2025, A Year of Books in Review

Link to My Year in Books on Goodreads.

I read lots of books in 2025 and tracked all of my progress on Goodreads. In this blog post, I will summarize the books that I read in 2025, starting with some infographics about my reading habits, followed by a ranked ordering of all the books that I read, and concluding with some of the best quotations from these books.

Information Regarding My Reading Habits

In 2025, I read a total of 80 books from 49 unique authors. These 80 books contained a total of 31,345 pages, which suggests that my average book length was roughly 391.8 pages. For each of these 80 books, I provided a rating and wrote a review on Goodreads. I compiled the most relevant information for these 80 books in a Google spreadsheet. I subsequently analyzed my reading trends using the aforementioned spreadsheet and Python. My reading trends can be observed in the following infographics.

books/2025_Figure_01.jpg — The first of these infographics provides a histogram of my ratings for the 80 books that I read. In general, I typically gave high ratings to the books that I read. More than half of these books received a perfect rating of 5 stars. The lowest rating that I gave was 3 stars. The total number of books receiving 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 star ratings were 0 (0.0%), 0 (0.0%), 6 (7.5%), 28 (35.0%), and 46 (57.5%), respectively.

books/2025_Figure_02.jpg — The second of these infographics provides a histogram of my ratings minus the average ratings for the 80 books that I read. In general, I typically gave higher ratings than average for the books that I read (as shown by the positive median value of 0.40). More than half of these books received a rating higher than the average (63.8%). On average, I gave ratings that were 0.24 stars higher than average, but with large scatter (as shown by the standard deviation of 0.53).

books/2025_Figure_03.jpg — The third of these infographics provides line graphs for the number of pages that I read on a given day. These line graphs are provided as running averages over two timescales: 7-day running averages are shown in blue while 30-day running averages are shown in pink. Averaged over the entire year, I read roughly 92.5 pages per day. I typically read one page per minute (although this is subject to large scatter, depending on the author and genre of the book I am reading). This suggests that I spent roughly 90 minutes per day reading – roughly 6.4% of my time was spent reading in 2024!

Ranked Ordering Of All The Books That I Read

Some Of My Favorite Quotations From All These Books

“It is easy to assume that the divide between rich countries and poor countries has always existed; that it is a natural feature of the world. Indeed, the metaphor of the divide itself may lead us unwittingly to assume that there is a chasm — a fundamental discontinuity — between the rich world and the poor world, as if they were economic islands disconnected from one another. If you start from this notion, as many scholars have done, explaining the economic differences between the two is simply a matter of looking at internal characteristics… But the story is wrong. The idea of a natural divide misleads us from the start. In the year 1500, there was no appreciable difference in incomes and living standards between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, we know that people in some regions of the global South were a good deal better off than their counterparts in Europe. And yet their fortunes changed dramatically over the intervening centuries — not in spite of one another but because of one another — as Western powers roped the rest of the world into a single international economic system. When we approach it this way, the question becomes less about the traits of rich countries and poor countries — although that is, of course, part of it — and more about the relationship between them. The divide between rich countries and poor countries isn’t natural or inevitable. It has been created. What could have caused one part of the world to rise and the other to fall? How has the pattern of growth and decline been maintained for more than 500 years? Why is inequality getting worse? And why do we not know about it?… At one of the most frightening times in our history, with inequality at record extremes, demagogues rising and our planet’s climate beginning to wreak revenge on industrial civilization, we are more in need of hope than ever. It is only by understanding why the world is the way it is — by examining root causes — that we will be able to arrive at real, effective solutions and imagine our way into the future. What is certain is that if we are going to solve the great problems of global poverty and inequality, of famine and environmental collapse, the world of tomorrow will have to look very different from the world of today. The arc of history bends towards justice, Martin Luther King Jr once said. But it won’t bend on its own.”
- This quotation is from “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions” by Jason Hickel (Pages 2-4).
“If scientists are correct in saying that our model of exponential GDP growth lies at the very core of our crisis, then that’s where we need to start when it comes to imagining an alternative future. One crucial first step would be to get rid of GDP as a measure of economic progress and well-being and replace it with something different. There are many alternative measures of success on offer. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), for example, starts with GDP but then adds positive factors such as household and volunteer work, subtracts negatives such as pollution, resource depletion and crime, and adjust for inequality. A number of US states, like Maryland and Vermont, have already begin to use GPI as a measure of progress, albeit secondary to GDP. Costa Rica is about to become the first country to do so, and Scotland and Sweden may soon follow. Measuring GPI gives us a completely different picture of society than GDP. If we plot global GPI and GDP together, just for comparison, we see that GPI increased together with GDP up through the mid-1970s and then leveled off — and even began to decrease — while GDP continued to rise. This illustrates how growing GDP no longer translates into a better society. The consequences of shifting to something like GPI are profound. If our governments were driven to maximize GPI, they would be incentivized to create policies that would facilitate good economic outcomes while diminishing bad ones…”
- This quotation is from “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions” by Jason Hickel (Page 294).
“Ditching the GDP measure and shareholder-value laws is a crucial first step, but it is not enough in and of itself. It might help us refocus our attention, but it doesn’t address the main underlying driver of growth, which is a little bit deeper and more difficult to see, and that is debt. Right now, one of the reasons our economies have to grow is because of debt. Debt comes with interest, and interest means that debt grows exponentially. For a country to pay down its debt over the long term, it has to grow its economy enough to match the growth of its debt. The same is true of a business. If you want to start a business, you’ll probably have to take out a loan. Then, because you have that debt, you can’t just be satisfied with earning enough to pay your employees and feed your family — you also have to turn enough profit to pay off your loan with compound interest. Regardless of whether you’re a country or a business — or even an individual — you’ll find that, without growth, debt piles up and eventually causes a financial crisis. If you don’t grow, you collapse. One way to relieve this pressure is simply to cancel some of the debt… But even debt cancellation would only provide a short-term fix; it wouldn’t really address the root problem, which is the fact that the global economic system runs on money that is itself debt. When you walk into a bank to take out a loan, you assume that the bank is lending you money it has in its reserve — real money that it stores in a basement vault, for example, collected from other people’s deposits. But that’s not how it works. Banks are only required to hold reserves worth about 10 per cent of the money they lend out. This is known as ‘fractional reserve banking.’ In other words, banks lend out about ten times more money than they actually have. So where does that extra money come from, if it doesn’t actually exist? The banks create it out of thin air. They loan it into existence. About 90 per cent of the money that is presently circulating in our economy is created in this manner. In other words, almost every single dollar that passes through your hands represent somebody’s debt. And every dollar of debt has to be paid back with interest as with more work, more production or more extraction. The fact that our economy runs on debt-based currency is one big reason that it needs constant growth. Restricting the fractional reserve banking system would go a long way to diminishing the amount of debt sloshing around in our economies, and therefore to diminishing the pressure for growth. One easy way to do this would be to require banks to keep a bigger fraction of reserves behind the loans they make. But there’s an even more interesting approach we might try: we could abolish debt-based currency altogether. Instead of letting commercial banks create our money, we could have the state create it — free of debt — and then spend it into the economy instead of lending it into the economy. The responsibility for money creation could be placed with an independent agency that is democratic, accountable and transparent. Banks would still be able to lend money, of course, but they would have to back it with 100 per cent reserves, dollar for dollar…”
- This quotation is from “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions” by Jason Hickel (Pages 296-297).
“We live in an abundant planet and have an economy that produces more than enough for all of us. If we can find ways to share what we already have more fairly, we don’t need to plunder the Earth for more. Equity is the key to a more ecological economy.”
- This quotation is from “The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions” by Jason Hickel (Page 300).
“Have you heard of Amaterasu? It’s a Japanese solar probe… According to their data, the sun’s output is decreasing… It’s not the eleven-year cycle. It’s something else. JAXA accounted for the cycle. There’s still a downward trend. They say the sun is 0.01 percent less bright than it should be… They’re saying that value is increasing. And the rate of the increase is increasing. It’s some sort of exponential loss that they caught very, very early thanks to their probe’s incredible sensitive instruments… JAXA took a good long look at the Petrova line and they say it’s getting brighter at the same rate that the sun is getting dimmer. Somehow or another, whatever it is, the Petrova line is stealing energy from the sun… The sun’s output will drop a full percent over the next nine years. In twenty years that figure will be five percent. This is bad. It’s really bad… The sun’s dying…”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Pages 24-25).
“Most notably, a group in Perth sacrificed one of their Astrophage and did a detailed analysis on all the organelles inside. They found DNA and mitochondria. In any other situation, this would have been the most important discovery of the century. Alien life — indisputably alien — had DNA and mitochondria! And… Grumble… A bunch of water… Point is: The inside of an Astrophage wasn’t much different from the inside of any single-celled organism you’d find on Earth. It used ATP, RNA transcription, and a whole host of other extremely familiar things. Some researchers speculated that it originated on Earth. Others postulated this specific set of molecules was the only way for life to occur and Astrophage evolved it independently. And a smaller, vocal faction suggested life might not have evolved on Earth at all, and that Astrophage and terrestrial life have a common ancestor.”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Page 75).
“Mass conversion. As the great Albert Einstein once said: E = mc^2. There’s an absurd amount of energy in mass. A modern nuclear plant can power an entire city for a year with the energy stored in just one kilogram of Uranium. Yes. That’s it. The entire output of a nuclear reactor for a year comes from a single kilogram of mass. Astrophage can, apparently, do this in either direction. It takes heat energy and somehow turns it into mass. Then when it wants the energy back, it turns that mass back into energy — in the form of Petrova-frequency light. And it uses that to propel itself along in space. So not only is it a perfect energy-storage medium, it’s a perfect spaceship engine. Evolution can be insanely effective when you leave it alone for a few billion years.”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Pages 97-98).
“CERN is going to release this paper next week. This is a rough draft. But I know everyone there, so they let me see an advance copy… They figured out how Astrophage stores energy… Long story short: It’s neutrinos… It’s very counterintuitive. But there’s a large neutrino burst every time they kill an Astrophage. They even took samples to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and punctured them in the main detector pool. They got a massive number of hits. Astrophage can only contain neutrinos if it’s alive, and there’s a lot of them in there… Microbiologists have confirmed Astrophage has a lot of free hydrogen ions — raw protons with no electron — zipping around just inside the cell membrane… CERN is pretty sure that, through a mechanism we don’t understand, when those protons collide at a high enough velocity, their kinetic energy is converted into two neutrinos with opposite momentum vectors… Sometimes gamma rays, when they pass close to an atomic nucleus, will spontaneously become an electron and a positron. It’s called ‘pair production.’ So it’s not unheard-of. But we’ve never seen neutrinos created that way… There’s a lot of complicated stuff about neutrinos I wong get into — there are different kinds and they can even change what kind they are. But the upshot is this: They’re an extremely small particle. Their mass is something like one twenty-billionth the mass of a proton… We know Astrophage is always 96.415 degrees Celsius. Temperature is just the velocity of particles inside. So we should be able to calculate the velocity of the particles inside… We know the average velocity of the protons. And we know their mass, which means we know their kinetic energy. I know where you’re going with this and the answer is yes. It balances… Any heat energy above the critical temperature gets quickly converted into neutrinos. But if it drops below critical temperature, the protons are going too slow and neutrino production stops. End result: You can’t get it hotter than 96.415 degrees. Not for long, anyway. And if it gets too cold, the Astrophage uses stored energy to heat back up to that temperature — just like any other warm-blooded life-form… Neutrinos are what’s called Majorana particles. It means the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Basically, every time two neutrinos collide, it’s a matter-antimatter interaction. They annihilate and become photons. Two photons, actually, with the same wavelength going opposite directions. And since the wavelength of a photon is based on the energy in the photon… The mass energy of a neutrino is exactly the same as the energy found in one photon of Petrova-wavelength light. This paper is truly groundbreaking… Neutrinos routinely pass through the entire planet Earth without hitting a single atom — they’re just that small. Well, it’s more about quantum wavelengths and probabilities of collision. But suffice it to say, neutrinos are famously hard to interact with. But for some reason, Astrophage has what we call ‘super cross-sectionality.’ That’s just a fancy term meaning nothing can quantum-tunnel through it. It goes against every law of particle physics we thought we knew, but it’s been proven over and over… It absorbs all wavelengths of light — even wavelengths that should be too large to interact with it… Turns out it also collides with all matter that tries to get by, no matter how unlikely that collision would be. Anyway, as long as an Astrophage is alive, it exhibits this super cross-sectionality…”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Pages 225-228).
“Yeah, that was unscientific. There are probably a thousand things that led to them being sapient and stuff. The sleep thing is likely just one part of it. But hey, I’m a scientist. I have to come up with theories!”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Page 253).
"… Do you believe in God? I know it’s a personal question. I do. And I think He was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing, don’t you? The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe, you know?"
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Page 306).
“It’s a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There’s no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Page 409).
“Modifying an alien life-form. What could possibly go wrong?”
- This quotation is from “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (Page 412).
“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General…”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Page 7).
“Soak yourself in Jergen’s Lotion. Here comes the one-man population explosion.”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Page 37).
“And then Herbert Foster, looking drab and hunted, picked his way through the crowd. His expression was one of disapproval, of a holy man in Babylon. He was oddly stiff-necked and held his arms at his sides as he pointedly kept from brushing against anyone or from meeting any of the gazes that fell upon him. There was no question that being in the place was absolute, humiliating hell for him. I called to him, but he paid no attention. There was no communicating with him. Herbert was in a near coma of see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil. The crowd on the rear parted for him, and I expected to see Herbert go into a dark corner for a broom or a mop. But a light flashed on at the far end of the aisle the crowd made for him, and a tiny white piano sparkled there like jewelry. The bartender set a drink on the piano, and went back to his post. Herbert dusted off the piano bench with his handkerchief, and sat down gingerly. He took a cigarette from his breast pocket and lighted it. And then the cigarette started to droop slowly from his lips; and, as it dropped, Herbert hunched over the keyboard and his eyes narrowed as though he were focusing on something beautiful on a faraway horizon. Startlingly, Herbert Foster disappeared. In his place sat an excited stranger, his hands poised like claws. Suddenly he struck, and a spasm of dirty, low-down, gorgeous jazz shook the air, a hot, clanging wrath of the twenties… Nobody could do anything for Herbert. Herbert already had what he wanted. He had had it long before the inheritance or I intruded. He had the respectability his mother had hammered into him. But just as priceless as that was an income not quite big enough to go around. It left him no alternative but — in the holy names of wife, child, and home — to play piano in a dive, and breathe smoke, and drink gin, to be Firehouse Harris, his father’s son, three nights out of seven.”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Page 105).
“People keep wondering what the matter with the world is… I know what the matter is. It’s simple: most men don’t know the meaning of the word love.”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Page 207).
“The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones, and tubes? No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway — no matter how much you stuff and protect it! Who really wants one of the things? What’s so wonderful about protoplasm that we’ve got to carry so damned many pounds of it with us wherever we go? Trouble with the world isn’t too many people — it’s too many bodies… If living matter was able to evolve enough to get out of the ocean, which was really quite a pleasant place to live, it certainly ought to be able to take another step and get out of bodies, which are pure nuisances when you stop to think about them.”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Pages 257-258).
"‘Think of it this way,’ said Helmholtz. ‘Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it.’ A small cry of despair came from Jim Donnini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy. ‘How?’ said Jim. ‘Love yourself,’ said Helmholtz, ‘and make your instrument sing about it. A-one, a-two, a-three.’ Down came his baton."
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Pages 282-283).
“I don’t want to be a machine, and I don’t want to think about war… I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can’t go on this way… Good luck, my friend. Treat our Pat well. I am going to short-circuit myself out of your lives forever. You will find on the remainder of this tape a modest wedding present from your friend, EPICAC…”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Page 304).
“Lou, hon, I’m not calling you a failure. The Lord knows you’re not. You just haven’t had a chance to be anything or have anything because Gramps and the rest of his generation won’t leave and let somebody else take over…”
- This quotation is from “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Page 316).
“What’s going on right now is both really, really complicated and incredibly simple. The incredibly simple part is that the chemistry of the atmosphere is changing. Before the Industrial Revolution there were 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and now it’s around 420. And that change is all due to human activities, mostly digging up dead stuff and setting it on fire, but also changing the way we use land, cutting down forests. So the atmosphere is fundamentally different now… We’re already seeing this 1.3°C of warming make a big difference. We’re starting to see really extreme, record-shattering events. Things like heat waves that simply would not have happened had the Earth not been warmed by humans changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. It is really well understood that when you warm the whole place up, you get more extreme heat events. Something else we understand really well is that warm air holds more water vapor. And more water vapor in a warmer atmosphere means there is more to dump on us. So we’re seeing an increase in really heavy rainfall and sometimes snowfall events. We also understand where that water vapor is coming from. We know that warmer air is thirstier air and creates increased evaporation just like when you get really hot your body covers you with sweat, so that liquid can be evaporated away from your skin and cool you. The Earth is literally sweating in the heat. We are seeing increased evaporation taking more moisture away from the surface of the Earth, which is creating more severe drought. For example, the southwest of the United States and northern Mexico is having its worst drought in at least 1,200 years. And that’s not because of a massive decline in rainfall. What is driving that drought is much more evaporation of water away from the surface as a result of atmospheric warming… And on top of that, in a warmer world, we get more rain as opposed to snow, so we’re not building up the snowpack as much anymore. And that’s changing spring runoff, which a lot of water managers in the West depend on. So we’re seeing big changes to the water cycle changes in droughts and downpours and floods and soil moisture and runoff. Also, the seas are rising. That’s happening for two reasons. One is because of land ice. Ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are melting, so we get water that used to be frozen up on land going into the ocean. The other is because, as you may remember from fifth-grade science class, as things (including water) get warmer, they expand… And those warmer sea surface temperatures, that’s hurricane food — it fuels stronger hurricanes. The number of hurricanes is not necessarily changing, but we are certainly seeing more severe and more rapidly intensifying hurricanes.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Pages 18-19).
“We have put so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it weighs more than all the animals and plants on the Earth. It weighs more than everything we have ever built. It’s just incredible.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Page 26).
“The biggest uncertainty in climate projections, the wild card, is what humans will do. So if you don’t like what an article is reporting about a possible future trend, you have the ability to help change that.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Page 30).
"… As a society, we have to make a choice to produce these things, food and wood, in ways that keep the land beautiful and keep it ecologically whole. That will make things more expensive, but it’s a small part of our economy overall and it will create a landscape that people want to live in. So it’s worth it — the added benefits outweigh the costs."
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Page 54).
“We think about change in terms of this butterfly of transformative social justice. This butterfly has four winglets — butterflies cannot live with one, two, or three; they need all four. One of the winglets is ‘Resist.’ This is directly confronting oppression. That’s the blockades, the strikes, the protests, the boycotts. That’s necessary. We need to get in the face of oppression. You will not put this pipeline through my community; I will chain myself to it. Another winglet is ‘Reform.’ This has to do with policy change, getting inside of our institutions and changing the narrative; making change from the inside. This is a lot of the slow, painful bureaucratic work. And then we have the winglet that I situate myself on. That’s ‘Building.’ Building alternative institutions that try to model our higher values. The freedom schools and co-ops and land trusts and community farms and free libraries… Yes, exactly. And the final winglet is ‘Heal.’ Because there’s no way we can go through 500 years of this BS and not be completely traumatized. We need art and therapy and ritual and spirituality and collective healing. And we need every farm to sign up to be food justice certified for workers’ rights.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Page 82).
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Page 119).
“Well, this is the result of decades of billions of dollars being thrown into our media ecosystem from giant oil companies telling us that we need to be afraid of the solutions, telling us we’re going to be forced to follow new laws, that we won’t be able to drive our wonderful, cool cars. Meanwhile, the solutions are awesome. The solutions are just better. It’s borderline utopian. Energy could be free. That’s for starters. Pollution will be mostly gone. The world will be reborn. Probably the future with architecture is going to integrate the natural world. It’s more than Frank Lloyd Wright designing a house with a waterfall going through it. What we’re seeing now is a new type of design for homes, for buildings, where you have moss on the walls, because guess what? Moss works as insulation, it improves the oxygen in the room, and there’s some of it that’s bioluminescent so it can serve as a beautiful night-light. And trees that grow through buildings, buildings covered in vines and plants, common spaces with ponds. And the solar panels are getting smaller and smaller — probably what they’ll look like in maybe twenty years are little triangle-shaped gleaming gems, hitting the sun. They’re going to look beautiful… We could have roads paved, instead of with asphalt or whatever, with solar panels, which is already starting to happen. The solutions are fantastic and the solutions appeal to all of our instincts. If you’re someone who maybe leans more right-wing and you don’t trust big institutions and you want the right to make your own choloes there’s energy independence, unplugging from these giant utilities, not having to be strapped to the grid. And if you’re on the other end of this spectrum and you’re progressive and you belleve in communal life, that’s going to be part of this solution as well. We’re going to be sharing resoures more and more, we’re going to have a world with more common spaces, more parks. You’re going to be getting rid of gas stations, It’s hilarious how fantastic the solution is. And yet there’s a huge amount of propganda and misleading information that’s been put out there when it’s just a glorious new valley with beams of sunshine going through it, The solutions are as enjoyable, wonderful, and life-improving as any thing you can imagine. And necessarily as a result of that, we’re not going to work fifty, sixty hours, seventy hours a week anymore. The workday will shorten. They’re probably going to have to have universal basic income of some sort, because something like 3.5 million people are employed driving trucks around the country. That kind of stuff is going to go away. You’re probably going to have bullet trains that can long haul cargo. But yes, my headline is: The Solutions Are Awesome.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Pages 211-212).
“People around the world have been doing versions of this for hundreds of years; a lot of it builds on Indigenous practices. I didn’t invent anything here. Anybody who tells you that they invented anything, don’t believe them. Individual inspiration is a total myth. It’s about borrowing and stealing, it’s about networks, it’s about learning together. It’s an organic, collective process.”
- This quotation is from “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Page 402).
"… When we look at the stars, we are looking back in time. This is an incredible gift. We can see parts of space, parts of our universe, as they were many years ago. The further we can collect light from, the further back in time we can look. If you look at the bright star Betelgeuse, which glows in the Orion constellation, you wind time back more than six hundred years. Its reddish glow started its journey to Earth in the Middle Ages. The stars in Orion’s belt are even further away. Their light, familiar to generations of humans, has travelled at least 1,000 years to reach us. This means we have a chance of understanding the history of the universe because we can see the more distant parts of it as they were in the past, thousands or millions or billions of years ago. This ability to look back in time has existed since humans first looked at the stars but has only become a key feature of astronomy in the past century as we have looked out beyond the Milky Way. The great extent of the universe in both space and time can make modern-day astronomy seem overwhelming. Space is so immense that the numbers describing distances are at risk of becoming meaningless. Numbers with too many zeros are hard to process. To get around this, we come up with ways of making sense of the different scales of space, and we simplify things and let go of some of the details…"
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Page 14).
“We now take our final step outwards, arriving at the extraordinary viewpoint that takes in our entire observable universe, On this largest scale the universe appears as an intricate network of galaxy superclusters that together contain about 100 billion galaxies. Those galaxies are themselves huddled together throughout space in their smaller collections of clusters and galaxy groups. Each of those galaxies has around 100 billion stars, and a huge number of those stars will have their own systems of planets orbiting around them. With such numbers, it is no wonder that most astronomers suspect that life exists in some form elsewhere in the cosmos. When we refer to ‘observable’ universe we mean what we are able to see from Earth. What limits this is not how good our telescopes are, but how old the universe is. The universe as we know it has not been around for ever. If we are to be able to see some distant galaxy, that means its light has had time to travel through space to us on Earth. A galaxy that is further away, so far away that its light has not yet had time to get to us, is beyond our cosmic horizon, and beyond our reach. So how far away is this horizon? We will come around later, in chapter 4, to the idea of the birth of the universe and its age. For now we can say that astronomers have worked out that the cosmic horizon is about 50 billion light-years away from us in all directions. It is more than 14 billion light-years, the distance light could travel during what we now know to be the life-span of the universe, because space has been growing during that time. Our observable universe is therefore spherical, centred on ourselves here on Earth. This does not of course mean that we are at the middle of the universe. We are just, by definition, at the middle of the part we can see. If we now imagine putting the whole observable universe in our basketball court, our home supercluster Laniakea would be about the size of a cookie right in the centre…”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Pages 72-73).
“This discovery has shown us that we are living in a space that is growing, which has no centre and no edges. It is growing everywhere, and everything in it is gradually moving apart, except inside the galaxies and clusters of galaxies, where gravity has won out over the relatively gentle expansion. If we now imagine winding time backwards we would see space shrinking, with all the galaxies now moving towards each other. If we wind time back far enough, every galaxy would end up right next to every other one, and farther still they would be on top of each other, all occupying the same space. Here our analogies do not work, because under normal conditions on Earth an elastic can only shrink so far. In space the gaps between objects can keep shrinking almost indefinitely. What does it mean to have all the galaxies in the same place as each other? Well, this would coincide with the moment that we call the Big Bang, the first instant in the growth of our universe, our own Time Zero, or extremely close to zero. We will say more about that idea in the next chapter. For now, something we need to know is that in the first moments there were in fact no galaxies, not yet. Instead there were extremely densely packed fundamental particles: the protons and neutrons that are the building blocks of atoms, dark matter particles, the tiny neutrino particles and rays of light.”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Page 199).
“Given the idea of a Big Bang, there are some obvious questions that we cannot help but ask, about what happened as we wind time right back to zero. Was space really infinitely compressed? Did something happen before the Big Bang? Why did space start growing at all? These are among the most fundamental questions we have about our universe, and we don’t yet have answers to them. As we try to reach back to the beginning, our understanding of physics simply breaks down. We can almost get there, to within a tiny fraction of a second, but can never quite reach zero, or at least not yet.”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Page 214).
“Returning now to our place in the universe, we locate ourselves on our small planet travelling around the Sun. Our Sun is surrounded in space by its neighbouring stars, many of them encircled by their own tiny planets. Our neighbouring stars move around in the longer spiralling arm of stars that makes up part of our larger home, the Milky Way galaxy. Our Galaxy, a huge disc of stars and gas embedded in a much larger halo of invisible dark matter, is spinning gently around. We look out to our neighbouring galaxy, the majestic spiralling Andromeda, slowly moving towards us through the depths of space. Around us there are many more galaxies, scattered through space and grouped together in smaller groups or larger clusters. Inside them, stars are born and die. Further out, we find more galaxies in their groups and clusters, as far as we can see. If we look far enough, we see them grouped into even larger structures, the megalopolis-like superclusters. The galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the bright lights on the backbone of the universe, the web of dark matter. We know that the universe has not always been like this. It is not only individual stars that get born, but entire galaxies too. They have not always been there, and the stars within them have not always shone brightly. By noticing that the galaxies surrounding us seem, on average, to be moving away from us, we have worked out that our universe must be growing. Everything in space is getting further away from everything else. If we then wind time backwards, we are led to the inevitable conclusion that, sometime in the past, our whole universe must have started to grow. It had something that could be called a beginning…”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Pages 233-234).
“After a couple of hundred million years the universe approaches the end of the Dark Ages. At last the clumps of atoms have become dense enough to form the first mini-galaxies at the dense nodes of the cosmic web of dark matter. These proto-galaxies would have been quite unlike the galaxies that we can see around us in the universe now. Many times smaller, they would have been just tens of light-years across and perhaps a million times heavier than our Sun. At first they would have contained no stars at all. By following what happens in computer simulations, we have come to think that these galaxies were each made of a disc of gas, embedded in a larger, sphere-like shape of dark matter. The ingredients of the gas would have been only hydrogen and helium, very different to star-forming gas in galaxies like our own. The ingredients of solar systems like ours, with elements like carbon and oxygen, did not yet exist. What happened inside those mini-galaxies? The pull of gravity would have compressed the gas, heating it up to about 1,000 degrees. Where the gas was densest it would clump together ever more tightly, bringing hydrogen and helium atoms close together. Before a clump of gas can collapse into a star, though, the atoms inside it need to get cold enough for their inward-pulling gravity to win out over their outward-pushing pressure. The colder the gas, the lower the pressure. In practice this means cooling the gas clumps down to hundreds of degrees below zero, which happens when the atoms collide with each other. This slows them down, lowering their temperature, until at last the dense clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms can collapse into the very first stars. As we learned in chapter 2, fusion can then begin in their cores, generating light and heat. Hydrogen and helium atoms do not collide and cool down as readily as gases made of elements like carbon and oxygen. This means that these earliest clumps of gas would have had a stronger outward-pushing gas pressure than we find within gas clouds in the Milky Way today. That, in turn, means that those first stars were likely born on average much heavier than a typical star today, with a stronger inward-pull from gravity to counteract the pressure. There would have been many more of the short-lived white and blue stars, the heaviest and hottest of all the stars. We believe that the first stars formed in this way a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang, marking the start of the ‘Cosmic Dawn’ of the universe. Astronomers have not yet determined the exact time this happened, because we cannot see their starlight…”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Pages 247-248).
“We do not yet know if, in the much more distant future, the universe will keep growing. At the moment it appears as if it will do, with all the galaxies separating on average ever further apart from each other. A time may come in the very distant future when an astronomer sitting in a galaxy like ours will no longer be able to see any other galaxies, as they will all have vanished from view, disappearing over the cosmic horizon as space grows and grows ever faster. Happily, that time has not yet come, and the universe is still very much within our reach.”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Page 271).
“Our community of astronomers has come an enormous way in advancing our understanding of our universe and our place within it. It is extraordinary to think that a century ago we did not even know that there were other galaxies beyond our own, we didn’t know how stars created their light and we were not aware that space is growing. Even in the past twenty years we have transformed our understanding of such basic matters as the age of the universe, the nature of solar systems around other stars and the fundamental ingredients of the universe. We can now trace the evolution of the universe from the earliest moments through its almost 14-billion-year history, understanding how galaxies, stars and planets like ours came to be. Our understanding of how things work in space has taken leaps forward, allowing astronomy to evolve from a science based mainly in empirical observation into a science grounded in our deeper understanding of the physical behaviour of the objects and phenomena we see in the sky. This is a golden age for astronomy, full of interest and possibility. One of the great excitements is that there are undoubtedly new discoveries just around the corner. Discoveries of new planets will continue apace, and perhaps soon there will be signs of conditions that hint at the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In the next few years we will no doubt see many more gravitational wave signals coming from black holes and neutron stars colliding throughout space, giving us a new way to see and understand the universe. We hope to soon discover what the invisible dark matter particles really are. And in the coming years we expect to at last see the first galaxies that formed in the universe. These discoveries are being made possible with magnificent new telescopes coupled with ever-increasing computing capabilities. The telescopes being prepared for the next decade span all of the wavelengths of light, as well as gravitational waves, and they will target high-definition views of particular objects as well as broad surveys of the entire sky. Highlights include the Square Kilometre Array to measure radio waves, the James Webb Space Telescope to examine the infrared and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to map the skies in visible wavelengths. To interpret the data, our computers will continue to increase in speed and capacity, allowing ever better simulations of the cosmos and the objects within it. There will also be discoveries that are not just around the corner, which will take much longer to reach. Being able to observe a planet suitable for life in great detail could take decades. So, too, will compiling a complete history of how our Milky Way was created. Understanding why the universe is growing ever faster, and how it started growing in the first place, will likely be a long process. But we can contemplate working towards each of these goals, because doing this work is a continual process that each of us plays a small part in. We stand on the shoulders of our scientific predecessors, all of whom have contributed in some way to the scaffolding that holds us up and that lets us together climb up further. When we look to the future, we hand our tools and knowledge on to our students, and we plan for things that might happen fifty or a hundred years from now, anticipating the success of those who follow in our footsteps. Our past is strewn with examples of visionary astronomers and physicists who did not make the discovery that they dreamed of. Halley never got to see the transit of Venus. Hale never got to see his magnificent telescope completed. Zwicky never saw a gravitational lens. But these were not failures. These scientists inspired younger generations to keep following their path and equipped them to make their own new discoveries. While we strive towards new discoveries, our past experience also tells us that our bigger picture of the universe and the laws of nature may still need some major aajustments. Our observations are certainly real, and our current interpretation of them tells a consistent story, but we should reasonably assume that some future shifts in the big picture are yet to come. The most exciting discoveries are the ones we least expect, ones that can radically change what we thought was true and ultimately lead us to a better understanding of our wider world. We look forward to them with eager anticipation.”
- This quotation is from “Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide” by Jo Dunkley (Pages 276-277).

2025, A Year of Books in Review

Information Regarding My Reading Habits

Ranked Ordering Of All The Books That I Read

Some Of My Favorite Quotations From All These Books

Related