Where I Didn't Like It at All

Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya by Dick Teresi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me over a year to finish. Sometimes a page a week.

I swear, the central conceit of the book--"The ancient roots of modern science"--is right up my alley. I love this stuff. And there were some excellent chapters in the book. The part on science and math was great.

But there were some long, dull sections that have almost no point. Super well researched, full of awesome detail, but mostly sound and fury. The chapters on cosmology and physics seem so pointless I almost got mad at the book. Okay, I did get mad. The author connects early scientific thought from different cultures to modern concepts in physics, but he does it in about the same way that you can connect children playing "Red Rover" to black holes or evaporation or something. "Many ancient cultures had inklings of quantum theory," he writes. "Where did this come from?" I dunno--ancient astronauts? (Eye roll.) The combination of granular detail and incredibly suspect correlations was frustrating and off-putting. If myths from Oceania suggest a Big Bang origin of the universe and Sumerian tradition suggests a plasma universe, what are we to conclude but that the author is messing with us because it's kinda nonsense?

It's a shame, because so much of the book was interesting and grounded in history and reality. The ancient Chinese inventions like paper and gunpowder and amazing devices for measuring earthquakes and such were very exciting and worth learning about. That was good. My opinion? (Why stop now?) A book 1/2 or maybe 2/3 as long could have been great.

I learned some things, but I didn't enjoy reading the book. Let's call it even.

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