A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen TESCREAL types be just plain wrong about science many times over the years. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality botches Punnett squares and pretty much everything more advanced than that. LessWrong demonstrably has no filter against old-school math crankery. The (ahem) leading light of “effective accelerationism” just plays Mad Libs with physics words. Yudkowsky’s declarations about organic chemistry boggle the educated mind. They even manage to be weird about theoretical computer science — what we might call the “lambda calculus is super-Turing!” school of TESCREAL.
Sometimes, the difference between a TESCREAL understanding of science and a legitimate one comes from having studied the subject in a formal way. But not every aspiring autodidact with an interest in molecular biology or the theoretical limits of computation is a lost cause!
So, then: What books come down upon the superficial TESCREAL version of cool things like a ton of scientific bricks? What are the texts that one withdraws from an inside coat pocket and slides across the table, saying “This here is the good shit”?
Reading a bit about the history of science is good too. For some reason TESCREAL types are like the Whig historians, science is a constant march towards this, the best of all possible worlds.
I read a small monograph years ago about the history of plate tectonics, and it was clear to me that far from being deluded Bible-huggers, the people who preceded modern ideas of how continents form were grappling with the evidence as they saw it.
Also this overview of “dying sun” SF points out that in the late 19th/early 20th century, what powered the Sun was entirely unknown! https://www.typebarmagazine.com/2024/03/24/science-fiction-and-the-death-of-the-sun/ [1]
Considering that much TESCREAL discourse is less about science and more about science fiction, maybe the focus should be on pointing out the many ways where SF tech goes wrong…
[1] as an aside, I got that link from HN, and the discussions are typically shallow, like most HN discussions about SF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911155
Super late response (sorry!), but yeah, history of science is great stuff. And your point about TESCREALS engaging with science fiction over science is entirely spot-on. (Which was me as a teenager. There but for the grace of god go I…)
Btw, if you want to read a FANTASTIC book dealing with people grappling with plate tectonics, John McPhee’s Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Ancient World spans literal decades of interviews with geologists, and you get to start with geologists being deeply skeptical of this newfangled plate tectonics (not dismissive, but not convinced of the breadth of its explanatory power), and work to it being fully accepted science over the course of the book.
I have listened to the entirety of John McPhee’s geological books as audiobooks, which is more entertaining than it sounds.
I think the concept of geological Deep Time is very humbling, and it kind of grounds the human condition in a weird way.
John McPhee’s so goddamn good, one of the best nonfiction writers out there. The absolute master of nonfiction narrative structure, imho.
And yeah, Deep Time is… a hell of a trip.
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Fuck yeah The Control of Nature is great.
Basin and Range is the first book in the geology series.
Another fav of min is “Waiting for a Ship”, about the merchant marine.