0
Pop-Sci Big Read, a natural evolution of The Big Read ;]
Inspired by BBC's list, let us compile a similar thing for popular science books. The emphasis here is on popular: books that are engaging and accessible to a truly general reader or laymen, ideally with a strong narrative component.
I took a superficial inventory of the many books on science scattered about our home and compiled a potential list. I have some obvious biases: physics, maths and science history, with the odd foray into forensics and chemistry - plus, a few notable fictional works that have a history of inspiring present and future scientists.
The rules, as always are simple:
- Bold those you have read.
- Italicize those you have started but haven't finished.
- Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday *
- Mark in red the books you love/found most useful.
- Mark in blue those you read, but are not particularly fond of.
I know I'm missing many significant titles. But one has to start somewhere. Ergo, I offer the following popular science book list, in no particular order.
- Micrographia - Robert Hooke
- The Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin
- Never at Rest - Richard Westfall
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman
- Tesla: Man Out of Time - Margaret Cheney
- The Devil's Doctor - Philip Ball
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes
- Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos - Dennis Overbye
- Physics for Entertainment - Yakov Perelman
- 1-2-3 Infinity - George Gamow
- Guns, Germs And Steel - Jared Diamond
- Warmth Disperses, Time Passes - Hans Christian von Bayer
- Alice in Quantumland - Robert Gilmore
- Where Does the Weirdness Go? - David Lindley
- A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
- A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
- Black Holes and Time Warps - Kip Thorne
- A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
- Universal Foam - Sidney Perkowitz
- Vermeer's Camera - Philip Steadman
- The Code Book - Simon Singh
- The Elements of Murder - John Emsley
- Soul Made Flesh - Carl Zimmer
- Time's Arrow - Martin Amis
- The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments - George Johnson
- Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman
- Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
- The Curious Life of Robert Hooke - Lisa Jardine
- A Matter of Degrees - Gino Segre
- The Physics of Star Trek - Lawrence Krauss
- E=mc<2> - David Bodanis
- Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea - Charles Seife
- Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold - Tom Shachtman
- A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines - Janna Levin
- Warped Passages - Lisa Randall
- Apollo's Fire - Michael Sims
- Flatland - Edward Abbott
- Fermat's Last Theorem - Amir Aczel
- Stiff - Mary Roach
- Astroturf - M.G. Lord
- The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
- Longitude - Dava Sobel
- The First Three Minutes - Steven Weinberg
- The Mummy Congress - Heather Pringle
- The Accelerating Universe- Mario Livio
- Math and the Mona Lisa- Bulent Atalay
- This is Your Brain on Music- Daniel Levitin
- The Executioner's Current, Richard Moran
- Krakatoa- Simon Winchester
- Pythagorus' Trousers- Margaret Wertheim
- Neuromancer- William Gibson [odd choice, I know]
- The Physics of Superheroes - James Kakalios
- The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump - Sandra Hempel
- Another Day in the Frontal Lobe - Katrina Firlik
- Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps - Peter Galison
- The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
- The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
- The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
- An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
- Consilience - E.O. Wilson
- Wonderful Life - Stephen J. Gould
- Teaching a Stone to Talk - Annie Dillard
- Fire in the Brain - Ronald K. Siegel
- The Life of a Cell - Lewis Thomas
- Coming of Age in the Milky Way - Timothy Ferris
- Chaos - James Gleick
- The Carbon Age - Eric Roston
- The Black Hole Wars - Leonard Susskind
- Copenhagen - Michael Frayn
- From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne
We have 30 more to go.
This is not an official list, so correct my imbalances (you know you want to!) - what are some of the titles that you would add?
I have faith there are enough Aprigeeks around for us to complete this list
Bookmarks