- Charlie Munger A physicist's wide-ranging exploration of how the fundamental scientific concept of temperature is bound up with the very essence of life and matter — the kind of multidisciplinary science Munger kept steering people toward. source ↗
A physicist's wide-ranging exploration of temperature as a fundamental property of the universe, tracing its role from the Big Bang through the origins of life to climate change and the fate of the planet. Segrè shows how one variable — temperature — unlocks understanding across cosmology, geology, biology, and human civilization.
Munger placed Segrè on his Almanack recommended list because the book exemplifies first-principles thinking: temperature is a single variable that governs phenomena from star formation to enzyme kinetics. The latticework lesson is that tracing one thread through many disciplines generates insights no specialist silo delivers. For founders, this is the model for how a single mental model — incentives, inversion, or margin of safety — can unlock understanding across otherwise unrelated business problems.