Summer for the Gods (Edward J. Larson, 2000 (with 2020 Afterword)

Book club selection courtesy Zach.  Session held June 7, 2026 at Zach's place, our first in-person meeting since February 2020. Useful book. 

Focus is on the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. Good rundown of the trial, lead-in, follow-up. Kind of odd - the town seeks out the trial for publicity/civic growth.  Celebrities on both sides who tend to make it about themselves or their pet beliefs.

William Jennings Bryan is old; I associate him moreso with 19th century presidential runs and the "cross of gold" speech.

I think author could have condensed this! Parts felt repetitious. 

Interesting, timely (evergreen, really) things to think about. 

Things that struck me:

* What about creation itself? Assume evolution is basically correct (as I do) - that doesn’t take us back to the very beginning. So how did it all start?? Who set off the Big Bang (or whatever)? Is this purely scientific? If not, then what? Seems relevant to a book devoted to creationism, but not mentioned.

* Fundamentalists picked on for as long as I can remember; an easy target and certainly some odd beliefs. But beliefs of other groups can feel the same way - taken on faith or tribal loyalty, not science. Harder to see when it's your own tribe.  

    * 2020 quote from CDC honcho showing up on sixth anniversary of Floyd fiasco - “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”  

    * NPR tweet: “Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. ‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,’ they wrote.”

Other recent/current beliefs. IQ and SAT are racist and not predictive. No differences in traits among groups. Everyone would perform the same if given the same opportunity. A man can be a woman if he says he really wants to be. Etc. 

* Who decides what is taught? Big topic in the book. For the mainstream government school, majoritarianism seems the right approach. But what if you are a progressive in a fundamentalist district and this leads to your child being taught creationism? Anti-vax? What if you don’t subscribe to progressive beliefs and your school is teaching that there is >2 genders, that a man can turn into a woman? What if the school is teaching that 1619 Project is actual history?  Apologizing for white privilege? Climate doomerism? 

    * There never can be a great answer - somebody has to decide curriculum and some others will be unhappy. 

    * Plato and the guardians. 

    * Best available protection seems to be that nobody should be trapped - vouchers. Yes there will be fraud and ridiculousness - but it cannot be worse in aggregate than what the government schools are delivering. Let the parents decide.

* In government schools - the teacher's words are not a freedom of speech issue. Somebody decides curriculum, and the teacher teaches.

This book mostly written from perspective that fundamentalists are the problem.  How to explain the persistence if not growth of fundamentalism? 

Try abortion (mentioned late in the book), is science enough to explain commencement of a person's life? 

Afterword told me this book was written years ago. Would be very much off track if written now. 

The Perfectionists (Simon Winchester, 2018)

I probably didn't understand a lot of this, but the book had a lot of ideas about the advance of technology that were fascinating.

The idea in the early part of the book of inventing machine tools, ie a machine to make perfect machines. John Wilkinson. 1776. A machine to make precise cannons.  Interchangeable parts. 

John Harrison clock discussed (for longitude) - but not in this category (of a machine to make machines). 

Page 71, the pulley blocks and the factory to build them, resonates with the Revolutionary War book (Rick Atkinson's) discussing the British Navy and its requirements. 

Unhappy, displaced workers, still happening to this day. These were skilled folks and well paid, caught up in technological change.

Military needs and opportunities a driver of technology, as so often throughout history (two examples above).  US manufacturers of guns in 19th century - could repair a gun on the fly with an interchangeable part.

Recency of these advances. The world lived without them for millennia.  Not now.

Chapter on cars was less interesting to me (contrasting Rolls Royce and Ford). Rolls-Royce with much handcrafted work, Ford becomes automated. Measuring tools make huge jumps.

The airplane chapter is pretty terrifying - a lot can go wrong, with serious consequences even if just a little big wrong.

Hubble - fixing the lens. 

One of the final chapters addressed my old client - ASM Lithography - taking tolerances and scale to the literally unbelievable. ASM International with a brief, if inaccurate, mention.

Kind of disjointed but very interesting. 

Focus - The ASML Way - Inside the Power Struggle over the Most Complex Machine on Earth (Marc Hijink, 2023)

 (337 pages)

ASML today is a world-famous company.  Its core product is photolithography machines, used to print intricate patterns on silicon wafers, a key step in chip manufacturing. ASML is the sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, enabling the production of smaller, faster, and more powerful microchips.  Largest tech company in Europe.

Their machines are critical to production of pretty much every single advanced chip - for AI or whatnot (Invidia and the like). I don't understand all this so well, I do see that the price of newest machine is nearly $400 million per unit.

I'm deeply interested in the company because I was lead lawyer for ASML's US operations (based in Phoenix) from 1991 - 1996 (working with the senior partner who had initiated the relationship).  It was fascinating work at the time.  The newly-released (1991) PAS 5500 wafer stepper cost an astounding $1 million per unit.  We were doing purchase agreements with Micron and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).  And a new customer - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC).  It was interesting to read that many 5500s continue in operation to this day.  I'm wondering about the service contracts we wrote for those machines in the 1990s!  ASML's big competitor was Nikon.  Karl Zeiss lenses were a big selling point, that was a new relationship for ASML when I was involved.

My then-law firm had initiated the relationship with ASML in approximately 1984. ASML was a pure Dutch start-up funded by Philips (big Dutch electronics company), but didn't fit well with Philips.  Tech entrepreneur Arthur del Prado - founder and CEO of Dutch corporation Advanced Semiconductor Materials International (ASMI) - talked Philips into a 50-50 joint venture with ASMI.  My then-law firm already represented ASMI in the US, so took over the joint venture (soon named ASML).  

Arthur del Prado is a guy I spent quite a bit of time with, both in the Netherlands and in the US.  An entrepreneur with a vision for ASMI of developing wafer processing machines that would cover every step of the manufacturing process (from the "front end" - high science devices that mostly etched the chips atop the silicon wafers - to the "back end" - incrementally less sophisticated devices that cut the wafers into chips and then packaged them and attached lead "wires").  ASML would have filled a key gap in the ASMI front-end product line. But ASMI had too ambitious of a goal, and was running out of money trying to take on too many production segments - so it reluctantly cashed out its interest in ASML in 1988 (selling back to Philips).  A decade later, ASML alone - concentrating on a single key wafer processing machine - was worth more than all of ASMI put together. (ASML considered changing its name - it didn't like the "ASM" portion of the name once the ASMI relationship had ended - but finally decided that the confusion and hassle wasn't worth it.) (ASMI did have some product hits, including a wafer stepper that processed every single Pentium chip manufactured by Intel; we created two limited partnerships to partially finance development of this stepper.)

Even though ASMI no longer had any ownership interest in ASML, we in Phoenix were able to continue representing both companies. Per above, 35-year old me took over the relationship in 1991 with both ASMI and ASML.

The book discusses ASML hiring Peter Wennink as CFO in 1997, and how he became effectively co-CEO, just hitting retirement now.  Wennink was a Deloitte partner and I got to know him in that capacity. Philips listed ASML shares on Nasdaq starting in 1995.  I was looking to leave my law firm, and Wennink asked if I was interested in taking a general counsel role with ASML (he liked my securities law experience in addition to general familiarity with the company). I didn't want to take on the commitment - which would have involved lots of travel to the Netherlands - and I'm not sure they even wanted someone like me - after we ended the discussion, they hired a more junior person for US operations and he has worked out great. (It also wasn't clear to me how things would work with the corporate center of gravity still in the Netherlands.) Instead of ASML I ended up moving to Employee Solutions as GC/SVP (we loved titles!); sadly, it went bankrupt in ~ 2003 (I left ESI in January 2000).)

The book also discusses the hiring of Doug Dunn as ASML CEO at the same time - I got to know him, liked him, he didn't last nearly as long as Wennink.

The book goes on to describe ASML's ascension to world-class status - that happened long after I no longer worked with the company.  The discussion of TSMC and ASML in Arizona in recent years is of course very interesting (CHIPS Act as part of the story).  Also the political issues have gotten quite hot, with the US in particular interested in preventing China from getting its hands on ASML's technology. This was happening during both the Trump and Biden administrations, probably still is. 

A good read.  ASML's product is magic, unbelievable stuff.

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (Tom Shachtman, 1999)

(240 pages)

Quick read; much of the technical stuff was out of my zone and I hurried through it; the overall ideas (what is cold? how is it "attacked" and then utilized?) were rather amazing.

Is it absence of heat? Something else?  How to study this?  For millennia it's been easy to create heat and "see what happens" - not so with cold. Philosophers and in turn what became known as "scientists" take various paths.

Even inventing accurate thermometers, figuring out measurements. Seeking to liquify pretty much every gas; some present incredible challenges.  Pushing toward absolute zero.  As with so many breakthroughs, there's more than one person chasing the idea, disputes over discoveries, etc.

Our friend Faraday is influential ("Age of Wonder").  Talented guy!

The parts about harvesting ice, learning to pack it and ship it to tropical locations, figuring out how to convince customers that they needed or wanted the product - this part is interesting and easily relatable.  We have photographs from St. Joe in early 20th century of folks harvesting ice from the Des Moines River northeast of town.  Grandparents had a literal icebox (prior to electricity).

Technology changed so much about food production and distribution - made things possible - in the US, this overlapped with opening up the West.  Air conditioning's effect on settlement patterns.

I had vaguely heard about superconductivity (at extreme low temperatures); good discussion about how this enable computer/tech development.  This was written in 1999 so it would be interesting to know about further developments here.  Except I wouldn't understand it very well.  

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Michael Pollan, 2018)

Book club selection (via Rose; session held (via Zoom) March 13, 2022).

Another book I wouldn't consider picking up - but this one provoked at least as many interesting ideas per page as compared to any other book club selection.  I liked it.

Also liked a prior Pollan book - "The Botany of Desire"- some overlapping concepts, but not many.

My notes are below - lots to think about.

_____________________

Does mention the botany of desire thesis - perhaps mushrooms learned how to benefit from manipulating humans - seems unlikely.  When author takes the azzies (found near Columbia mouth - the three parks we visited) - this is what he thinks of - communicating with plants (timing of the experience, and conceiving the book?)  (Wife has a painterly experience more specific to her profession.)  End of ch 2 . . . Seems to be the same as my ruminations below about a mere chemical reaction, influenced by one's personal history,

middle aged persons recommended to try (not so much young folks) - ?  maybe more prone to seek/find incremental meaning if not busy enough, not connected enough, "searching" for whatever reason?  Feeling the clock is running out, maybe the job wasn't enough or the family experience wasn't everything one hoped for??

Seems telling that expectations matter so much to the experience that occurs

James's definition of "mystical" - they do try to put some words around it so that it is possible to say the experience is "mystical" - but necessarily vague . . . if religions try to do this, immediate skepticism

Darwin/evolution - what kind of world where one can tap into the main consciousness only if found the right set of chemicals? ["stoned ape" discussion not closely tied to this - hominids finding mushrooms unleashing their brains to put together language - huh?].  That makes no sense to me.

Seems unsurprising that we can stumble upon chemicals that act upon the brain in a fairly consistent way . . . yielding a different experience than available in the absence of those chemicals, but colored by expectations, setting, prior experiences.  Not sure how significant it is.

Except there would be value for folks that are troubled by whatever - without proving anything about consciousness outside the brain - if the experience consistently reinforces the basic values:  the road map thing about trusting, open, being (whatever the fourth item) - "love is everything" - things that might seem prosaic but somehow clarified in this condition?

everyone is "searching" to some extent . . . where does this take us?

I already don't feel up to the task of fully absorbing music, literature, religion - much of this is pretty elevating - not sure why I would want an "artificial" (word chosen intentionally) prop in this enjoyment.

look for:  how this might connect to Eastern spiritualism; Christian mystics; Native American experiences.  Folks get there without drugs . . . 

References to Goethe, Joseph Banks - broader views than modern specialists

1960s - descriptions of LA practitioners making $$ off free samples from Sandoz; Cary Grant's sad story

Some guy named Hubbard credited with spreading around Silicon Valley . . . engineer willingness seems like MLB players looking at steroids.

Leary, Ginsberg - boring to me then and now.  So much blather about change the world, expand consciousness, "squares" refusing to partake.

I emphasize curiosity . . . am I uncurious about this?  Perhaps . . . moreso a feeling that this would be of value, something like religion, to persons who feel something is missing in their lives.  Or looking for something to do.  Or they just enjoy it - there's a lot of stuff people enjoy that I don't understand or desire for myself. Pretty strong reaction that I need to convince myself this isn't useful, at least for me.  why?

Chapter trying to define mysticism - useful - brain is chemical-driven, how much does it matter where the chemicals are sourced?  "Quieting the ego" - less aware of oneself.  Goes on to discuss non-added-chemical approaches that seem to do the trick.  

Discusses how the "trick" as to efficacy might be shutting down brain's default mode . . . the sector where the brain does work when not required to deal with a task.  Might relate to dreaming.  "Default mode" sector identified in early 2000s so not clear.

But might align with evolutionary stuff in Africa book . . . brain development had upside but also consumed so much energy . . . a brain system utilizing shortcuts makes a lot of sense.

Book continues with lots of discussion of the "default mode" issues, how that can start to become a negative if the mind gets "stuck" in defined tracks - addictions, depression (focus on certain harmful issues), etc.  Psychedelics as possibly helping break the cycle.

Interesting discussion comparing children's minds to adults on psychedelics - when very young, much more open to trying out-of-the-box solutions.

Maybe a world of intense specialization makes many of us narrower in some way, makes "breaking out" more important than in less specialized times.

Regaining the sense of awe or wonder (thinking of those Romantic-era scientists).

The Age of Wonder (Richard Holmes, 2008)

(484 pages)

Book club selection (via me; session held (via Zoom) January 30, 2022).

I had read this in 2010, my summary from back then is here.  I think I liked it better this second time around.

Notes used for book club remarks:

Age of Enrichment - starts c. 1800 - how this fit in.  Industrial Revolution and trade preceded . . . knowledge, efficiency, productivity - why we are wealthy today.

General approach - lots of science/technology - this alone made the book worthwhile for me - some of the details about how the pioneers functioned, biographical touches

The difference from similar books:  made far more interesting by linking these developments to how it felt, how it affected thinking about the universe, religion, man's place, etc., biographies

Banks - brought the exotic to life - a different lifestyle - seeing new worlds, new value systems.  Praised by Linnaeus!  Then his long role at Royal Society.

Herschel - size of the universe; likelihood of other galaxies.  Finding Uranus. His sister.  Geography suited to celebrity visitors - fixed location, near London etc.

Ballomania - thinking of today's space entrepreneurs - private wealth funding.  Immediate recognition of military utility.  

Mungo Park. The "unknownness" of Africa.  Imperial considerations.

Davy - Lengthy story but perhaps the most interesting.  The notion that chemistry could explain nearly everything, including workings of the brain and replacement of the soul. That we can invent safety lamps etc to deal with most any problem.  Then discovering how complicated it all is. Important as we consider events of 19th and early 20th century, their optimism was not entirely irrational. Incredible level of interaction with famous poets and others. Defining what “science“ would be going forward, the idea of hope (similar to poetry), looking forward to better things.

Did the Romantic poets and artists inspire the scientists (using the newly-coined term), or vice versa?  Strong synergies, I thought this part was really interesting.

Throughout the book, not this chapter alone, the idea that we knew so little circa 1800s.

When folks look back in say 2222 - how will we look circa 2022?

The ongoing tension with France, the way Bonaparte dominated British thinking. Children were threatened with Boney, not a bogeyman!

Scientists as polymaths . . . Goethe (Sorrows of Young Werther) and study of light.

Frankenstein chapter - this was probably the most interesting - another example of developing a new way of understanding key processes - thinking of Kalinithi and looking at brain lobes.  Vitalism.  Studying the cranium, classifying.  Things we haven't made much progress understanding.

Fear of science destroying wonder - not new.