens:Is there a name for this? I'd love to know more about how to actually orchestrate it. It sounds really similar to the Piaget mountain test, where you give mountain tasks, where you have children look at mountains, little toy mountains on a table, and they have to answer questions about what various characters in the scene can see.

26:54Hannah Fry:I think it's the same thing. I think it's the same idea. And the other element of that, of course, is the spatial reasoning, right? That you're having to change your physical position and being able to manipulate that in your mind, which also ends up being quite useful as a mathematician.

27:08Michael Stevens:Wow. OK, I know what I'm doing tonight.

27:10Hannah Fry:I mean, frankly, I've got my own list of experiments lined up as well. So if you too are experimenting on children in your lives, then let us know how it goes. Let us know in the comments. Right, we're going to come back after the break with the question that many, many, many people over the years have asked you, Michael. What are your favourite science books?

27:49Michael Stevens:even better combination? Teachers in space.

27:53Hannah Fry:Hello, thank you. Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as science teacher Rylan Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission into space to discover why the sun and the stars are dying. And he teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. What kind of prep would you hope Ryan Gosling had done for this role in order to play the role of a science teacher?

28:19Michael Stevens:He should have spent a bunch of time with cool teenagers and tried to teach things to them so that it wasn't just like a good explanation, but also kept their interest and made them want to hear more and understand it so that they could share it to be cool too.

28:37Hannah Fry:See Project Hail Mary now in cinemas and IMAX everywhere.

28:48Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Cancer drugs aren't developed overnight. They start as ideas in the lab, then move into testing to check they're safe and work effectively.

28:58Hannah Fry:In the late 1990s, Cancer Research UK scientists began exploring a bold idea. Could the antibodies that normally trigger allergic reactions be used to treat cancer?

29:09Michael Stevens:The lab results were promising, but allergic reactions carry real risks. After years of work, an early stage trial showed these antibodies could be used safely.

29:19Hannah Fry:And for one person on the trial, their tumour shrank. Research is ongoing, but this careful process is how treatments move from the lab into hospitals.

29:29Michael Stevens:Cancer Research UK backs innovative ideas. And thanks to decades of support, over 8 in 10 people in the UK receiving cancer drugs are using one developed by or with Cancer Research UK scientists. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash the rest is science. In a classroom of sodas, most stay quiet. Then there's Mr. Pibb, sweet cherry, bold outbursts, the kind of flavor that gets attention. Bold kick of cherry.

30:06Hannah Fry:Hey, yo, Mr. Pibb.

30:16Hannah Fry:I'm intrigued about this one. I want to know how many of these I've read and how many wonderful things, wonderful things that are out there in the world that I am yet to discover. It's like, you know, when you feel jealous of people who haven't watched Breaking Bad yet because of all of the joy they have ahead of them in their life, this is how I feel right now in this conversation, I've got to be honest with you.

30:35Michael Stevens:So, yeah, we're answering the question of, hey, Michael, what books do you recommend? Because I think we've got this emailed to us by so many people. We can't even name you all. I'm sorry. You won't get any credit. But I love books. I love physical books. I love the weight of them. In fact, I find it hard to even read a book if I don't love the book as an object, which means I like them heavy and full of hard covers. It just, I don't know. Literally, my reading list, the order that I choose them in is based on how the book looks. I had a paperback copy of American Psycho, the book, and it was just so beautiful because it was just white.

31:16Michael Stevens:And it had the title way down in the lower left corner, and that was it. And I just couldn't stop looking at it on the table. And I'm like, I got to read this. And so I actually read it because I just could not stop admiring the objecthood of it, the beauty of it.

31:32Hannah Fry:Turns out you really can judge a book guy at Vice's cover then, Michael, huh?

31:35Michael Stevens:I do. I've got a lot to say about that in fact covers of books because um it it matters a lot what the cover looks like I generally prefer the UK covers of books they're just so much more cool I don't know why uh but like you'll have to you'll look this up yourself you'll almost always find the UK cover is better why do they do two different covers I don't know and I have had books published

31:58Hannah Fry:in the states and then the cover art has come back and I've been like I'm sorry what the first

32:03Michael Stevens:time I really noticed this, though, and I see it now everywhere, was with Katie Mack's book, The End of Everything. I think both covers are really good, but the UK edition looked so cool. And the American version looked like, yeah, it's a space-time book. It's a great book. I don't want to put down the cover. You shouldn't judge it by the cover if you're in America, is what I'm saying. It's a fantastic book that deserved to have the cover that the UK gave it. So here at my office, I have all of my philosophy, math, and science books. There's the shelves. And a lot of them are really specific to the kinds of episodes I've made.

32:50Michael Stevens:So I would never recommend it to anyone unless, oh, are you doing an episode about how many holes the human body contains? Because here's a book that helped me. When it comes to just general, like, I think anyone would like this and should read it. My number one recommendation outside of like a science book, even though it kind of is, it's David Eagleman's Sum. And this book was recommended to me by a mutual connection, Jake Chudnow, who does all the music for Vsauce. He's the one who told me about this. So you've read it. I have.

33:21Hannah Fry:Yeah, he's amazing. He's amazing. Hold on. He's a neuroscientist, isn't he? He is. Yeah. Do you know him? I know of him. Yeah, he's great. He's incredibly charismatic. He's really good at storytelling, as evidenced by the book. What he's really good at doing is, I don't know, some people are just very, very good at understanding what draws people into a story. And he does that with his research. It's not just his storytelling, it's his research too. His research is just endlessly fascinating.

33:51Michael Stevens:So for those of you who aren't familiar, some, what is it about? It is a book full of 40 different chapters. Each one is a little hypothetical made up version of what the afterlife is like. He's not saying that it is like this, but he's saying, imagine that this is what happens after you die. And it is so wonderful for reflection. The one I think about the most is the chapter that's about like, you know, when you die, you go to heaven, which happens to be just the same world you always lived on, except the only people who live there are people that you were friends with in your life. And at first, it's really awesome because you've got your best friends and your family and all the co-workers that you loved.

34:32Michael Stevens:And then you start to realize after a few days, a few weeks, a few months that you didn't have a friend who could vulcanize rubber. You didn't have a friend who could winnow a field. And it just makes you step back and go, man, we are so dependent on the knowledge and the labor of so many people we never talk to.

34:54Hannah Fry:Absolutely.

34:55Michael Stevens:So I won't spoil any more of them, but each one is a little short, digestible thought experiment on life and meaning. It's fantastic.

35:06Hannah Fry:Extremely short book as well. It's very short.

35:08Michael Stevens:Yeah. So it's a great book to recommend because it's not like, oh man, this is a huge tome. And if I'm not into it after a few pages, I'm going to hate Michael. It's more like after a few pages, there's another neat chapter and there's another neat chapter. So, yeah, I love this book. I'd say the early days of Vsauce were very much inspired by books like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. OK, this is a classic. I bet a lot of listeners have already listened to or have read A Short History of Nearly Everything. But the way he writes about everything in this book really inspired a lot of ideas for early Vsauce videos.

35:49Michael Stevens:And I actually even referenced this book in my most recent video about ghosts and how we're remembered because he has this great fact about how rare it is to become a fossil. That he's like, of all the humans alive in the United States today, within millions of years, what will be left and actually fossilized will not even be one full skeleton. Like not even one of us alive today is going to be a fossilized skeleton. It's pretty cool.

36:16Hannah Fry:He has this absolute gift for just the lightest of touches and like honing in on the joyfulness of absurdity. I am endlessly envious of his ability to write Bill Bryson. He is phenomenal.

36:34Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah, Bill Bryson, any book by Bill Bryson is going to be a good read. Home, I haven't read yet, but I've got it. and I've got a nice hardback cover.

36:42Hannah Fry:Tell you what, though, the cover of that one, let's have a look at the cover of that one. I would say that's not a very good cover. That's the American cover, isn't it? No, no, it isn't.

36:51Michael Stevens:I bought, oh yeah, it is. I read this in England, but I must have bought it in America.

36:57Hannah Fry:You know what, actually, I don't think that the English cover is that much better, to be honest.

37:00Michael Stevens:The cover of what I have is, it's a paperback with a blue cover and it's got a picture of Earth on it with an asterisk. And the asterisk brings us to this note, which is the title of the book. So in a way, the title of the book is actually a photo of Earth. And then an interpretation of that is a short history of nearly everything.

37:20Hannah Fry:I think that might be better than the British cover on this instance. The British cover is half, the top half is white, the bottom half is orange. There's sort of earth as though it's printed out and has a dashed line around it. It's not particularly inspiring.

37:33Michael Stevens:Around the same time that I was reading Bill Bryson, which was, again, I think this was like when Vsauce became an educational channel. I also got a lot from this book, which is called The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie. And it has a very black and white cover with waves on it. And then the title is printed in yellow and white. Its subtitle is An Exploration of Science and Philosophy. And this book is also about everything. It's about insects and planets and storms and math. And it has a much more spiritual bent. And everything that I read in this book, I had to fact check. And a number of the things were like, that interpretation is not popular.

38:16Michael Stevens:But this inspired a lot of questions like, how big are you? Like, does your body end at the hard surface? Or is your smell kind of like you? To a cat, I might be as big as my smell. And how widely does my smell travel, right? And he just keeps bringing up weird things like that and doesn't really even answer them or attempts to. I mean, I don't think that one's actually answered in here, but it inspired a lot of great thoughts. So I'm really grateful to that book.

38:46Hannah Fry:That looks like quite an old book, that one.

38:48Michael Stevens:This book is the reason why I get hardcovers with acid-free paper nowadays, because this is not that old. I mean, I am old in the sense that I think I bought this in like 20, probably 2013. So it is like a 13-year-old copy of the book, but it's gotten very browned and it's kind of falling apart. And as I go back and read it, I'm like, man, this doesn't have a lot longer. I want to be able to leave this to my daughter.

39:15Hannah Fry:When was it published? The 90s.

39:17Michael Stevens:Copyright 1978.

39:19Hannah Fry:That's fun, though. I like the idea. I haven't read that one.

39:21Michael Stevens:It has really good illustrations. This is about the electromagnetic sense, this little section. And so I found it very enjoyable. Funny enough, do you know who recommended this book?

39:34Hannah Fry:Tell me.

39:34Michael Stevens:I bought this off of Rainn Wilson's recommendation at a TED Talk. He was like, you got to read this one. And so I got it.

39:41Hannah Fry:I didn't have him down as somebody who'd be particularly good at recommending philosophical science books, but there we go. How wrong I was.

39:49Michael Stevens:Now, you know, let's get really like hard, hard science here. Physics. I very much recommend these two. The guy's name is Lewis Carroll Epstein. Thinking physics blew my mind. It's it's kind of a workbook. It's just got a bunch of problems, but they're all really strange ones. They're ones like, OK, if the universe was empty except for two pieces of mass, what would happen? They would come together eventually. But what if the universe was full of nothing but matter and there were two empty hollows? Would they come together? Would they have a force on each other or would they have a repelling force on each other?

40:27Michael Stevens:And he answers them. He answers them so well. The ability to explain the concept of things like energy, momentum. It's just leverage. What do we mean when we talk about the pivot point or the lever arm of something? This one gets it right so clearly. It's so well done. Normally, this is sold for teachers to use. And photocopies of the pages are like one of notoriously one of the most common copyright violations of science teachers because it's just it's hard to beat how clear these are. And I mean, I'm an adult who I still learn so much from this. I crack it open and I go, oh, yeah, the way a hard hat works is a great way to talk about force.

41:10Michael Stevens:Yeah, it's just it's wonderful. And then he wrote a book called Relativity Visualized, which is the best book I've ever found about relativity and how to understand what's being said by Lorentz contractions and time dilation and all those things that can often feel a bit woo-woo or a little bit beyond. And this one has it also has the very best diagrams of like how to think of space time. And a lot of this inspired my Which Way Is Down episode where I talked about different surfaces representing different structures of space time, geodesics and whatnot.

41:49Hannah Fry:Right. What I will say is this, Michael. At the moment, I'm up to 54 pounds in my Amazon basket. So thank you. Wait, you're buying these as I say them? The ones I haven't read. Yeah, of course. I don't want to miss out.

42:05Michael Stevens:Okay. Now, if you really want to dive into classical mechanics, the theoretical minimum books are also really phenomenal at explaining concepts. At the end of the day, though, I do recommend that if you want to understand a concept, you just need to read everything ever said about it. You need to hear everyone's different voice on it. And that doesn't mean you have to spend hundreds of dollars. It just means like read a bunch of stuff. You know, pick up a book at a thrift store and just read the chapter about the thing that you're interested in. Or, you know, just read a bunch of stuff on Reddit online.

42:37Michael Stevens:Like you just need to hear everyone try their best at explaining it. And someone will say it in a way that hits your wavelength. Julian Barber's The Discovery of Dynamics is a different approach to understanding mechanics. This is a historical approach. It's the stories behind the people and the ideas and the debates that led to the formation of F equals MA, the solar, the sun-centered view of the solar system. And this also helps you understand, first of all, that things like energy and force are concepts. It's not like Newton caught some force in the wild in a jar and studied it. He just said, guys, let's do this.

43:23Michael Stevens:Let's say that the product of mass and acceleration is force. Okay, I made it up. But it's weird if you start treating it like a thing. And this one has, it's just great. First of all, he talks a lot about how if humans had evolved on the moon, science would be so much further ahead. Because friction and air resistance got in the way of us understanding dynamics for a millennia.

43:48Hannah Fry:These are great. Do you know what? so nice about this is that like lots of these books are just not on my radar at all. I'd never even heard of this one, the Barber one, the discovery of dynamics, but it's so up my street. This is, yeah.

44:01Michael Stevens:I absolutely love it. Um, and I, I will, I will take the knowledge I've gotten from some of these books I've been mentioning. They'll be in my video about levers. Okay. I'm going to, I'm trying to go a little bit more quickly. So when it comes to mathematics, I got a shout out, Nosen Yanovsky's The Outer Limits of Reason. Notice a lot of my books don't have book jackets on them. I find book jackets so annoying. I take them off. I put them in a drawer.

44:26Hannah Fry:Me too. Actually, I throw them away. Because I just always wind up ripping them. I think they look much prettier. I much prefer what they look like like that.

44:32Michael Stevens:Okay. The Outer Limits of Reason is a book that is, like, ostensibly, it's about how far can reason take us. But it's not a philosophical work. It is a mathematical work about, okay, here's what reason is. And here is where we reach problems that we know that we cannot solve unless we brute force it for, you know, forever. Like the traveling salesman problem. It talks a lot about the difference between hard problems and the whole NPP distinction. And it explains it in a way. It talks about Turing machines. It goes through this. I didn't know any of this stuff when I started the book. And I loved it so much.

45:13Michael Stevens:I mentioned it in a few of my videos and the author sent me an autographed copy of his quantum computing textbook. So I'm a big fan.

45:22Hannah Fry:He's a proper mathematician, right? Like this is this is the kind of person who normally writes textbooks. I wouldn't say that that was a book that was written for broad, you know, sort of like a it's quite meaty, right?

45:33Michael Stevens:Yeah. I mean, it's from the MIT press. So I wouldn't recommend this to just like a person that I don't know who they are. They might be like, dude, this is so boring. And I'm like, well, you know, look, I don't agree, but I might to them say you should read some. And it's like a process, it's like a ladder. I wanted to cover just three little philosophical books. I think that Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions is a real kind of must have for some of the big questions people ask about all kinds of things. This is where the famous, what is it like to be a bat comes from? Yes, of course. That's chapter 12 in the book.

46:15Michael Stevens:And the very first chapter is about death. And unlike a lot of other philosophical books written by true philosophers, this one, he finishes with like, and here's just how I feel, you know? He's like, look, I don't know. I just, this is how I get by. And here's why. Then when it comes to consciousness, I've got two. One is The User Illusion. This one is by Tor Nortranders, and it is very much about free will, conscious will, and what exactly is going on there. But I found Daniel M. Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will much, I don't know how to phrase this, it's more academic focused, whereas The User Illusion is more for popular audiences.

47:00Michael Stevens:But these both really make it quite clear that we don't have as much control over our wills and ourselves as we think that we do. And that's okay.

47:11Hannah Fry:That was an absolute treat. What I will say is this, I had read a lot less of them than I thought. So I am now£124, 37 pence down in my Amazon basket. But boy, do I have a lot of joy ahead of me in the reading months ahead.

47:28Michael Stevens:You sure do. You sure do. And look, like that's just a little taste of like, okay, for a science podcast, what would I recommend? I do want to do a special shout out to yesterday. I finished reading The Lord of the Rings. I'm on a big fantasy kick at the moment. I started with science fiction and Ursula Le Guin, and then I wanted to read her Earthsea books. But I thought, you know what? I'm going to go back to, like, honestly, the books that started the fantasy genre. It wasn't called fantasy when Tolkien wrote them. It was like fairy tales is what they called books like his. I just finished. Let me grab them.

48:03Michael Stevens:I finished Lord of the Rings yesterday. I read this in two weeks. I started it on the 15th of February, and I finished it on March 1st. So this is all three of the books combined. And now that that's done, I'm going to move on to Earthsea, which look at this tome.

48:21Hannah Fry:Oh my Lord. I mean, they're both beautiful books though. Talking about judging books by their covers. They are, the Lord of the Rings one has a black cover on it, red edging on the pages, beautiful, I don't know what the Middle Earth writing is called, and the beautiful writing etched on the side.

48:40Michael Stevens:The language of Mordor, one ring to rule them all, blah, blah, blah. We got the white book ribbon. And so, yeah, I just last night started the first Earthsea book. You can see from the book ribbon that I'm only a few pages into it. But I love the heaviness of it. I love that it strengthens my fingers. It just makes me feel like I'm moving the wheels of the world by diving into someone's mind. And that's what I love about the book, too. I think if you're going to read something like this, you should read it all in one sitting as much as possible because you get to be inside someone else's head for so long.

49:16Michael Stevens:And that's an experience that we don't get from reading short little snippets on social media, on forums. But to just be like, yeah, Tolkien, take two weeks of my life and just you're a nut, man. And I love it. And I'm glad that I got to participate in that because so many people are like I wanted to get the references. which you cannot escape in our society.

49:37Hannah Fry:What's your Amazon review rating for Lord of the Rings going to be? How many stars?

49:42Michael Stevens:I mean, you got to give it five stars. It's the Lord of the Rings. I mean, it's hard to separate it from its cultural impact. I started watching the movies last night. I got about 30 minutes through the first one and I was just like, man, there's not enough in here. You know, I know it's like nine hours of movie, but I was just like, oh, gee, I was telling my wife, They've, ah, there's so much. They've cut out and things are going so quickly. Like the conversation between Gandalf and Saruman, okay? In the book, you're like, oh my gosh. Like, I think this guy might've gone to the wrong side. Like, whoa, there's a lot more mystery.

50:22Michael Stevens:In the movie, it's like Saruman is like, I'm evil now. Let's work with the Dark Lord, please. It's just like, you gotta move on. And I get it. They're two very different mediums. but the like I'm trying to understand you portion of a book is what's so wonderful.

50:37Hannah Fry:I think it's that idea of being able to dip into somebody else's worldview, you know, walk a mile in their shoes as it were. I think that's what's so, and I think, I don't know, I generally read nonfiction if I'm honest. Maybe once or twice a year I will dip into some fiction. But I think that's even true when you read really, really good nonfiction. A few of the examples that you gave there of people who who have a way of seeing the universe, a way of seeing problems that is just totally illuminating. Yeah, that's what you get from books that you don't get from short snippets.

51:10Michael Stevens:Yeah, exactly. I've gotten so many ideas out of fiction books. Like, I didn't expect this, but like, let me show you, here's all the notes I took from Lord of the Rings. I've got like just pages and pages of, wow, you know what, this is, is this something about human nature or is it human nature in the 20th century? And what does this tell us about interiority? And what is bravery? Why does it matter to us? Does it matter to all of us? How is it framed? There's so many things to learn from fiction, even though it's not necessarily pretending to teach.

51:44Hannah Fry:Well, I hope that you enjoyed that absolutely glorious delve into Michael's bookshelf. That That was, yeah, really wonderful, Michael. Thank you so much. If you have any questions that you would like us to answer, you can send us them at therestisscience at goldhanger.com.

52:01Michael Stevens:And you can join our newsletter at therestisscience.com slash science. All right. Stay curious.