Customer Reviews

The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years

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This book is a fascinating collection of ideas from some of the best scientific thinkers alive today. The range of inventions is extreme. Cliff Pickover, author of "Surfing Through Hyperspace," selected paper as the most important invention. Physics professor Freeman Dyson, author of "The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet" selected "hay" as the most important invention. There are many surprises in this book and much to be learned.

This compilation offers no useful insights about invention. The editor solicited comments from the contributors by e-mail. They evidently replied quickly, and made no serious attempt to consider the effect of technology on civilization, nor the effect of their own words on readers.

Many of the famous contributors make weak arguments based on blatantly false readings of history and astounding ignorance of science.

It is difficult to accept, for example, that the Thermos Bottle is one of the greatest accomplishments of this era. One sage justifies this choice on the basis of an old joke; to ice the cake, a nobel-prize-winning physicist simply concurs with, essentially, "me too".

The editor demanded no thoughtfulness of his correspondents, and mostly received none.

I purchased this volume hoping to learn the origins of inventions, inventors, and inventiveness. Luckily, hope is eternal.

The problem with this book is that it isn't a book at all. It is a vanity publication of The Edge Foundation. Actually, it is a series of emails that the Foundation's members sent in response to one of their "great questions" series. These examples were chosen by John Brockman, a literary agent who coincidentally represents many of these same people.

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A quick sampling: Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and corporate strategist; John Maddox, physicist and editor emeritus of Nature magazine; Marvin Minsky, mathematician and founder of MIT's AI Lab; John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American; Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate and director emeritus of Fermi Nation Accelerator Laboratory; and Michael Nesmith, business person.

This impressive list is weighted toward the scientific and medical arts with a goodly sampling of science journalists. Bet you didn't know that Michael Nesmith, past member of the Monkeys singing group, was a high status "intellect", did you? He's a member. There's also some guy named Jeff Bezos in it.....

In the year 2000, there was an over abundant inventory of TV shows, magazine articles and coffee shop conversations devoted to nominating the greatest events and innovations of the last century. For the bold, the debate was expanded to the last two thousand years. Suggestions varied since what constitutes greatness depends on view point. Many took up the challenge which generated this volume. It demonstrates once again that there's nothing like a good argument with famous names to sell books.

The book is divided into comments (and BIOS) on "How We Live . . . ", observations on the nominated innovation's impact on the physical world, the printing press, classical music and "How We Think . . .", innovations that changed our perception of the universe, self government, calculus. While all your favorites are there, the printing press, the contraceptive pill, the atomic bomb, other more esoteric and conceptual are also included. For example "free will" is listed as a profound conceptual innovation. However, the recommender closes his nomination by saying that it is actually a "glorious, absolutely necessary illusion."

Arguments on why the nominations are so important are brief and facile in most cases and without much richness of description. One Princeton professor of physics did nominate hay (as in, "bales of...") and connected it, via the horse, to the rise of urban civilization and the great cities. An interesting concept if quite a historical leap. Remember, these were emails to the editors, not thoughtful discussions.

There is an afterword is by the Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond. It is the only section of the book that appears truly thoughtful. Which, of course, is classic Diamond. Unless you need a tiny coffee table book to impress your friends or your guest bathroom needs its magazines replaced, look elsewhere your millennium insight...

The book is basically just a summary of the exchanges on the Edge mailing list. All the writers have spent some time in their life, thinking about some aspect of humanity in great detail, and all of them have at least published two books.

It made me think a lot about life, and many entries in the book are very unobvious. Of course, the average reader will probably not agree with many of the writers' thoughts or opinions. Nevertheless, I would recommend anyone to quickly browse the book to see what are the ideas that have influenced humanity so immensely in the last 2k years.

I wouldn't rate this book too high just as others have noted. What I found interesting was the list of books written by the contributors. This list looks interesting and I will follow up on some of them. I am sure that their writings will be more informed than their opinions on the greatest inventions.

I think that some have been a little harsh as to the merits of this book -- there are those scientists that dashed off hurried responses to the question, but there are just as many others who took the time to write thoughtful essays. Just having the chance to see how scientists and other creative people put their thoughts together makes the book worthwhile reading -- think of it as brain food for your mind. The responses ranged from the more obvious answers like the birth control pill, to more out there ones like the eraser and free will. If nothing else, these essays are written in digestible pieces and provide a good overview of major discoveries since man has inhabited the earth. Most will find it provoking. I'm fairly certain the thermos quote was tongue in cheek.

This is a genuinely great book because it makes readers think;we are so used to the world around us, that it is almost impossible tothink of what our life would be like without such everyday items as sliced bread.

No, somehow "sliced bread" didn't make it into this list. Instead, the first half of the book talks about material inventions such as the printing press, electric motors, telecommunications, the plow, the static electricity machine, the caravel, hay, clocks, the atomic bomb and the Internet. The second half deals with ideas such as marketing, calculus, the scientific method, secularism, the scientific method, the clock, economic man and other ideas that change the way we think.

It's done with humor on occasion, as in the nomination of the thermos bottle which ". . . keeps cold things cold and hot things hot. But, how does it know?" In each case, the relevant invention is briefly described and its material and intellectual impact is explained. One of the greatest American inventions of all times is overlooked, the invention of "the list" -- such as the book itself. Americans love to make lists such as "the greatest inventions of the past 2,000 years" and the "best 100 books of the century" and the "best home run hitter in baseball." You name it, there's an American list for it.

That's part of the fun of the book. Other readers will undoubtedly come up with their own omissions -- this book was compiled by nonimations from about 100 prominent scientists and thinkers. In itself, that suggests another distinctly American invention -- the one-upmanship of the expert by the average person. It's part of the social fabric of the United States; when Jeff Bezos came up with a list of 20 possible business ventures using the Internet, his employer at the time ranked selling books at the bottom of the list. So, Bezos went out and invented Amazon dot com -- a typical American approach to the experts who says something is impossible, impractical or irrelevant.

One of the fun things to consider is that this book had its origins on the Internet, at Edge.org, and a discussion among scientists and thinkers. Yet, here it is in the form of movable type used to place ink on paper -- which, one of the contributors, is a technology that dates at least to the Minorans of 1,700 BC. That's the nature of ideas; you spend all of your time inventing something, then people use it for some entirely different purpose.

Think of poor old Thomas Edison, who invented a practical means of recording sound and then expected it would be used to record the last words of dying people, or to enable clocks to announce the time, or to teach spelling to children. Instead, to Edison's disgust, it was used to record music! Can you imagine? With a band on every corner, musicians in every bar and theatre, someone came up with the idea of using the phonograph to record music.

That's what makes this book fun, enlightening, well worth reading and quite relevant to own. It will do two things for every reader: first, it will show how our world came to be, and second, it will prompt many readers to ask, "Why didn't they include . . . ?" Brockman compiled a wonderful list, and he also left out a wonderful list. That's the beauty of America (which he overlooks), no matter how good your product, someone is always able to come up with a new and unexpected way of using it. END

have you ever read a book with facts that you know are not true? well if you havent than this is a book that might change that.