Jennifer Oullette has put together a pop-sci book meme (and John Lynch has joined in). It’s the usual thing, a long list of books and you’re supposed to highlight the ones you’ve read, this time with the theme being that they’re all about science somehow. I detect a physics bias in Ms. Oullette’s choices, however, despite the excellent beginning — and it’s to that I ascribe my poor performance. That and some weird choices: since when is Neuromancer pop-sci? Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or Snowcrash would be better choices if we’re going to throw fiction in the mix, or Sterling’s Schismatrix. If we open the door to SF, though, the howling hordes will pour in and we’ll never get anything done.
Anyway, here’s my copy of the list:
- 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
- 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
- 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=mc2, 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
- 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
Jennifer did suggest that we make additions, so let’s beef up the biology a bit with a few more off the top of my head (OK, McPhee and Rudwick are geology…but that needs bolstering, too!).
- 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
- 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