Books We've Learned from

Some books that Conjecture Institute affiliates have enjoyed, both in 2025 and during the course of our lives.

Happy New Year!

Below are some books that Conjecture Institute affiliates have learned something from, either in 2025 or during the course of their lives. While they’re not necessarily recommendations, we thought that you might find this list valuable.

Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto

1. Galileo’s Finger, by Peter Atkins—Wonderfully witty and deep, it is a broad and original overview of the basic ideas of modern science. I have re-read it recently and I always learn something from it. Peter’s writing style is superb, too.

2. Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling, by P.Pullman—A deep dive into creativity and the power of storytelling, by one of the best english writers of all times (who also happens to like the idea of Many Worlds in quantum mechanics).

3. The Grammar of Fantasy, by G. Rodari—Recently translated into English, it is a collection of essays on imagination and how it powers our creativity, with insightful observations on how to foster it in children through play, language, and stories.

4. Hold on to Your Kids, by G. Mate and G. Neufeld—An essay on the importance of creating deep and long-lasting attachments with our children, based on shared knowledge and family traditions.

5. Simplicity Parenting, by Kim John Payne and Lisa M. Ross—An ode to parents creating a sanctuary for childhood for it to flourish properly, without being rushed, taking the time to develop a taste for playfulness and creativity.

6. A Velocity of Being — Letters to a Young Reader, edited by Maria Popova & Claudia Bedrick—Wonderfully illustrated, a collection of letters from original thinkers to a young reader, paying a tribute to the art of book reading.

7. Portals to a New Reality, by Vlatko Vedral—An exciting and original vista on the new physics ahead of us. Also a compelling case for universal quantum theory!

Conjecture Institute Advisor Daniel Hannan

1. Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey, by T. G. Otte—A beautifully written biography of Britain’s longest-serving foreign secretary which, in telling his story, presents as powerful and convincing an account as you will find of why the First World War happened and why the UK was dragged into it.

2. Goodbye, Dr Banda: Lessons for the West From a Small African Country, by Alexander Chula—A young Oxford classicist taught in a Malawian school established to ensure that the elite of that country would get a firm grounding in Latin and Greek. He tells Malawi’s story in exquisite prose and, in doing so, gently demolishes the assumptions on which modern anti-colonialism rests.

3. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt.

4. The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain, by George Owers—A familiar-seeming culture war sundered England between 1690 and 1714. Everything became about party loyalties. The period is generally neglected by all except specialist historians, but here is a book for the general reader, full of such colourful details that you keep having to remind yourself it is not a novel.

Conjecture Institute Advisor Peter Boghossian

1. There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm

2. Truth, by Michael Shermer

3. From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, by Lee Kuan Yew

4. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, by Farrell and Newman

5. The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction, by Nicolai Sinai

Conjecture Institute Advisor David Deutsch

1. How Language Began, by Daniel Everett

2. When the Stones Speak, by Doron Spielman

3. Eighteen, by Alice Loxton

4. Scale, by Greg Egan

5. Eichmann before Jerusalem, by Bettina Stangneth

6. Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

   Also parts of:

7. Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism, by Elder of Ziyon

8. On Democracies and Death Cults, by Douglas Murray

9. Going Dutch, by Lisa Jardine

Conjecture Institute Ambassador Brett Hall

1. Australia: A History, by Tony Abbott

2. Lions and Scavengers, by Ben Shapiro

3. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliazar Yudkowsky and Nate Shares

4. On Democracies and Death Cults, by Douglas Murray

5. Superforecasting, by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

Conjecture Institute Fellow Maxime Desalle

1. Venice, A Maritime Republic, by Frederic Chapin Lane

2. Guests of the Sheik, by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

Conjecture Institute Fellow Maria Violaris

1. What Is Life?, by Erwin Schrödinger

2. The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, by Jacques Hadamard

Conjecture Institute Fellow Arjun Khemani

1. The Rise and Fall of The House of Medici, by Christopher Hibbert

2. Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson

3. The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant

4. The Sovereign Individual, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (reread)

5. The Sovereign Child, by Aaron Stupple with Logan Chipkin

Conjecture Institute Fellow Samuel Hagh Shenas

1. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, by Fritjof Capra

2. Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, by Anil Seth

Conjecture Institute Fellow Charles Bedard

1. Meta Math! The Quest for Omega, by Gregory Chaitin—A beautiful, clear, accessible, and fascinating introduction to mathematical incompleteness, written by someone who reshaped the subject.

   This is not Gödel’s incompleteness revisited, but Chaitin’s: incompleteness from algorithmic information. The book explains why certain mathematical truths are true for no reason simpler than themselves—and why this is not a defect but a feature of mathematics.

   Along the way, you will gain intuition for parts of mathematics that often feel inaccessible: Diophantine equations, Hilbert’s tenth problem and its solution; the mind-bending infinity of the real numbers; the fact that almost all of them are uncomputable; and, why not, a third proof that there are infinitely many primes.

   Meta Math! is a manifesto: mathematics is not a static, completed edifice, but an evolving, creative, and fallible enterprise—much closer in spirit to physics than Hilbert ever imagined.

2. The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl—Pearl’s claim that “data is profoundly dumb” is not provocation—it is a diagnosis. Without causal models and counterfactuals, data alone explains nothing. The Book of Why—and Pearl’s work more generally—is therefore not merely a rehabilitation of causality as a legitimate scientific concept; it is a cure for much of contemporary science that is drowned in explanation-less statistics.

   Pearl shows, through spot-on and non-technical examples, how causal reasoning actually works in practice. He explains colliders and confounders, why “controlling for” a variable can introduce bias rather than remove it, and why interventions differ fundamentally from observations.

   If this book motivates you to then open Causality, Pearl’s more technical work, so much the better. Working through the do-calculus and counterfactual reasoning is a genuine revelation for all of us trained in conventional statistics, and it makes painfully clear just how narrow they are.

3. Back to the Pre-Socratics (in Conjectures and Refutations), by Karl Popper—Popper’s essay Back to the Pre-Socratics tells the wonderful story of what he calls the birth of science. The ideas studied by the pre-socratics were important: the cosmological problem of the support of the Earth, the recognition of an infinite regress in a proposed theory, and a solution that strikingly anticipates key features of modern gravitational thinking.

   But what is cosmically more significant is the emergence of a tradition of criticism between master and pupil. In Ionia, Thales’ student Anaximander openly criticized his teacher—not as a heretic, but as a participant in a shared search for better explanations. This new relationship, in which criticism is encouraged rather than suppressed, is for Popper the origin of the scientific attitude. He argues that it was invented only once in history, later lost, and rediscovered with Galileo and the Renaissance.

4. Chapter 1 of The Beginning of Infinity (“The Reach of Explanations”), by David Deutsch—This opening chapter is a sweeping argument about how knowledge is created at all—in science and beyond.

   Deutsch’s presentation of fallibilism is both uncompromising and liberating: there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, no justificatory foundations, no secure derivations from data. Knowledge grows through conjecture, criticism, and the deliberate search for better explanations. Fallibilism is not a weakness; it is the very condition that makes progress possible.

   Deutsch then dismantles, one by one, the most entrenched philosophical pictures of science—empiricism, induction, positivism, instrumentalism—and shows why none of them can account for the reach of scientific knowledge.

   At the core of the chapter is Deutsch’s notion of good explanations: those that are hard to vary while still accounting for what they purport to explain. This reveals why myths or other easily adjustable stories fail—even when they are testable—and why science can reach far beyond any direct experience.

   If Chapter 1 convinces you, there is no natural stopping point: the rest of the book continues to reshape how you think. It cannot be read without being changed by it.

Conjecture Institute Fellow Tom Hyde

1. The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch

2. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes

3. The Ultimate Resource, by Julian L. Simon

4. The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman

Conjecture Institute Fellow Antonia Weber

1. The Book of Why, by Dana Mackenzie and Judea Pearl

2. Portals to a New Reality, by Vlatko Vedral

3. These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means, by Christopher Summerfield

4. Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker

5. Chaos, by James Gleick (still reading)

6. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Conjecture Institute Fellow Dimitri Vallein

1. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges—“Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.”

   Borges is that rare writer who makes you sharper every time you read him, and who’s endlessly re-readable.
   I recently read Ficciones in the countryside; it paired strangely well with quiet fields and long walks.

   “The Library of Babel” and “The Garden of Forking Paths” are my favourites, but every story feels like a whole world in itself.

2. Le Talisman, by Marcel Dassault—“It isn’t my way of being to let the storm overtake my purpose. What purpose? To achieve. To achieve what? That which my thoughts and my dreams, together, have shown me to be both necessary and possible.”

   A brisk portrait of the optimism and grit of mid-20th-century European industry. Reading it, you feel how much was built by people willing to marry technical detail with seemingly unreasonable ambition. A good antidote in a time of European pessimism.

3. The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski—Adapted from Bronowski’s BBC series of the same name, this is a poetic history of science from stone tools to quantum physics. Bronowski keeps asking how we can wield knowledge. His answer is radical fallibilism: science as error-correcting imagination rather than cold authority.

Conjecture Institute Fellow Paul Raymond-Robichaud

1. Fundamentals of Mathematics, Vols. 1-3, edited by H. Behnke, F. Bachmann, K. Fladt, & W. Süss—These books are a monumental work of mathematical exposition, led by some of the most important figures in 20th-century German mathematics whose specific goal was elevating and modernizing the entire field’s education.

   This was my first true introduction to modern mathematics, and these books are my favorites because they are both rigorous and deeply explanatory. They start from the true foundations, including the philosophy of mathematics, and are never afraid to ask the deep questions.

   Much of the ideas I have worked on in the foundations of physics come directly from my reflections on these volumes. What’s most striking is that the philosophy of mathematics they contain, while not explicitly Popperian, is deep and largely correct. Very little would need to be changed to adapt the work to Popper’s philosophy.

   As these books span three volumes, they cover nearly every modern field of mathematics and show how they are all interlinked, something traditional courses rarely achieve. In short, it is a modern mathematics education in three volumes.

2. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis & Christos Papadimitriou—This is a favorite graphic novel. I recall finding it at the bookstore and being completely unable to put it down. I missed my metro stop because I was so absorbed. I got on the train to go back... and missed my stop again, going the other way. I was so enthralled, I finally gave up on trying to get home, found a spot in the city, and just read it cover to cover. I had to read it again immediately and then loan it to all my friends.

   Why? The story is epic—it’s the passionate, human story of the quest for the foundations of mathematics. It became even more real for me when my math professor at the time, Gert Sabidussi, told me he knew some of the characters in the story, like Gödel, from his time at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Years later, I had the pleasure of meeting one of the authors, Christos Papadimitriou, who signed my copy.

3. The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse—Hesse’s masterpiece poses a set of profound questions that feel more relevant every year. What happens when a society becomes able to juggle with all of human culture in a single, complex game, yet in doing so, becomes static? What happens when it stops producing fundamental new ideas and is content to only refine prior knowledge?

   What happens to the world when its academics, isolated in their ivory tower, no longer care about their relation to the world and its problems? The Glass Bead Game is a meditative journey into these dangers, and it’s a warning I think about often.

Conjecture Institute Fellow Eric Denton

1. The Self and Its Brain, by Karl Popper and John Eccles (Popper’s contribution)

2. Charles Darwin: Voyaging & The Power of Place, by Janet Browne

3. Jerusalem: The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

4. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett

5. Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

Conjecture Institute Fellow Carlos De la Guardia

1. The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch—Reshaped my worldview with far-reaching ideas. Sparked my work on artificial general intelligence. Strongly and consistently affected my thinking for 10+ years. The intellectual energy density is like nuclear reactor’s.

2. The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins—Best explanation of evolution I’ve seen. Deeply relevant to AGI, as thinking is a form of evolution. Both are instances of knowledge-creation.

3. Knowledge and Decisions, by Thomas Sowell—Looks at economic systems not through ideology, but how each uses - or fails to use - knowledge. I love that it approaches an important problem through the lens of knowledge.

4. Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter—Whenever I dip into it, it’s always great food for thought on how minds work, even (or especially) when I disagree with it. A cornucopia.

5. The Information, by James Gleick—Not deeply philosophical. Doesn’t solve a specific problem. But it successfully makes one idea visceral and unavoidable: The sprawling diversity of the living and human world is all suffused and powered by one thing: knowledge. All evolution, communication, computation, and thought.

Conjecture Institute Fellow Sam Kuypers

1. The Meaning of It All, by Richard Feynman—Feynman reflects on science as a human activity shaped by curiosity, creativity, and intellectual honesty, making it a profoundly human endeavour. Short and lucid, it is closely aligned with Popperian ideas about scientific progress.

2. How Children Fail, by John Holt—Based on careful classroom observation, Holt shows how schooling often trains children to avoid mistakes rather than to understand.

3. Conjectures and Refutations, by Karl Popper—I return to this book regularly, and it still produces the same sense of intellectual grandeur. Popper advances his epistemology through criticism, examples, and confrontation with rival views, demonstrating the very method he defends.

4. The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch—Deutsch shows that if we are to take some of our deepest theories about the world seriously, we are forced to accept conclusions that are deeply unintuitive yet compelling, such as the existence of other universes. Even on rereading, the clarity and ambition of the arguments remain striking.

5. Price Theory, by David Friedman—Perhaps the best textbook I’ve read on any topic, not just due to its principled defence of the basic assumptions that go into microeconomics (or price theory, as Friedman calls it), but also because it actually emphasises explanation.

6. Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens—A spirited defence of disagreement as a civic and moral duty. Hitchens explains the tradition of critical discussion via historical and personal examples, addressing the reader directly in what is a surprisingly moving book.

7. Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, by Daniel Hannan—Hannan argues that the Anglosphere invented political institutions that protect freedom, and that this tradition explains its historical success. He makes a convincing case that freedom works.

Conjecture Institute President & Cofounder Logan Chipkin

1. Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology, by Robert J. A. Lambourne

2. The Science of Can and Can’t, by Chiara Marletto

3. The Laws of Thermodynamics, by Peter Atkins

4. Arrival of the Fittest, by Andreas Wagner

5. Five Portals to a New Reality, by Vlatko Vedral

6. Inventing the Individual, by Larry Siedentop

7. Austrian Economics, by Steven Horwitz

8. Fossil Future, by Alex Epstein

9. Logic, by Graham Priest

10. Conjectures and Refutations, by Karl Popper

11. The Myth of the Closed Mind, by Ray Scott Percival

12. The Cave and the Light, by Arthur Herman

13. Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, by Michael Nielsen and

    Isaac Chuang

14. Scale, by Geoffrey West

15. Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty

16. American Creation, by Joseph Ellis

17. Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt

Conjecture Institute Cofounder David Kedmey

1. Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002-2025, by Judea Pearl