Name: The age of wonder
ISBN: 9781400031870

The age of wonder

"The Age of Wonder' is Richard Holmes' first major work of biography for a decade. It has been inspired by the scientific ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the 18th century, and which Holmes now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science."

What Hacker News says

brgOct 2024

Non-fiction: The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes.

Fiction: The Gods Themselves Asimov.

These are the book I always recommend to friends and colleagues. There are runners up based on taste, such as Zero to One,The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Anathema.

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jhbadgerJan 2024

Richard Holmes wrote a great book called "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science" which covers Humphry Davy as well as other late 18th-century/early 19th century figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who was a friend of Davy's and who was an amateur chemist as well as a professional poet just as Davy was the reverse).

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orzigOct 2022

Books:

- Deep Work, and anything by Cal Newport (You can get a taste of most of his ideas for free on his blog and podcast)

- The Art of Learning. Note that he “jumped around“ at the peak of his original career, but ended up finding a common thread. To your dilemma, a major take away is that single domain can have nearly infinite novelty if you keep looking deeper

- moonwalking with Einstein: this will seem unrelated, but really listen for how The author ends up falling in love with this weird hobby. Can you find that love for anything in your life?

- Misbehaving (Richard Thaler): A young economist bumbles around for years until it starts to come together into a coherent research direction.

- The age of Wonder (Holmes): biographies of romantic scientists, know how different they all are, and also how many different phases of life they each have. I guarantee you you will see yourself in one of them, I just don’t know which

Though I do not have a book for it, my final piece of advice is to except that even the “right“ path will have some boring or even painful stretches. I don’t have a clear cut decision rule for when to stick with it, but it’s definitely not “quit immediately”. I think there’s a book called The Dip about that. Also like Adam Savage YouTube channel where you can see essentially endless hours of the sky who is definitely doing what he is passionate about, but also gets frustrated all the time when things break and such. He’s making physical things, even successful projects take many tedious hours. But there’s no question in his mind that he is going to power through.

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brgFeb 2022

I would very much suggest both biographical and idea focused sources.

For me, the absolute best written is Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. It covers a large swatch of British Science from Newton to Maxwell.

Other good reads are

1. The Invention of Science by Wootton (which is very academic in style),

2. The Wizard and the Prophet by Mann

3. Galileo At Work by Drake

4. Newton by Gleik.

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vo2maxerJan 2022

It is a great story and even more when you learn that it was written by a teenager, Mary Shelley. This episode In Our Time is very interesting as are all the others on the Romantic era [1].

I just finished reading Frankenstein with my 12 years-old daughter. We read the original 1818 version "annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds." [2] If you want to get more of the flavor of the time in which Frankenstein was written, there is The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. He discusses many of the interesting figures of the period including Joseph Banks and William Herschell (talk about makers, telescopes in his case). [3] There is a book which I can't wait to get now that I've gone down this rabbit hole, The Science of Life and Death in 'Frankenstein'. [4]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01hjm2s

[2] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3542/FrankensteinAnnotated...

[3] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/82017/the-age-of-wo...

[4] https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/science-of-life-and-deat...

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jhbadgerFeb 2021

There's a great book called "Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes that is about the period between Newton and Darwin in which science and art were mixed -- you had poets like Coleridge who were amateur chemists (no, he wasn't making his own drugs, to spare the obvious joke given his habits), and chemists like Humphrey Davy who were amateur poets.

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