Winter reading list
It’s going to be a long winter. Even with the vaccination rollout ramping up, it’s unlikely that life will return to normal until the spring. Luckily, as a compulsive book-buyer (many of them preowned), I have a nice collection of books to keep me company over the next few months. Here’s my Winter 2020-2021 reading list.
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham: A gift from my Aspuru-Guzik group Secret Santa, this book has been on my wish list (to which he had access) ever since it came out two years ago. It’s a natural successor to Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, two books that helped shape my views on nuclear weapons.
Against Method by Paul Feyerabend: After reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gives a compelling argument for progress in science due to paradigm shifts, I figured I should hear the rebuttal, the famous “anything goes” argument.
Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson: This book has been sitting on my shelf for two years. I bought it to understand my colleagues who work on quantum computing. What better time than now, after 2020 was the year humanity has reached some form of quantum advantage (Google Sycamore and the recent UTSC Gaussian Boson Sampling experiments).
Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society by Ron Diebert: This year’s Massey Lecture, delivered by cybersecurity expert and director of the Citizen Lab, examines the impact of digital technologies on society. Having just watched the Social Dilemma docu-drama on Netflix, I’m particularly interested in reading Diebert’s solutions to remedy the damages the internet has caused, including recent events in the US capital.
Quiet by Susan Cain: As a mostly introvert, I sometimes wonder how I fit into a world that appears designed for extroverts. How to succeed in academia (and life) when I tend to eschew social media, self-promotion, small talk, and casual networking with strangers? Of course, I’m hardly the sole introvert in science, and I do try to venture outside of my comfort zone. But hopefully, this book will give me some additional insight.
Perhaps a work of fiction: either Asimov’s Foundation series, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which depicted the terrifying reality, or lack thereof, of totalitarian regimes so well that I had to put it down after 50 pages and switch to something light: Patrick DeWitt’s French Exit. (Incidentally, the original German manuscript of Darkness at Noon has been recently rediscovered. A fascinating read in the New Yorker.)
If by some miracle I read all of the above, then Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder about the second scientific revolution which gave us electromagnetism, hot air balloons, and the birth of analog computers. It argues that romanticism, contrary to the stereotypical cold, unemotional, rational view of science, was essential in driving the discoveries of that period.