Reading List for Chapter 1: On Generation and Corruption

And Where To Get Started Understanding Calculus and Physics

Want to learn more about the topics discussed in Chapter 1? Here’s some additional reading.

I am indebted to my author friend, Robert Bidinotto, for introducing me to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. Gottschall’s thinking influenced my thinking on the importance of incorporating an explicit narrative in both my fiction and non-fiction writing. And he does a marvelous job explaining the concept of story-telling and narrative in human cognition. While you’re at Amazon, also check out Bidinotto’s superb vigilante thriller, Hunter.

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, is a fun memoir by the irreverent physicist, Richard Feynman. Sprinkled with interesting anecdotes and scientific wisdom, this book is a good way to get inside the head and thinking of one of the twentieth century’s leading physicists.

Clausewitz may have argued that war is politics by other means [i], but politics and other civilian activities benefit from application of concepts first applied in a military context. Colonel John Boyd revolutionized our understanding of air-to-air combat with his concept of the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Daniel Fords’ A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror explains how these concepts have been applied in recent conflicts. Jerry Pournelle called Martin van Crevald a “necessary addendum to Clauswitz.” Van Crevald’s A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind, places these emerging ideas in their historical context.

I debated saving this one until later, but to understand how one theory supplants another, I highly recommend The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996). Kuhn’s thesis is that scientific revolutions occur for reasons not entirely rational. Scientific ideas are understood in a broad conceptual context with unstated and not so obvious preconceptions. Once within the intellectual matrix, it becomes difficult to stand outside one’s premises and take a dispassionate look at evidence and ideas. There’s a reason why physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) argued “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”[ii]

A reader also asked what books I’d recommend for someone interested in learning more about math and physics on a basic level.

The book I wish I’d known about when beginning my studies of calculus is Calculus Made Easy. There's a modern edition available on Amazon, but the original version is in the public domain, and you can find e-copies easily, for instance at archive.org. From the prologue:

Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way. Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.

Another marvelous public domain book is James Clerk Maxwell’s Matter and Motion. It’s mostly at an introductory level accessible to beginning of students and covers mostly mechanics, gravitation, and motion. It’s a thrill to learn physics straight from the man who figured out the modern theory of electromagnetism.

Richard Feynman’s Lectures On Physics are an excellent survey of the subject, but at a higher level. Intended for freshmen undergraduates, Feynman scared off his intended audience, but didn’t realize it because more senior undergraduates and graduate students started attending his lectures. I’d recommend The Feynman Lectures for a student who has already mastered the basics and wants to understand better what it all means.

Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law is also excellent background reading on scientific thinking.

When we get more into electromagnetism proper, I’ll be recommending books like Electromagnetic Theory for Complete Idiots, A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations and Div, Grad, Curl, and All That, for readers interested in getting a head start and seriously diving into the mathematics of vector calculus. Fields & Energy will not provide the mathematical treatment so readily available from these and other books on electromagnetism. Instead our focus here will be on the models and intuition behind the math.

Enjoy!

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[i] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J.J. Graham. New and Revised edition with Introduction and Notes by Col. F.N. Maude, in Three Volumes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & C., 1918). Vol. 1. Chapter: CHAPTER I: WHAT IS WAR?

[ii] Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie. Mit einem Bildnis und der von Max von Laue gehaltenen Traueransprache. Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag (Leipzig 1948), p. 22, in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, (1949), as translated by F. Gaynor, pp. 33–34 (as cited in T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).