Science books
- 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 (I've not read this, but I've read Mr. Tompkins in Paperback)
- The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
- 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 (I listened to it on tape on a drive to the Dallas CSICOP conference in 1992)
- 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 (I'm currently reading this)
- 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
- 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 (haven't read this, but I've read all of his books of collected Natural History articles)
- 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
- Storm World, Chris Mooney
- The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
- The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
- Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
- From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
- Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
- Chaos, James Gleick
- Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
- The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
- Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais
Now John Lynch can tell me that I really need to read Origin of Species.
UPDATE (August 28, 2008):
Enhanced with P.Z. Myers' additions:
- Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski
- Basin and Range, John McPhee
- Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
- Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
- *Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson (reading now)
- *Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll
- Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Carl Zimmer
- Genome, Matt Ridley
- Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
- It Ain't Necessarily So, Richard Lewontin
- On Growth and Form, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
- Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran
- The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins
- The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd
- The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson
- The Great Devonian Controversy, Martin Rudwick
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
- The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
- The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Richard Lewontin
- Time, Love, Memory, Jonathan Weiner
- Voyaging and The Power of Place, Janet Browne
- Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier
12 comments:
I've got a gorgeous Barnes and Noble HC edition of all five of Darwin's books that I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten around to yet ... I'm pretty sure I read Voyage of the Beagle in the 7th grade and did a report on it but I'm not sure.
Another book I'd add to the list is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. I started reading it last year and had to stop because the material was too engaging for me to do the usual 3-4 books at a time deal.
When I post this I think I'm going to add some more philosophy of science books in, too.
How has Soul Made Flesh been? I've wanted to read that for years now.
I've not had a chance to read any more of Soul Made Flesh since I started it during my vacation, but so far it's been excellent. I think I'm about four or five chapters in.
Soul Made Flesh, like Zimmer's other books, is well written and very engaging. As for the list, I think I've read only seven. Shameful, I know.
I mispoke about Road to Reality. I should have said "demanding" rather than "engaging." The book has practice problems in it to help you learn the math and science - I had planned on working out the problems - graded easy, intermediate, and difficult. They all seemed fairly difficult to me despite having once been decent at calculus based physics.
college intro level physics, of course.
It's amazing how quickly that stuff goes. I aced my first semester of calculus a couple years ago (I even helped proofread a few chapters of this text) but I'd be lucky if I could find the limit of a function today.
I picked up Soul Made Flesh again. I'm six chapters in, and came across this sentence that I'm not happy with: "Boyle was impressed by the way that a dead man's nails could keep growing for months, long after the rational soul had left his body." (p. 144)
Sure, that's what Boyle *thought* he was seeing, but Zimmer doesn't note that this is a myth.
I was in the library today to return a book and could not resist checking out a copy of Zimmer's Microcosm that was featured on the New Books shelf.
I also noticed that my library has a new service that allows you do check out on-line editions of books which you can then burn onto cds. I'm hoping they eventually get plenty of public domains books available this way. I jogged my way through Plato's Republic on my IPod earlier this year.
D'oh! I forgot to mention The Scientists. And I even made that my Book of the Year for 2007 (that being the best Doubter related book I read during the course of the year.)
Added to my wish list. Thanks!
Here are my additions to the list (some are already listed by PZ):
Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner
Chance in the House of Fate by Jennifer Ackerman
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees
Reinventing Darwin by Niles Eldredge
The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker
The God Particle by Leon Lederman
I just remembered that Discover did a list of top science books about year and a half ago.
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