Tom Oakley

A very enjoyable book, Gladwell uses illustrations and stories from history and the present day to try and understand why outliers are able to stand out and be successful in their fields. He uses examples from software (Bill Joy, Bill Gates), music (The Beatles), geniuses (Chris Langan), physics (Robert Oppenheimer), law (Joe Flom), psychology (Lewis Terman and his Genetic Study of Genius) and even his own mother and father, to understand what makes someone successful. I particuarly enjoyed the chapter entitled "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes", where Gladwell uses examples from Korean Air's awful record in the 1990s, to their incredible recovery to be one of the world's safest airlines in the mid 2010s, to understand their turnaround. Fascinating stuff, with some really interesting takeaways.

Coming from a background of knowing very little about Physics in general, apart from the surface level and a little about it's relationship to computer science, I found this a fascinating read. I particuarly enjoyed the first half of the book, where Gribbin explains about how quantum theory was introduced to the scientific world in the early 1900s, and then discusses it's real world applications. It gets a bit heavy going at times and I found it tough to read on the tube sometimes, but it's a great book for diving in to the quantum world without it feeling like a text book.

I found it fascinating how Bartlett spoke about the dark side of technology and how it will affect politics in the future. He had a section on how the Donald Trump presidential campaign used Cambridge Analytica to devastating effects. He also has two theories on how the future will pan out - one utopian vision, where machines will take jobs but goods will get much cheaper and quality of life will improve, with universal income becoming the method of income for most people. The other is the dystopian vision; governments will loose the ability to function properly, and as government gets increasingly in-effective and cryptocurrencies continue their rise, tax evasion will get far harder to track, and this will create a viscious cycle of governments who need funds to operate but the poor quality of the government will mean people are far less willing to pay taxes.

Overall I really enjoyed this book; Bartlett included lots of attributes to other authors and books, so many of them, including Atlas Shrugged, Life 3.0 and Present Shock have been added to my Amazon Wishlist for future reading.