Books by Dartnell, Lewis

Dartnell, Lewis. The Knowledge. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-14-312704-8.

In one of his first lectures to freshman physics students at Caltech, Richard Feynman posed the question that if everything we had learned was forgotten, and you could only transmit a single sentence to the survivors, what would it be? This book expands upon that idea and attempts to distil the essentials of technological civilisation which might allow rebuilding after an apocalyptic collapse. That doesn't imply re-tracing the course humans followed to get where we are today: for one thing, many of the easily-exploited sources of raw material and energy have been depleted, and for some time survivors will probably be exploiting the ruins of the collapsed civilisation instead of re-starting its primary industries. The author explores the core technologies required to meet basic human needs such as food, shelter, transportation, communication, and storing information, and how they might best be restored. At the centre is the fundamental meta-technology upon which all others are based: the scientific method as a way to empirically discover how things work and apply that knowledge to get things done.

June 2020