Book review: The upright thinkers: the human journey from living in trees to understanding the cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos is an accessible grand history of science and many of its most crucial figures, enlivened by personal anecdotes and insights by physicist Leonard Mlodinow. Mlodinow evocatively demonstrates how scientific developments are not solely the product of isolated genius, but are dependent upon the convergence of systems, technologies and happenstance. Although he suggests that a more critical reflection on the parameters of ‘science’ could have been offered, Jia Hui Lee argues that The Upright Thinkers is a witty and thought-provoking account of the history of scientific discovery.