As scientists we are bound to ask questions. A lot of times there is no ready-to-use answer. So we imagine that we know the answer and call it a hypothesis. The goal is to make a law (I am talking about physical laws in this post) out of a hypothesis. Laws must serve as a grounding material for our actions, and these actions are what moves us towards our goals, whatever they are. What is important to understand is that using logic is not enough to ensure reasonable actions. The logic must be grounded in laws. As Richard Dawkins suggests if we start with a “spaghetti-monster” we can apply all kinds of logic and still arrive at nothing.

The interesting thing about the physical laws is that everything is subject to these laws (that’s why they are laws) and nothing can disobey these laws. One good example is the law of gravity. It says “the earth is coming” (as a skydiver I can testify that it’s true). If there are no other laws applied such as aerodynamic laws (that’s why I was able to make more than one jump) the “earth will come”.

Given that all of that is pretty obvious we can ask a question: “What is the law that is used to develop our society (if any)?”. Daniel Quinn in his book “Ishmael” talks about this question. I found Quinn’s way of developing ideas very similar to the approach that is used by Jared Diamond in his books.

The beauty of this book is that it looks at things we see every day, but because we see these things every day we fail to make connections between them. Everyone saw apples on the ground, everyone saw apples fall to the ground… But it was Newton who discovered the law of gravity. This law shows a connection between apples and Earth in this particular case. That’s why connections are important to understand.

I was able to see the “problem”, “approach”, “hypothesis”, “solution”, and “future work” in this book. A good structure coupled with a very clear language and a very important topic (if our society is not following laws it will not survive exactly as aircrafts not following aerodynamic laws will not fly) makes this an excellent book.

Now what does it have to do with us? Well… our civilization develops using technology. And technology is developed by engineers. Hence I believe that even though it is a very good read, it’s very beneficial for engineers (in fact I consider this book “must read” for everyone). But in case you doubt my opinion (a very reasonable thing to do) Daniel Quinn won Turner Tomorrow Award’s half-million-dollar first prize for this book.

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed