I love books. I grew up in a house full of them, and I learnt to appreciate them since I was a kid. At roughly the same age I also discovered the enchanting world of video games and handheld devices, as many other kids that grew up in the late 90’s/early 00’s. Unfortunately those two activities are usually competing and eventually I ended up spending more and more time in front of a screen. There were instances during my adolescence, and during my undergraduate studies that I was reading books, but not consistently in any way. However, I was always feeling a need to buy interesting new books, even though I did not have a plan to read them anytime soon (in Japanese this is called tsundoku - 積ん読).

While studying for my Ph.D. my inner urge to learn new things led me to start reading books again. My initial goal was to read one book per month (12 per year), which at the time I started this quest seemed quite a lot. However, after the first few books, I started to speed up and ended up reading more than 30 per year. I almost exclusively choose to read non-fiction books about science, philosophy and politics (as you will see below), but I think I might expand to fiction soon. 2020 was a very strange year for me because beyond the pandemic, I also finished my Ph.D and relocated to a new country. Unfortunately I was not very persistent on my reading goals throughout the year, but I read some really interesting titles. Below you can find five of my favourite books for 2020 along with some brief comments. Enjoy! 😁

Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind.

-Epictetus

Beamtimes and Lifetimes by Sharon Traweek

In this book Sharon Traweek presents a cultural anthropology study in the field of particle physics. She interacted with physicists from many facilities around the world, such as SLAC in the USA and KEK in Japan. This title really stood out because I could relate to almost everything I was reading. The chapter I enjoyed reading the most was the one about the transition of a student to a full fledged member of the community, during which I was recollecting memories from my own experience and got some indirect advice about my time as a postdoc. Another interesting aspect of her work was the comparison between the American and Japanese communities, which I could also confirm from my interaction with scientists from different cultures. Particle and nuclear physics have many similarities, as I noticed while reading this book; one of them is the under representation of women and ethnic minorities in the higher positions of the field (e.g faculty, team leaders, directors etc). Even though the book was first published back in 1988, the number of female scientists in theoretical high energy physics is extremely low compared to its experimental counterpart (which is also very low). I would recommend this book to all my colleagues and also anyone that would like to know how our communities work.

What is this thing called Science by Alan Chalmers

I found out this book from a list of Philosophy of Science books by Massimo Pigliucci. Even though I study and practice science for around a decade, I never had the opportunity to learn about the philosophy of it. Questions like “What makes a good theory?” or “What is real?” are usually in the margin of science university classes, unless you are taking a specialized course. Sometimes spending time in the philosophy of science can be ridiculed from other scientists, remember the famous quote by Feynman: “philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”, which I couldn’t disagree more (see also this article). In this book Alan Chalmers takes us into a journey to the different philosophers/ies of science, from Popper to Kuhn and Lacatos exploring the evolution of ideas concerning science from deduction and falsificationism to paradigms and scientific programs. It is a great book for everyone who wants to get an overview of the major developments of this field, written in a very clear and engaging way. Definitely recommended to students (undergraduate and graduate).

The stranger in the woods by Michael Finkel

Here we have the first non-scientific book of the list, which I read in almost one sitting. I first learnt about the protagonist of the book, Christopher Knight, who lived as a hermit in a forest of Maine for 27 years, from a BBC article. Knight was stealing food and resources from local cabins to sustain his ascetic lifestyle and he has a soft spot for sweets and fatty food, which helped him survive the long and cold winters. One of the most memorable bits from the book is when the hermit tells the author that he did not got sick during the time he was in the forest, even though when the temperature was way below freezing in the winter, because “viruses and microbes need people” (hello 2020 pandemic). Finkel has done a very deep research on Knight, he was the only person to interview him, and the book has a very natural flow that makes you to keep reading. It is definitely a book that makes you ponder about society, human relationships and the meaning of life. You can also watch this short documentary about the hermit.

Range by David Epstein

In “Range” Epstein makes the compelling case that even though we leave in a hyper-specialized world, the people that succeed are those that have a wide variety of skills/experiences. I really enjoyed the story about Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, portrayed as the two opposites of specialization in the world of sports. On the one hand, Woods started playing golf as soon as he could hold a club and managed to become an expert after a lot of practice (and of course talent).On the other hand, Federer tried many different sports as a kid and a teenager that eventually gave him an advantage over his specialized opponents in tennis in the long run. Nuclear astrophysics, the field I am working on, is a melting pot where nuclear physics, astrophysics, geology, chemistry and computer science are blended to tackle the question of the origin of the elements. I love the fact that I can interact with scientists that are experts in different aspects of the field and I try to get a holistic view of these big questions. This book in a way pushed me to pursue the career path I am following right now. Highly recommended to people that start their career.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Ed Snowden does not need any introduction (I think). In case you don’t know him, he is a former CIA/NSA agent that turned whistle-blower after he discovered the U.S. intelligence’s mass surveillance program. This book is his autobiography that was published this year. Snowden starts from the very beginning, when he started getting involved with computers as a kid, and ends up in his life in Russia. The book is very well written and it presents the whole thought process and feelings of this person that led him to disclose highly classified information to the public. I enjoyed the part of the book where he talks about the early days of the internet, because it reminded me my own first encounter with this world as a kid. It also made me think about the evolution of the world wide web from a transferring information service between scientists, to what it is today in just a few decades. Another interesting topic related to this book is surveillance capitalism, a term given by Shoshana Zuboff, an economic system where capitalists profit from the commodification of personal data. Citizenfour by Laura Poitras is portraying Snowden and the mass surveillance program and is a must-watch documentary.