I’ve been nibbling on a bunch of books for the past week. They are, in no particular order:

Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt deals with the scientific side of Napoleon’s famous imperialistic debacle — the 1798 invasion of Egypt. We tend to think of historical knowledge as continuous in time. If we know something now, everyone in the past must have known it. This book shatters that illusion. Ancient Egypt had been lost to humanity for centuries. The savants in the expedition started the recovery of this lost civilization. One young scientist that participated in the expedition was Joseph Fourier. I have read many biographical sketches of Fourier but I do not recall ever reading that he was part of Napoleon’s Egypt “expedition”. One of the categories in this blog, “Fourier analysis”, is named after him. We can thank Fourier for many things but one that comes immediately to mind is the MP3 music file standard.

The World Without Us has been getting a lot of press. It clearly deserves it. The premise — what would happen to the world if we just disappeared overnight — forms a great hook on which to hang all sorts of scientific observations about biology, the durability of materials, the relentless march of entropy, human evolution, and much more. I highly recommend this book.