50 Energy Books

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Main Points: Back 70,000 years ago, our ancestors homo sapiens  who were living in East-Africa were unimportant animals. Their impact on the ecological system was irrelevant. But if you look at the world today we dominate this planet. Main question: how exactly did we go from there to here?  Main answer: We are the only animal that managed to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees: can cooperate in large numbers, but are not flexible. The bees are not going to reinvent their social system and execute the queen bee and establish a communist dictatorship of worker bees if the community faces difficulty.  Chimpanzees: are flexible, but cannot cooperate in large numbers. A bunch of chimpanzees in the train station would be absolute chaos. Put 1,000 humans vs. 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans would win because they can work together, but the chimpanzees cannot do so. What enables humans to cooperate flexibly

Six Easy Pieces/ Six Not-So-Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman Main Points: Richard Feynman was a professor at Caltech who taught freshman physics (1961-1963). Parts of his famous Lectures on Physics are in these two books. He won the 1965 Nobel Prize for work on quantum electrodynamics (QED). We can imagine a freely moving electron not just traveling in straight line from A to B but taking many wiggly routes. So when an electron hits a target screen, many paths need to be integrated- Feynman's "path-integral" method. The "Feynman diagrams" helped calculate the probability of subatomic reactions. All of the  famous Feynman Lectures  can be found online- courtesy of the California Institute of Technology! Feynman was adamantly opposed to authority and blind reverence to those who philosophize. To get a feel for his humorous and intellectual lecturing style you need to watch his  video lecture on entropy . "There is no difference between past

The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia by Lutz Kleveman Main Points: Oil/natural gas production in the Middle East and Central Asia is unresolved due to political tensions and the power struggle between the United States and Russia. Russia- would like oil from the Caspian Sea to be diverted north to their borders or to the Black Sea at their port at Novorossisk.  Iran- would like oil to be transported to the southern port and enter the Strait of Hormuz, while they receive oil in the north where their population is concentrated. United States- would like to have oil transported west from Baku (Azerbaijan) to Poti (Chechnya/Georgia) to Ceyhan (Turkey). So that they can ultimately be accessed at the Mediterranean Sea. The Caspian Sea: Is it a sea or is it a lake? Why does it matter? Five Littoral States: Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan have not come to an agreement on the territorial division of the Caspian Sea. Lake: "If the Caspian