(Part 2) Best engineering & technology history books according to redditors
We found 59 Reddit comments discussing the best engineering & technology history books. We ranked the 32 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
It's probably worth mentioning that we figured out the density of the earth by measuring how much a known masses are attracted to each other, and then inferring from the strength of gravity what the density must be. The high density basically told us that there had to be a lot of metals down there long before seismic methods made it possible to figure out the specific structure. There's a book about how this was done historically.
The Scharff and Dusek reader has been mentioned, but I'd like to put a plug in for the Kaplan reader as well.
The following are also worth checking out...
Peter Paul Verbeek's What Things Do (this is my "if you only read one book about Phil Tech, read this book" book)
Michel Callon's "The Sociology of an Actor-Network"
Don Ihde's Technology and the Lifeworld
Andy Feenberg's Questioning Technology
Albert Borgman's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"
Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization
Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society
Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics" and The Whale and the Reactor
Hans Jonas' "Technology and Responsibility"
Sunstein and Thaler's Nudge
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and The Glass Cage
Decreased genetic diversity among multiple species is often a symptom of a large geographic scale population bottleneck. Within the last 500,000 years there have been five significant glacial periods characterized by very rapid (in geological terms) climate changes. With a population bottleneck, the reduction of genetic diversity (including mitochondrion DNA) and speciation does occur. Approx 150,000 years ago was a rather significant and fast warming trend which would have produce a corresponding population bottleneck, as well as 250k, 350k and 450k'ish years ago.
I recommend taking this reduction of genetic diversity with probable attribution to population bottlenecks as only a cosmetic connection/correlation to the first (even though it is presented second) older creation narrative (starting at Gen 2.3) and not as a factual or thematic causation.
> this is evidence on how science and religion aren’t at odds with each other.
But science and religion are, nominally separate and non- or incompatible, and are often at odds.
Gods, and related supernatural phenomena, have no place in any scientific equations, plays no role in any scientific explanations, cannot be used to predict any events, does not describe any thing or force that has yet been detected, and there are no models of the universe in which God's presence, or related supernatural phenomena, is either required, productive, or useful.
Organized Theistic Religion often stifles scientific discovery, and has often tried to suppress, or otherwise limit scientific advancement:
Frank M. Turner, Isis, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 356-376
Most historians currently don't really adhere to general theories in general. With Marxist historiography going out of favor, and Christian historiography already having been put into the corner before that, there is a reluctance to make any sweeping statements about all of history.
One situation in history in which technological change has been studied a lot is of course the Industrial Revolution. One text that attempts to explain this process in a way that might be generalized is Margaret Jacobs Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. But another book that makes a great case for why the Industrial Revolution really was the result of a number of strange coincidences and geographical luck is Kenneth Pomeranz' The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.
One major knock I have with this essay is the presumption that Twitter or similar social media channels are monolithic and trending toward a decrease in intellectual complexity. Especially when so many of today's big ideas are about how such systems are changing the way we think for the better.
More democratic and more powerful authoring tools means that more people have a greater stake in creating and shaping our shared culture. I think those are some pretty big ideas.
Gabler's conception of Twitter and the like is that they are only for sharing personal ephemera, which is revealed when he says:
>Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.
My personal experience of these channels (Twitter, or, you know, Reddit) is that they're primarily used for sharing links to words, so it's hard to see the dichotomy Gabler is presenting.
I do think he is correct in one respect about this, however. These systems are increasingly designed to literally award what is likable and popular, rather than what is new or challenging. There is some overlap, of course, but this setup is better for making mediocre, predictable, and bland ideas, rather it is for making truly grand and groundbreaking ones.
This was a good one for me.
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231180640/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_PwX0CbCNZS27P
The idea that the middle ages were "the dark ages" is a modern myth. The middle ages were a period of scientific and artistic progress, and their was no great revolution caused by the enlightenment. It was a continuation of midieval thought. The roots of modern science lie in the middle ages
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Read Rodney Stark, James Hannam, or edward grant
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There is a lot of scholarship about the progress of Europe during the middle ages, so this wikipedia article is a nice summary of why it's a misleading conception of the era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
https://www.amazon.com/Reason-Middle-Ages-Edward-Grant/dp/0521003377
The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy is an interesting read, although it's very specifically about Newton's dabblings.
Edit: This may give you a starting point.
Cool, thanks for sharing! For anyone else interested, Amy Sue Bix wrote a book called Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women
> Book description:
> Engineering education in the United States was long regarded as masculine territory. For decades, women who studied or worked in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities, outcasts, unfeminine (or inappropriately feminine in a male world). In Girls Coming to Tech!, Amy Bix tells the story of how women gained entrance to the traditionally male field of engineering in American higher education.
> As Bix explains, a few women breached the gender-reinforced boundaries of engineering education before World War II. During World War II, government, employers, and colleges actively recruited women to train as engineering aides, channeling them directly into defense work. These wartime training programs set the stage for more engineering schools to open their doors to women. Bix offers three detailed case studies of postwar engineering coeducation. Georgia Tech admitted women in 1952 to avoid a court case, over objections by traditionalists. In 1968, Caltech male students argued that nerds needed a civilizing female presence. At MIT, which had admitted women since the 1870s but treated them as a minor afterthought, feminist-era activists pushed the school to welcome more women and take their talent seriously.
> In the 1950s, women made up less than one percent of students in American engineering programs; in 2010 and 2011, women earned 18.4% of bachelor's degrees, 22.6% of master's degrees, and 21.8% of doctorates in engineering. Bix's account shows why these gains were hard won.
>Science is an objective collection and interpretation of data. I completely agree. At the level of the study of purely physical phenomena, science is the only reliable method for establishing the facts of the world.
The collection and interpretation of data is never objective.
There is no such thing as raw data.
There's a great read on the subject here: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-data-is-never-raw
Excerpt:
>How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions — decisions about what exactly to measure, when and where to do so, and by what methods. Inevitably, what gets measured and recorded has an impact on the conclusions that are drawn
[...]
>In the memorable words of Geoffrey Bowker, informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, “Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.” “Raw” carries a sense of natural or untouched, while “cooked” suggests the result of cognitive processes. But data is always the product of cognitive, cultural, and institutional processes that determine what to collect and how to collect it. In this sense, “raw data” is indeed a contradiction in terms. In the ordinary use of the term “raw data,” “raw” signifies that no processing was performed following data collection, but the term obscures the various forms of processing that necessarily occur before data collection.
I've never seen the TV version, but there was indeed a book of it; my dad had a copy and I used to read it all the time as a child.
Reading through the wiki entry on the TV series, the book sounds like it followed the same format and covered much of the same ground. I'd recommend it if you can pick up a cheap copy.
When Science Goes Wrong