Michael's Favourite Science Books

What do Bill Bryson, Daniel Wegner and J. R. R. Tolkien have in common? They are all part of Michael's reading recommendations. On this episode of Field Notes we answer one of our most frequent inbox questions... "What do you both read?" Alongside that Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens delve into whether some numbers give off "vibes" and the optimal way to use airflow to rid your car of dog hairs and unwanted smells. A handy list of Michael's books (Hannah's will come in the future)! Sum by David Eagleman A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality by Lewis Carroll Epstein The Discovery of Dynamics: A Study from a Machian Point of View of the Discovery and the Structure of Dynamical Theories by Julian Barbour The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us by Noson S. Yanofsky Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Nørretranders The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Michael Stevens?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:05Michael Stevens?

  And today is an episode of Field Notes where we come back, Hannah and I, from the field with some discoveries, some things we want to share. Sometimes they're objects, sometimes they're observations. I've brought a lot of things. Look at that stack. And that's only some of it. I know, I'm finally answering a question that I get asked all the time, and I was sick of not having a good answer. So I put the work in, and I've got an answer. To what? You'll find out later.

• 0:31Hannah Fry?

  Okay, what I will say is this, though. For those who are listening rather than watching, Michael just turned his camera around, and there was an enormous stack of books. But they were notably clean, which makes me think that he's not talking about a real field. There was no mud on a single one of them.

• 0:46Michael Stevens?

  When I say field, it can be my living room, okay? And also, I've got the spines turned away. So when I turn the camera to it, it's just a big stack of paper.

• 0:56Hannah Fry?

  All we know, all we know is that some of them are pretty chunky. And actually, just to turn it around one more time, I want to see how well leafed through they are. Okay, a couple of those are very loved. Some of them, some of them, listeners rather than viewers, look like they've only been read in digital form. And this is the hard copy that sits on his shelf to prove, I'm not sure.

• 1:16Michael Stevens?

  That's interesting that you bring that up, because that is not true at all for these books.

• 1:22Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 1:22Michael Stevens?

  I love physical books so much that I, and I dislike reading on a screen so much, that I read the hardbacks. So these have all been completely read, every page of them. And the ones that look cleaner, I think they just look cleaner because they are, after all, like really high-quality hardcover books that stand up to wear and tear. I used to buy paperbacks, and this is why I don't anymore. Like, this paperback, it's all getting browned and yellowed, and the pages already feel brittle. So what I focus on nowadays is acid-free archival copies. And they're often cheaper than the new paperback, because it's just like an old, used book. It's not even a first edition.

• 2:06Michael Stevens?

  And so it'll be like 23 bucks for the paperback version, or $9 for this used copy from a little bookstore in Indiana that is printed on archival paper with a hard binding. And I'm like, It's a no brainer.

• 2:20Hannah Fry?

  And they also look nicer.

• 2:22Michael Stevens?

  They look nicer and a lot of times, though, you are going to have like old library binding. And I love that. I like having the little sticker on it that has it's like Dewey decimal number and it says like, you know, Wasuka County Public Library. And then there's got a big stamp on it that says, you know, removed. And I love that. It's got this whole story. Sometimes there's little people's notes. I'm wondering if I have, no, not here. But a lot of people have made their notes in it and I can like respond to their notes and be like, are you not understanding this book? Or yes, who are you? You're brilliant. And I never find out.

• 2:57Hannah Fry?

  Well, this was supposed to be a hook and tease for our second half, but I think we've given it away now that we're going to be talking about Michael's favorite books. But that's okay, because we haven't given away any of the titles. Michael's favorite science books. I mean, I'm not surprised that this is a question you've been asked multiple, multiple times.

• 3:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I'm asked it a lot and I finally got good, good answers because it came to a head when I was waiting for a sushi order for takeaway. And the waiter asked, what book would you recommend? And I was like, oh, my gosh, I don't know who the heck you are. Like, I don't want to say, oh, you should read The Illusion of Conscious Will, because that's like an academic book, but maybe that is what you want. And like, I had to figure out what's an answer I would tell to anyone, regardless of their background, regardless of what they're used to, and also regardless of like what they have access to. Because a lot of the books I would recommend might be like, okay, there's a copy on eBay right now for $800. Mine belonged to my father, but I want to be able to say, look, you can

• 3:58Michael Stevens?

  get this on Amazon for five bucks if that's what's going to be easy for you. Or Kindle. I think a lot of people want to read them on, on a screen.

• 4:12Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 4:15Michael Stevens?

  If you wanted to type out the entire human genome, you would have to type at 60 words a minute for eight hours a day for about 50 years. Okay, that's the scale of the DNA rulebook inside. Each one of your cells, telling it when to grow, when to divide, and when to stop.

• 4:34Hannah Fry?

  And different tissues read that same rulebook in different ways. So a skin cell doesn't behave like a lung cell.

• 4:40Michael Stevens?

  And cancer can begin when those instructions change. Not one dramatic moment, but through small gradual edits over time.

• 4:49Hannah Fry?

  Now, cancer isn't one disease. It is more than 200 types shaped by where those changes to the rulebook happen and how cells respond.

• 4:59Michael Stevens?

  Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, backing studies across all types of cancer.

• 5:06Hannah Fry?

  Work that takes years of very careful, steady progress to deliver each breakthrough.

• 5:12Michael Stevens?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

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• 6:27Hannah Fry?

  Okay, well, that is coming up in the second half of this episode. But as always, in field notes on our Thursday episode, we start off by taking a dip into some of your questions. Our mailbag, as it were, the things that have been troubling you, the things that have been on your mind. And as ever, we have some amazing questions that are coming from you, including this one for you, Michael. This is from Mladen Markovic, who asks, how much time do you think passed between the invention of the laser and a laser pointer being used to play with cats?

• 6:55Michael Stevens?

  I'd never considered this, so I had to look it up. And it's almost exactly 21 years. So by the time lasers were old enough to drink alcohol in the United States, they had become cat toys. That's obviously a bit of a guess, but it's based on the fact that the first laser was operated in May of 1960. It had, of course, it was resting on the shoulders of work that went back to Einstein and before. But the first laser, which used a ruby, was operated in 1960, and it was the very early 80s, like 1981, 82, maybe, is the first time you started to see consumer laser pointer devices.

• 7:38Michael Stevens?

  And I've got to imagine that as soon as someone opens up their laser pointer that they ordered, a cat starts playing with it. Like, I don't think it's very long between the availability on the market to, hey, my cat enjoys this. I haven't been able to find any reports, like an oral history of laser pointers and cats. But I cannot imagine it was more than a couple of weeks before someone noticed.

• 8:02Hannah Fry?

  But then, hold on, because there were lasers that existed before they were commercially available. I mean, are you ruling out the idea that a scientist wouldn't have just pointed it near a cat before that point?

• 8:14Michael Stevens?

  I guess that's a big flaw in my approach. I'm assuming that the laboratories were cat-free environments.

• 8:21Michael Stevens?

  These lasers would have been in development, the ones that were sold in the 80s, some of the first laser pointers, they would have been in development for a long time. And did the R and D teams like not have a cat around at some point? Like you would bring it home, you'd show, you know, you'd show your spouse and then, oh my gosh, you know, boots or socks is really in love with this pointer. And by the way, socks and boots, those are great names for cats from the 80s. Today, cats are all named things like Theodore, Jessica, Tiffany. But back then, we just had socks.

• 8:59Hannah Fry?

  I think there's something nice about that question, though. The distinction between hard science and play is actually much, much, much fuzzier than you might imagine. Because I agree with you that as soon as there is an object that that can be used for joy, I think inevitably it does become so.

• 9:17Michael Stevens?

  Inevitably, it does. And oftentimes, it's the opposite, where an item used for joy becomes a scientific tool.

• 9:23Hannah Fry?

  Well, there's lots of these, right? I mean, I'm thinking about the James Webb Telescope, the way that they launched that was based on an origami fold.

• 9:32Michael Stevens?

  Ah, yes.

• 9:33Hannah Fry?

  Also, computer graphics, which required a particular type of processor so that you could, when you're playing, when you're kind of moving around in gaming, so that the worlds appear as rich and visual as quickly as possible. It required a very particular type of computer processor. And that is now the reason why we have artificial intelligence. I mean, it ended up having this extremely important scientific purpose after all.

• 9:55Michael Stevens?

  So then, what, what cat toy, what current cat toy is going to become the seed of the next scientific revolution?

• 10:02Hannah Fry?

  Maybe the little dangly fish on a stick?

• 10:05Michael Stevens?

  The fish on a stick is going to unlock some orbital mechanics technique, or some sort of unification of macro and micro physics. Of course, I'm going to get working on that after the podcast.

• 10:19Hannah Fry?

  If you could.

• 10:20Michael Stevens?

  Here's a question for you, Hannah, from Dwyane Choudhury. Dwyane says, I have two German shepherds who shed aggressively. While driving on the highway, I wondered whether there is an optimal way to use airflow and pressure differences to remove dog fur from a car while driving. Which windows should be open by how much? And is there an optimal speed? Okay, first of all, you have become the fluid dynamics.

• 10:45Michael Stevens?

  Go to air of the queues.

• 10:48Hannah Fry?

  I know. This is great. Do you know what? I had such a fun afternoon thinking about this question. I've done more fluid dynamics for this podcast than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's absolutely great. I'm loving it. And I've got answers for you. Right, so I'll tell you what the bad ideas are. If you're in, you know, you're going down the motorway, you want to get as much fur out as possible. Bad idea is to open one window. Don't do that. That's just, it's just terrible. Because what happens when you do that, it's a bit like when you blow air over a bottleneck. So what happens is this, this hunk of air that's right by the, the one open window essentially starts acting like a plug. And as air rushes past it from the outside, it compresses the air inside the cabin, inside, inside the car,

• 11:32Hannah Fry?

  which then decompresses and you end up with what is effectively acting like a solid block of air that's wobbling back and forward. Which is why when you're driving, you open one window, it goes like

• 11:44Hannah Fry?

  that's what you're hearing. It's called a Helmholtz resonance. That's essentially what you're hearing. Don't do that. The best thing that's going to happen in that scenario is the dog hair is going to float up into that, into that trapped block of air and just vibrate next to your head. Bad idea, right? That's, that's not going to work. The other thing that you might be tempted to do is to just, just wind down all of the windows. Okay, don't do that. Also a bad idea. This happened, actually. I was in Florida last summer doing some filming. And I don't know if you've spent much time in Florida, Miami in particular. The mosquitoes, I could not believe, I could not believe the level of mosquitoes. But we were in a car with a local and he said, no problem. Here's what we do.

• 12:29Hannah Fry?

  We'll wind down all the windows and we'll just drive along with all the windows open for a few seconds. It will blow them out and then we can close the window safely. And I sat there and was like, no. No, local man, with your, with your knowledge, the fluid dynamics of this situation is, is all you're gonna do is you're just gonna create loads of pockets of turbulence if you do that. You've got wind coming in and out in all directions. You're gonna have little eddies, especially near the surfaces where the mosquitoes are sitting. They're gonna be boundary layers. You know, you're, you're gonna give the, the mosquitoes a little roller coaster. Sure, they're gonna have a wild ride, but you're not gonna, you're not gonna kick all of the air out. This is a bad approach, bad approach.

• 13:09Michael Stevens?

  So what's, what's the best approach?

• 13:11Hannah Fry?

  Right, there's two. There's two different approaches you can use. So what you want here is you want, you want slick, fast-moving laminar air, right? That's what you want. You want, you want the slippy stuff.

• 13:22Michael Stevens?

  How do I get that? Cause I don't, I don't have a dog, but I do sometimes fart in the car and I don't want my family to, to notice or even suffer. And rolling down one window seems to, it just produces a, a, a bad smell and a bad sound. So what do I do?

• 13:40Hannah Fry?

  If you know in advance that it's coming, okay, then, then, then what you can do is you, you know that high pressure always is looking for low pressure areas, right? So what you can do, keep the, keep the windows closed, turn on the aircon full, full whack, make sure that it's drawing in air from the outside. So you increase the pressure in the car and then crack both the back windows a tiny amount, like one or two inches. And then you've got high pressure in the front of the car and it's pushing the air through to the back. That will be good, right? That will work. But if your aircon in your car isn't, isn't strong enough, you know, you don't think it's gonna be able to keep up with that.

• 14:16Hannah Fry?

  The other option is to create this diagonal flow. So you crack your window, the driver's window by maybe two centimeters or so, two inches maybe. And then the back passenger window by a similar size gap, maybe, maybe another couple of inches there. Do them both at the same time. And then cause you're driving at like 60 miles an hour, say, there's this big high pressure area at the front of the car that will kind of roll around, enter in the driver's window. You've got high pressure there. And then at the back of the car, as the car's kind of moving through, there's low pressure. So you are, you're effectively creating this physical bridge

• 14:56Hannah Fry?

  between a high pressure area outside the car, low pressure area outside the car. You're gonna get this slipstream all the way through. Your doggies sitting in the backseat, they're going to be bored by the time you get home.

• 15:07Michael Stevens?

  Is cracking the window just a little bit part of it? If you open them all the way, what, too much turbulence?

• 15:13Hannah Fry?

  Too much turbulence, exactly right. So this, I mean, there's something called Reynolds number, which basically tells you about, in effect, how turbulent the flow is likely to be. I'm simplifying slightly, but you can go with me. And one of the things in Reynolds number is the size of the aperture. So if you, you want it to have this like a slightly smaller aperture so that it slips through, goes too big, you're going to get messy air. Do not want messy air for moving fluid through.

• 15:40Michael Stevens?

  There you go, scientific life hack.

• 15:42Hannah Fry?

  Next time you fart in the car, your wife and daughter can thank me, okay?

• 15:46Michael Stevens?

  They will, I'll make sure they do.

• 15:48Hannah Fry?

  This is also how you get hot air out of the car in the summer, by the way. This was actually my most viral video last year. You can do that while you're driving, the diagonal thing. Or if you want to do it before you take off, when you get in the car and it's really, really crazy hot, leave your driver's window closed, crack the back passenger door a tiny bit, and then open and close your driver's door and it'll take all of the air out.

• 16:12Michael Stevens?

  Like a bellow almost, you're pumping out the air. Because the air inside the car is warmer than the outside. Yeah, I'm always trying to like, oh, I need the new air to get in here.

• 16:22Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, exactly. That's the quickest way to do it. And like two or three, open and close and you're done. You're good. Okay, we've had two pet themed questions so far. But here we go. This is a question from Minori, who says, after listening to the recent podcast episode where you discussed the cyclops effect, I was wondering what other experiments should I stockpile to do on my child? I don't intend on having one anytime soon. I just feel like I should be prepared when I do.

• 16:49Michael Stevens?

  Well, you don't have to experiment on your own children. I think other people's children are just as fine to do psychological experiments on.

• 17:00Michael Stevens?

  I really wish I had done more on my daughter. The one I want to try soon is about hypotheticals. So if you talk to like a five or six year old child and you ask them questions about the world. A really famous example I've seen going around on social media involves an experimenter saying, "Okay, if you hit a glass with a feather, what happens?" And the kid says, "Nothing." And they go, "Why?" "Well, because the feather is soft. It's not hard enough." "Okay, well, what if, what if there's a new rule, which is that if you hit a glass with a feather, it will break? If you hit a glass with a hammer, what will happen?" A young kid will be like, "Well, it won't break."

• 17:43Michael Stevens?

  But a 13 year old goes, "Oh, well, okay, in this made up scenario, it will break because you said that's the rule." And it's amazing just how hard it is for the younger child to understand that you are describing a different fantastical universe with different rules. And that, that switch to being able to understand hypotheticalities happens around like seven years old. And you should also test the difference between their ability to understand hypotheticals in the future and in the past, because they don't happen simultaneously. Research has shown that young children understand future hypotheticals better. Like, "If it rains tomorrow, what should we do?"

• 18:27Michael Stevens?

  But if you ask them, "If it had rained this morning, what would we have done?" That's a harder question. And I still don't know if it's because of the conceptual nature or if it's simply the, a language barrier of like, "Yeah, but it didn't." Or, I don't know what conclusions to draw from this, but we need, we need more studies, so let us know.

• 18:48Hannah Fry?

  I have one daughter who's younger than that and one daughter, if you think it happens around seven, I have one daughter younger than seven, one daughter older than seven. So I'm going to try that and I'll, I'll report back.

• 18:57Michael Stevens?

  Try it out and see if they have different answers. Obviously, there's also the famous consistency of matter experiments, which my daughter did fail when she was very young. I haven't tested her recently, but this is where you take a tall glass and a short glass and you fill the short one with water. And then you take that glass and you pour the water into the taller glass and you say, which one now has more? Sorry, does that make sense? I should explain this better.

• 19:30Hannah Fry?

  The tall glass is skinny, right?

• 19:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Hannah Fry?

  So the water level sits, the same water level sits higher in this tall skinny glass than it does in the short wide one.

• 19:39Michael Stevens?

  That's right. And you start with the water in the, in the short wide glass. And you say, okay, there's, there's a certain amount of water here. You pour it into the tall skinny glass and the water, of course, is higher. The water level is higher in altitude. And you say, which one has more water in it? Was it the one before or this tall one? And under a certain age, kids always choose the tall one.

• 20:03Hannah Fry?

  I think that's so gorgeous. I like that so much. It's so sweet.

• 20:07Michael Stevens?

  What I think is so fascinating is that you cannot explain the problem in that reasoning to a child. You can teach them, look, I've poured all the water from the small glass to the tall glass. None was added, none was taken away. So it should be the same amount. They still will get it wrong. The only way children have demonstrated that they learn the difference is by experimenting with this themselves, by playing with water, with blocks, with Lego, with whatever, with sand, and realizing, ah, it's always the same amount. Because there's a difference between the size of the pile and the amount in it.

• 20:49Michael Stevens?

  And they have to come to that realization through their own cognitive processes. It cannot be taught to them with words.

• 20:57Hannah Fry?

  I also think it's notable how incredibly well tuned small kids are to portion size, basically, which is what I was thinking as you were describing it. You know, if you give two kids two glasses, one with slightly more than the other, you bet any amount, you know, the kid is gonna notice and like pick the one with slightly more. They're sort of incredibly tuned to the height of a fluid in a glass, for instance. There is a book, actually, that I, whenever I have a friend who has a baby, it's, it's the stock book that I give them. You know, so you sort of do like a congratulations on being a parent box. And this is the book that I always put in it. And it's called Experimenting with Babies. And it's fifty science projects you can perform on your own kid.

• 21:42Hannah Fry?

  And they're all, it's so good, it's so good. None of them, none of them a little Albert, okay? None of them are like nasty things. They're all like very sweet stuff that you can look at the reflexes that your kid has when they're born. There's one that's particularly memorable about when a, when a kid is just born. They have this reflex, which is where if you lie them on their backs facing upwards with their arms in the air. So sort of like ready to give a high ten and turn their head for them. They will straighten the arm that they're looking at. And it doesn't matter whether you turn their head the other way. They will then straighten the arm they're looking at and bend the other one. It's called the on guard reflex. Cause it's like you're fencing, right? On guard.

• 22:21Michael Stevens?

  Well, so this is, the arms are up like they're above their head. Even they're laying flat on their backs and their arms are like flat on the floor, basically. They're not straight up like this.

• 22:30Hannah Fry?

  Correct.

• 22:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I love all these weird reflexes babies have that they lose. I've, I've even heard people argue that the fact that we lose them is like a little micro form of metamorphosis that humans go through. Where we become a different creature with different reflexes. After a certain age, I gotta get this book, Experiments to Do, and I gotta, I'll have to have another baby too, but I think it's worth it.

• 22:53Hannah Fry?

  There is another one experimenting with kids, which you can do with slightly older kids, but yeah. There's a, none of them are cruel, all of them are fine. They're all just very sweet little things that you can, you can test on your children. The marshmallow test where you sort of, you see if they have got a, an ability to delay reward. You say you can have one marshmallow now, or if you wait, you can have two later. And loads of kids fail it. Um, yeah, lots of really sweet experiments that you can do.

• 23:19Michael Stevens?

  I need to look into more about the marshmallow experiment because I've seen a lot of videos about it in the last few years. I don't know if there's been in updates on the conclusions or the results, but yeah, I've heard that. The younger a kid is, if they're able to. Pass the marshmallow test and say, oh, I can either have this one, or if I wait five minutes, I'll get to have two. A kid that chooses to wait to have two at an early and earlier age, it really does show that that child will have better outcomes later in their life.

• 23:50Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, it really does. It really does. Sort of like a, it demonstrates a kind of internal resilience, I guess, that then shows up in lots of other factors.

• 23:59Michael Stevens?

  That's right. It shows they have a better, maybe, concept of, of planning and time, and also a stronger veto power over their non-conscious urges. So, yeah, there's a lot of experiments you can do. I'm not sure how I feel about having a book on my shelf called Experimenting with Kids, but it'll make a good conversation piece.

• 24:18Hannah Fry?

  Because we're on the topic, can I just tell you one of my favorites ever? Just because we're on the topic. Okay, so if you, if you want to work out what your kid's going to be like, there are very few things. I mean, the marshmallow test is one which is correlated. It's not deterministic, right? But it's like, there's a chance, you know, sort of is indicative. If you want to work out what a kid's maths ability is going to be later in life, then, I mean, pretty much everything you can measure, how quickly they know their times tables, how quickly they learn addition, doesn't make a difference. Nothing, nothing, nothing makes a difference. The one thing that is correlated to future mathematical ability is if you take a five-year-old and you manufacture a toy scene in front of them, say, a car crash, right?

• 25:03Hannah Fry?

  And you say, oh, look, no, what's happened here is that this car's been driving, and whoa, they've crashed here. And then you have all of these other toys that are watching on from the scene. Ask the five-year-old to tell you the story from different perspectives. So you say, okay, what did, what did the guy in the car think? And they'll be like, oh, no, whatever. It's like, okay, but what did Barbie think up the hill? And some kids at five are really able to do that. They're really able to just switch their mind from one perspective to another, to another, to another. And other kids find it incredibly difficult, just don't really understand. It's like, they all saw it from the same perspective as they themselves saw it from, from the child perspective. And no one is quite sure, at least last time I checked on this research, it may be that it's been updated since,

• 25:48Hannah Fry?

  but no one is quite sure why this should be the thing that ends up connecting to future mathematical ability. But there is one idea, which is that when you take something like the number eight, right?

• 26:02Hannah Fry?

  The number eight is like this character in a kid's mind. But what that character does changes depending on what you do with that character. You know, you multiply by eight, it's doing something very different to dividing by eight or taking away eight. And it's sort of like that ability to be mentally flexible based on what you see in front of you. There's an idea that that's the earliest sign of future mathematical ability.

• 26:30Michael Stevens?

  Is there a name for this? I'd love to know more about how to actually orchestrate it. It sounds really similar to the Piaget mountain test, where you give mountain task, where you have children look at mountains, little toy mountains on a table, and they have to answer questions about what various characters in the scene can see.

• 26:51Hannah Fry?

  I think it's the same thing. I think it's the same idea. And the other element of that, of course, is the spatial reasoning, right? That you're having to change your physical position and being able to manipulate that in your mind, which also ends up being quite useful as a mathematician.

• 27:06Michael Stevens?

  Wow, okay, I know what I'm doing tonight.

• 27:07Hannah Fry?

  I mean, frankly, I've got my own list of experiments lined up as well. So if you too are experimenting on children in your lives, then let us know how it goes. Let us know in the comments. Right, we're going to come back after the break with the question that many, many, many people over the years have asked you, Michael. What are your favorite science books?

• 27:33Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Project Hail Mary, the new spectacular space adventure movie coming to cinemas from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir, and the directors of the Spider-Verse movies, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. But here's an even better combination? Teachers in space.

• 27:51Hannah Fry?

  Hello, thank you. Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as science teacher Ryland Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission into space to discover why the sun and the stars are dying. And he teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. What what kind of prep would you hope Ryan Gosling had done for this role in order to play the role of a of a science teacher?

• 28:17Michael Stevens?

  He should have spent a bunch of time with cool teenagers and tried to teach things to them. So that it wasn't just like a good explanation, but also kept their interest and made them want to hear more and understand it so that they could share it to be cool, too.

• 28:35Hannah Fry?

  See Project Hail Mary now in cinemas and IMAX everywhere.

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• 29:43Hannah Fry?

  I'm intrigued about this one. I want to know how many of these I've read and how many how many wonderful things, wonderful things that are out there in the world that I am yet to discover. It's like, you know, when you when you feel jealous of people who haven't watched Breaking Bad yet because of all of the joy they have ahead of them in their life. This is this is how I feel right now in this conversation. I've got to be honest with you.

• 30:02Michael Stevens?

  So, yeah, we're answering the question of, hey, Michael, what books do you recommend? Because I think we've got this emailed to us by so many people. We can't even name you all. I'm sorry, you won't get any credit. But I love books. I love physical books. I love the weight of them. In fact, I find it hard to even read a book if I don't love the book as an object, which means I like them heavy and full of like hard covers. It just, I don't know, I literally, my reading list, the order that I choose them in is based on how the book looks. I had a paperback copy of American Psycho, the book.

• 30:40Michael Stevens?

  And it was just so beautiful because it was just white and it had the title way down in the lower left corner and that was it. And I just couldn't stop looking at it on the table. And I'm like, I gotta read this. And so I actually read it because I just could not stop admiring the objecthood of it, the beauty of it.

• 30:59Hannah Fry?

  Turns out you really can judge a book by its cover then, Michael, huh?

• 31:02Michael Stevens?

  I do. I've got a lot to say about that, in fact, covers of books, because it matters a lot what the cover looks like. I generally prefer the UK covers of books. They're just so much more cool. I don't know why. But like, you'll have to, you'll look this up yourself. You'll almost always find that the UK cover is better. Why do they do two different covers?

• 31:23Hannah Fry?

  I don't know. And I have had books published in the States and then the cover art has come back and I've been like, I'm sorry, what?

• 31:29Michael Stevens?

  The first time I really noticed this, though, and I see it now everywhere, was with Katie Mack's book, The End of Everything. I think both covers are really good, but the UK edition looked so cool. And the American version looked like, yeah, it's a space-time book. It's a great book. It's, I don't, I don't want to put down the cover. You shouldn't judge it by the cover if you're in America, is what I'm saying. It's a fantastic book that deserved to have the cover that the UK gave it. So here, here at my office, I have all of my philosophy, math and science books. There's the shelves. And a lot of

• 32:13Michael Stevens?

  them are really specific to the kinds of episodes I've made. So like, I would never recommend it to anyone unless, oh, are you doing an episode about how many holes the human body contains? Because here's a book that helped me. When it comes to just general, like, I think anyone would like this and should read it, my number one recommendation outside of like, a science book, even though it kind of is, it's David Eagleman's some. And this book was recommended to me by a mutual connection, Jake Chudnow, who does all the music for Vsauce. He's the one who told me about this. So you've read it?

• 32:48Hannah Fry?

  I have, yeah. He's amazing. He's amazing.

• 32:50Michael Stevens?

  Hold on, he's a neuroscientist, isn't he?

• 32:52Hannah Fry?

  He is, yeah. Do you know him?

• 32:54Michael Stevens?

  I know of him.

• 32:55Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, he's great. He's incredibly charismatic. He's really good at storytelling, as evidenced by the book. What he's really good at doing is, I don't know, some people are just very, very good at understanding what draws people into a story. And he does that with his research. It's not just his storytelling, it's his research too. His research is just endlessly fascinating.

• 33:18Michael Stevens?

  So for those of you who aren't familiar, some, what is it about? It is a book full of 40 different chapters. Each one is a little hypothetical, made up version of what the afterlife is like. He's not saying that it is like this, but he's saying, imagine that this is what happens after you die. And it is so wonderful for reflection. The one I think about the most is the chapter that's about like, you know, when you die, you go to heaven, which happens to be just the same world you always lived on, except the only people who live there are people that you were friends with in your life. And at first, it's really awesome because you've got your best friends and your family and all the coworkers that you loved. And then you start to realize after a few days,

• 34:02Michael Stevens?

  a few weeks, a few months, that you didn't have a friend who could vulcanize rubber. You didn't have a friend who could winnow a field. And it just makes you step back and go, man, we are so dependent on the knowledge and the labor of so many people we never talked to.

• 34:21Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 34:22Michael Stevens?

  So I won't spoil any more of them, but each one is a little, short, digestible thought experiment on life and meaning. It's fantastic.

• 34:32Hannah Fry?

  Extremely short book as well.

• 34:34Michael Stevens?

  It's very short, yeah. So it's a great, it's a great book to recommend because it's not like, oh, man, this is a huge tome. And if I'm not into it after a few pages, like, I'm gonna hate Michael. It's more like, after a few pages, there's another neat chapter, and then there's another neat chapter. So yeah, I love this book. I'd say the early days of Vsauce were very much inspired by books like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Okay, this is a classic. I bet a lot of listeners have already listened to or have read A Short History of Nearly Everything. But the way he writes about everything in this book really inspired a lot of ideas for early Vsauce videos. And I actually even referenced this book in my most recent

• 35:19Michael Stevens?

  video about ghosts and how we're remembered, because he has this great fact about how rare it is to become a fossil, that he's like, of all the humans alive in the United States today, within millions of years, what will be left and actually fossilized will not even be one full skeleton. Like, not even one of us alive today is going to be a fossilized skeleton. It's, it's pretty cool.

• 35:43Hannah Fry?

  He has this absolute gift for just the lightest of touches and like honing in on the joyfulness of absurdity. I am, I am endlessly envious of his ability to write Bill Bryson. He is phenomenal.

• 36:00Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Yeah, Bill Bryson, any book by Bill Bryson is gonna be a good read. Home, I haven't read yet, but I've got it. And I've got a nice hardback cover.

• 36:08Hannah Fry?

  Tell you what, though, the, the cover of that one, let's have a look at the cover of that one. I would say that's not a very good cover. That's the American cover, isn't it?

• 36:16Michael Stevens?

  No, no, it isn't. I bought, oh, yeah, it is. I read this in England, but I must have bought it in America.

• 36:24Hannah Fry?

  You know what, actually, I don't think that the English cover is that much better, to be honest.

• 36:27Michael Stevens?

  The cover of, of what I have is, it's a paperback with a blue cover and it's got a picture of Earth on it with an asterisk. And the asterisk brings us to this note, which is The title of the book. So in a way, the title of the book is actually A Photo of Earth. And then an interpretation of that is A Short History of Nearly Everything.

• 36:47Hannah Fry?

  I think that might be better than the British cover on this, on this instance. The British cover is, is half, the top half is white, the bottom half is orange. There's sort of earth, as though it's printed out and has a dashed line around it. It's not particularly inspiring.

• 37:00Michael Stevens?

  Around the same time that I was reading Bill Bryson, which was, again, I think this was like when Vsauce became an educational channel, I also got a lot from this book, which is called The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie. And it has a very like black and white cover with waves on it. And then the title is printed in yellow and white. Its subtitle is An Exploration of Science and Philosophy. And this book is also about everything. It's about insects and planets and storms and math. And it has a much more spiritual bent. And everything that I read in this book, I had to fact check. And a number of the things were like, uh, that interpretation is not popular.

• 37:43Michael Stevens?

  But this inspired a lot of questions, like, how big are you? Like, does your body end at the, at the hard surface? Or is your, is your smell kind of like you? To a cat, I might be as big as my smell. And how, how widely does my smell travel? Right? And he, he just keeps bringing up weird things like that and doesn't really even answer them or attempts to. I mean, I don't think that one's actually answered in here, but it, it inspired a lot of great thoughts. So I'm really grateful to that book.

• 38:13Hannah Fry?

  That looks like quite an old book, that one.

• 38:15Michael Stevens?

  This book is the reason why I get hard covers with acid-free paper nowadays. Because this is not that old. I mean, I am old in the sense that I think I bought this in like 20, probably 2013. So it is like a 13-year-old copy of the book, but it's gotten very browned. And it's kind of falling apart. And as I go back and read it, I'm like, man, this doesn't have a lot longer. I want to be able to leave this to my daughter.

• 38:42Hannah Fry?

  When was it published? The 90s?

• 38:44Michael Stevens?

  Copyright 1978.

• 38:46Hannah Fry?

  That's fun, though. I like the idea. I haven't read that one.

• 38:48Michael Stevens?

  It has really good illustrations. This is about the electromagnetic sense, this little section. And so I found it very enjoyable. Funny enough, do you know who recommended this book?

• 39:00Hannah Fry?

  Tell me.

• 39:01Michael Stevens?

  I bought this off of Rainn Wilson's recommendation at a TED Talk. He was like, you gotta read this one. And so I got it.

• 39:08Hannah Fry?

  I didn't have him down as a, as somebody who'd be particularly good at recommending philosophical science books, but there we go, how wrong I was.

• 39:15Michael Stevens?

  Now you know. Let's get really like hard, hard science here, physics. I very much recommend these two. The guy's name is Lewis Carroll Epstein. Thinking physics blew my mind. It's, it's kind of a workbook. It's just got a bunch of problems, but they're all really strange ones. They're, they're ones like, okay, if the universe was empty, except for two pieces of mass, what would happen? They would come together eventually. But what if the universe was full of nothing but matter? And there were two empty hollows? Would they come together? Would they have a force on each other? Or would they have a repelling force on each other? And he answers them. He answers them so well.

• 39:58Michael Stevens?

  The ability to explain the concept of things like energy, momentum. It's just leverage. What do we mean when we talk about the pivot point or the lever arm of something? This one gets it right so clearly. It's so well done. Normally this is sold for teachers to use. And photocopies of the pages are like one of notoriously, one of the most common copyright violations of science teachers, because it's just, it's hard to beat how clear these are. And I mean, I'm an adult who I still learn so much from this. I crack it open and I go, oh, yeah. The way a hard hat works is a great way to talk about force. Yeah, it's just, it's wonderful. And then he wrote a book called Relativity Visualized.

• 40:42Michael Stevens?

  Which is the best book I've ever found about relativity and how to understand what's being said by Lorentz contractions and time dilation and all those things that can often feel a bit woo woo or a little bit beyond. This one has, it also has the very best diagrams of like how to think of spacetime. And a lot of this inspired my Which Way Is Down episode where I talked about different surfaces representing different structures of spacetime, geodesics and whatnot.

• 41:16Hannah Fry?

  Right. What I will say is this, Michael, at the moment, I'm up to 54 pounds in my Amazon basket. So, thank you.

• 41:25Michael Stevens?

  Wait, you're buying, you're buying these as I say them?

• 41:27Hannah Fry?

  The ones I haven't read, yeah, of course. I don't wanna, I don't wanna miss out.

• 41:31Michael Stevens?

  Okay. Now, if you really wanna dive into classical mechanics, the theoretical minimum books are also really phenomenal at explaining concepts. At the end of the day, though, I do recommend that if you wanna understand a concept, you just need to read everything ever said about it. You need to hear everyone's different voice on it. And that doesn't mean you have to spend hundreds of dollars. It just means like read a bunch of stuff, you know, pick up a book at a thrift store and just read the chapter about the thing that you're interested in. Or, you know, just read a bunch of stuff on Reddit online. Like, you just need to hear everyone try their best at explaining it. And someone will say it in a way that hits your wavelength.

• 42:10Michael Stevens?

  Julian Barbers, The Discovery of Dynamics, is a different approach to understanding mechanics. This is a historical approach. It's the stories behind the people and the ideas and the debates that led to the formation of F equals ma, the solar, the sun-centered view of the solar system. And it's, this also helps you understand, first of all, that things like energy and force are concepts. It's not like Newton caught some force in the wild in a jar and studied it. He just said, guys, let's do this. Let's say that the product of mass and acceleration is force. Okay? I made it up.

• 42:56Michael Stevens?

  But it's weird if you start treating it like a thing. And this one has, it's just great. First of all, he talks a lot about how if, if humans had evolved on the moon, science would be so much further ahead. Because friction and air resistance got in the way of us understanding dynamics for, for a millennia.

• 43:15Hannah Fry?

  These are great. Do you know what's so nice about this is that like lots of these books are just not on my radar at all. I'd never even heard of this one, the Barbara one, the, the discovery of dynamics. But it's so up my street. This is, yeah.

• 43:28Michael Stevens?

  I absolutely love it. And I, I will, I will take the knowledge I've gotten from some of these books I've been mentioning. They'll be in my video about levers. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm trying to go a little bit more quickly. So when it comes to mathematics, I gotta shout out Nosen Janofsky's The Outer Limits of Reason. Notice a lot of my books don't have book jackets on them. I find book jackets so annoying. I take them off, I put them in a drawer.

• 43:53Hannah Fry?

  Me too. Actually, I throw them away.

• 43:54Michael Stevens?

  Cause I just always wind up ripping them.

• 43:56Hannah Fry?

  I think they look much prettier. I much prefer what they look like like that.

• 43:59Michael Stevens?

  Okay, The Outer Limits of Reason is a book that is like ostensibly, it's about how far can reason take us? But it's not a philosophical work. It is a mathematical work about, okay, here's what reason is. And here is where we reach problems that we know that we cannot solve unless we brute force it for, you know, forever, like the traveling salesman problem. It talks a lot about the difference between hard problems and the whole NPP distinction. And it, it explains it in a way, talks about Turing machines. It goes through this, I didn't know any of this stuff when I started the book. And I loved it so much, I, I mentioned it in a few of my videos and the author sent me an autographed copy

• 44:44Michael Stevens?

  of his quantum computing textbook. So I'm a big fan.

• 44:49Hannah Fry?

  He's a proper mathematician, right? Like this is, this is the kind of person who normally writes textbooks. I wouldn't say that that was a book that was written for broad, you know, sort of like a, it's, it's quite meaty, right?

• 45:00Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I mean, it's from the MIT press. So I wouldn't recommend this to just like a, a person. Um, I don't know who they are. They might be like, dude, this is so boring. And I'm like, well, you know, look, I don't agree, but I might to them say you should read some. And it's like a process. It's like a ladder. I wanted to cover just three little philosophical books. I think that Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions is a real kind of must have for some of the big questions. People ask about all kinds of things. This is where the famous, what is it like to be a bat comes from?

• 45:38Hannah Fry?

  Yes, of course.

• 45:39Michael Stevens?

  That's chapter 12 in the book. And the very first chapter is about death. And unlike a lot of other philosophical books written by true philosophers, this one, he finishes with like, and here's just how I feel. You know, he's like, look, I don't know. I just, this is how I get by and here's why. Then when it comes to consciousness, I've got two. One is the user illusion. This one is by Tor Nortranders. And it is very much about free will, conscious will, and what exactly is going on there? But I found Daniel M. Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will much, I don't know how to phrase this.

• 46:21Michael Stevens?

  It's more academic focused, whereas the user illusion is more for popular audiences. But these both really make it quite clear that we don't have as much control over our wills and ourselves as we think that we do, and that's okay.

• 46:39Hannah Fry?

  That was an absolute treat. What I will say is this, I had read a lot less of them than I thought. So I am now 124 pounds 37 pence down in my Amazon basket. But boy, do I have a lot of joy ahead of me in the reading months ahead.

• 46:55Michael Stevens?

  You sure do. You sure do. And look, like, that's just a little taste of like, okay, for a science podcast, what would I recommend? I do want to do a special shout out to yesterday. I finished reading The Lord of the Rings. I'm on a big fantasy kick at the moment. Started with science fiction and Ursula Le Guin. And then I wanted to read her Earthsea books. But I thought, you know what, I'm going to go back to like, honestly, the books that started the fantasy genre. It wasn't called fantasy when Tolkien wrote them. It was like fairy tales is what they called books like his. I just finished, let me grab them.

• 47:31Michael Stevens?

  I finished Lord of the Rings yesterday. I read this in two weeks. I started it on the 15th of February and I finished it on March 1st. So this is all three of the books combined. And now that that's done, I'm gonna move on to Earthsea, which, look at this tome.

• 47:48Hannah Fry?

  Oh my lord. I mean, they're both beautiful books, though. Talking about judging books by their covers. The Lord of the Rings one has a black cover on it, red edging on the pages, beautiful, I don't know what the Middle Earth writing is called, beautiful writing etched on the side.

• 48:07Michael Stevens?

  The language of Mordor, one ring to rule them all, blah, blah, blah. We got the white book ribbon. And so, yeah, I just last night started the first Earthsea book. You can see from the book ribbon that I'm only a few pages into it. But I love the heaviness of it. I love that it strengthens my fingers. It just makes me feel like I'm moving the wheels of the world by diving into someone's mind. And that's what I love about the book, too. I think if you're gonna read something like this, you should read it all in one sitting as much as possible, because you get to be inside someone else's head for so long. And that's an experience that we don't get from reading short little snippets on social media, on forums. But to just be like,

• 48:50Michael Stevens?

  "Yeah, Tolkien, take two weeks of my life and just, you're a nut, man." And I love it, and I'm glad that I got to participate in that, because so many people are. Like, I wanted to get the references, which you cannot escape in our society.

• 49:04Hannah Fry?

  What's your Amazon review rating for Lord of the Rings gonna be? How many stars?

• 49:09Michael Stevens?

  I mean, you gotta give it five stars. It's the Lord of the Rings. I mean, it's hard to separate it from its cultural impact. I started watching the movies last night. I got about 30 minutes through the first one, and I was just like, "Man, there's not enough in here," you know? I know, I know it's like nine hours of movie, but I was just like, "Ah, gee." I was telling my wife, "Ah, there's so much." They've cut out, and things are going so quickly. Like, the conversation between- Gandalf and Saruman, okay? In the book, you're like, oh, my gosh. Like, I think, I think this guy might have gone to the wrong side. Like, whoa, this is, it's, it's, there's a lot more mystery. In the movie, it's like Saruman is like, I'm evil now. Let's work with the Dark Lord, please.

• 49:54Michael Stevens?

  It's just like, you gotta move on. And I get it, they're two very different mediums. But the, the like, I'm trying to understand you portion of a book is what's so wonderful.

• 50:04Hannah Fry?

  I think it's that idea of being able to dip into somebody else's worldview. You know, walk a mile in their shoes, as it were. I think that's what's so, and I think, I don't know, I, I generally read nonfiction, if I'm honest. I maybe once or twice a year, I will dip into some fiction. But I think that's even true when you read really, really good nonfiction. A few of the examples that you gave there of people who, who have a way of seeing the universe, a way of seeing problems that is just totally illuminating. Yeah, that's what you get from books that you don't get from short snippets.

• 50:36Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. I've gotten so many ideas out of fiction books. Like, I didn't expect this, but like, let me show you. Here's all the notes I took from Lord of the Rings. I've got like just pages and pages of, wow, you know what? This is, is this something about human nature? Or is it human nature in the 20th century? And like, what does this tell us about interiority? And what it, like, what is bravery? Why does it matter to us? Does it matter to all of us? How is it framed? There's so many things to learn from, from fiction, even though it's not necessarily pretending to teach.

• 51:11Hannah Fry?

  Well, I hope that you enjoyed that, that absolutely glorious delve into Michael's bookshelf. That was, yeah, really wonderful, Michael. Thank you so much. If you have any questions that you would like us to answer, you can send us them at [email protected].

• 51:28Michael Stevens?

  And you can join our newsletter at therestis.com/science.

• 51:33Hannah Fry?

  All right.

• 51:33Michael Stevens?

  Stay curious.

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