The Thousand Best Popular-Science Books

83 Comments / Science and Society, Words

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer has cast a baleful eye on the various lists of the world’s greatest books, and decided that we really need is a list of the world’s greatest popular-science books. I think the goal is to find the top 100, but many nominations are pouring in from around the internets, and I suspect that a cool thousand will be rounded up without much problem.

We played this game once ourselves, but like basketball, this is a game that can be enjoyed over and over. So pop over and leave your own suggestions, or just leave them here. To prime the pump, off the top of my head here is a list of books I would nominate. A variety of criteria come into play; originality, readability, clarity, and influence — but just because a work appears here doesn’t mean that it scores highly on all four counts.

  • Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
  • Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hoftstadter
  • Cosmos, Carl Sagan
  • Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, Peter Galison
  • How the Universe Got Its Spots, Janna Levin
  • Chronos, Etienne Klein
  • The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
  • The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould
  • Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
  • The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth
  • The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
  • Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
  • The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick
  • The Double Helix, James Watson
  • Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone
  • The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
  • One, Two, Three… Infinity, George Gamow
  • Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, Hans Christian Von Baeyer
  • Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, Huw Price
  • A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
  • At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman
  • Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
  • Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
  • The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
  • The Mathematical Experience, Davies and Hersh
  • The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  • Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Sharon Traweek
  • The Diversity of Life, E.O. Wilson
  • The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose
  • Longitude, Dava Sobel
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
  • Flatland, Edwin Abbott
  • The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
  • Nobel Dreams, Gary Taubes

I didn’t peek at anyone else’s lists, but I admit that I did peek at my own bookshelves.

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83 Comments

83 thoughts on “The Thousand Best Popular-Science Books”

  1. R squared

    Some final additions :

    older ‘classics’

    ‘Of Stars and Men’ by Harlow Shapley (1959)

    ‘The Universe and Dr. Einstein’ by Lincoln Barnett (1962)

    ‘The ABC of Relativity’ by Bertrand Russell (1962)

    ‘Profiles of the Future’ by Arthur C. Clarke (1963)

    ‘Intelligent Life in the Universe’ by Sagan and Shklovskii (1966)

    ‘Red Giants and White Dwarfs, The Evolution of Stars, Planets and Life’
    by Robert Jastrow (1967)

    ‘Men Who Made a New Physics : Physicists and the Quantum Theory’
    by Barbara Lovett Cline (1969)

    ‘The Ascent of Man’ by Jacob Bronowski (1973)

    more recent goodies :

    ‘The Quark and the Jaguar’ by Murray Gell-Mann (1994)

    ‘Atom’ by Lawrence Krauss (2001)

    ‘Our Cosmic Habitat’ by Martin Rees (2001)

    ‘Life on a Young Planet’ by Andrew Knoll (2003)
    .

  2. Nick R

    “From Here to Infinity” (aka “The Problems of Mathematics”) by Ian Stewart

    “Chaos” by James Gleick.

    Personally I preferred Richard Dawkins’s “Climbing Mount Improbable” to “The Blind Watchmaker”.

  3. eddie

    I second Vlad on the best Feynman books and am also glad to see Ian Stewart mentioned. He worked with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen on the Science of Diskworld mentioned earlier.
    I’d like to nominate Ian and Jack’s What Does A Martian Look Like.

    You can’t beat Asimov’s Lucky Starr seires for a tour of the solar system.

    Mendelssohn – The Quest for Absolute Zero

    The book that made me want to be a physicist was The Nature of Matter by Otto Frisch.

    The original – Relativity by Einstein hasn’t been bettered

    Other non-physics ones; The Ancestors Tale is my favourite Dawkins and for maths I’d second the Music of the Primes and add The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved.

    phew.

  4. riemann

    Nick R @ 77: Dawkins agrees with you. Here’s a quation from his web site, http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,2890,Good-Science-Writers-Richard-Dawkins,Sandwalk,page1#216422

    I am interested in the suggestion that Climbing Mount Improbable might not be an ideal title. Interested, because I regard it as the most under-rated of my books. It sells FAR fewer copies than The Blind Watchmaker although I think it is a better book. Perhaps the reason is that the title is not so good. It covers some of the same ground as The Blind Watchmaker, but — even though it is not really for me to say — I like to think the two chapters called ‘The Museum of all Shells’ and ‘Kaleidoscopic Embryos’ are genuinely novel and original, where The Blind Watchmaker is mostly popularizing stuff that is already well known to professionals. Well, as I say, it is not really for me to judge. But my own opinion is that, if anybody is thinking of reading The Blind Watchmaker, they might do better to read Climbing Mount Improbable instead. Of course, I wouldn’t want to STOP anyone reading BOTH!

    It should be on the list. Then again so shoud The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. But then The Ancestor’s Tale is a true masterpiece and cannot be left out. Well, why don’t we just write “see Dawkins” to the list?

    And Jerry P. King’s The Art of Mathematics was what got my maths enthusiasm going.

  5. Ram

    Some books I love:
    “Godel, Escher and Bach”
    “Men of Mathematics”, E. T. Bell
    “How to Solve It”, Polya
    Freakonomics,
    Carl Sagan (any book of his…),
    “Courage to Create” and “Man in Search of Himself” (Psychology) ,
    Society of the Mind, Marvin Minsky
    most recreational math books,
    …

  6. Kerry

    Sorry to join in so lae in the game, but here are my favorites. All tend toward my specialty, Biology, but I have tried to make sure that all are popular, not technical.

    A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
    The Stars – H. A. Rey
    Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin
    The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins
    The Eighth Day of Creation – Horace Judson
    The Double Helix – Watson
    Chaos – Jame Gleick
    The Map that Changed the World – Simon Winchester
    Einstein’s Cosmos – Michio Kaku
    The Ancestor’s Tale – Richard Dawkins
    Why Big Fierce Animal are Rare – Colinaux
    Animals without Backbones – Ralph Buxbaum
    On Human Nature – E. O. Wilson
    E=mc^2 – David Bodanis
    The Edge of the Sea – Rachel Carson
    The Year of the Gorilla – George Schaller
    The Beak of the Finch – Jonathan Weiner
    Endless Forms most Beautiful – Sean Carroll
    One, Two, Three, … Infinity – George Gamow

    I grew up on Asimov, but find him dated and dull now. I find Darwin’s Origin dull stuff, too, but his later books on plants are great.

  7. John

    I’m not sure if it has been mentioned, but ‘The Matter Myth’ by Paul Davies is good. Has anybody included David Bohm’s ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’?

  8. Marion

    As a Popular Science publisher, I have had the pleasure of working with a range of interesting writers. However, by far the best in this field is Keith Skene, who wrote the highly aclaimed “Shadows on the Cave Wall: A New Theory of Evolution.” This completely turns recent thinking on its head, and should be read in order to truely appraise the value of Richard Dawkins’ work, which it exposes as extremely limited. It’s a great read, and very amusing, but profoundly moving at the same time.

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