Letters to a young scientist
Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career--both his successes and his failures--and his motivations for becoming a biologist. At a time in human history when our survival is more than ever linked to our understanding of science, Wilson insists that success in the sciences does not depend on mathematical skill, but rather a passion for finding a problem and solving it. From the collapse of stars to the exploration of rain forests and the oceans' depths, Wilson instills a love of the innate creativity of science and a respect for the human being's modest place in the planet's ecosystem in his readers.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
10mentions
8people
2016–2022years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you're a scientist, his 'Letters to a Young Scientist' makes insightful reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Scientist-Edward-Wilson...
- His book, Letters to a Young Scientist, is a great read even if you're not a scientist. It's one of those books you wish you had read when you were a teenager.
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli.
Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee (more philosophy of knowledge than science per se).
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan.
The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski are not essays, but it is one of the finest writings on science I've read.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming
Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson
I can't not help mention The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which is fiction, but hear me out - it melds natural philosophy, alchemy, maths, history, Newton, Leibniz, The Sun King, British parliament, colonialism, slavery, Egypt, India, war, finance, commerce, revenge, satire and so much more. I've learnt more about the origins of the Royal Society and the early days of modern science from these three books than anywhere else.
- - Rationality From AI to Zombies (huge collection of essays about (rationality,intelligence,quantum physics,bayesian probability,philosophy...) that can be read on lesswrong.com)
-Intuition Pumps and other Thinking Tools
-Sapiens
-Edward.O Wilson Letters to a young scientist
-Cédric Villani Birth of a Theorem
-Emanuel Derman Models Behaving Badly
-Letters From A Stoic by Seneca
-Mathematics it's contents methods 3 Volumes (Aleksandrov et al.)
-Nick Bostrom Superinteligence
-The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
- Letters to a Young Scientist [1] was written in 2014. E. O. Wilson [2] has written five more books since then.
Deborah Gordon’s [3] work on red harvester ants may also be of interest to the HN community:
> In 2012, she found that the foraging behavior of red harvester ants matches the TCP congestion control algorithm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_a_Young_Scientist
- This is about old pre-plague book "Letters to a Young Scientist," article from 2015.
