{"id":712,"date":"2008-08-28T03:56:47","date_gmt":"2008-08-28T08:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=712"},"modified":"2008-08-28T03:56:47","modified_gmt":"2008-08-28T08:56:47","slug":"meme-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/712","title":{"rendered":"Meme, Too!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jennifer has started the great pop-sci book project<\/a>, a natural evolution (and yet intelligently designed progression) of The Big Read<\/a><\/p>\n

The rules are familiar<\/p>\n

1. Highlight those you’ve read in full
\n2. Asterisk those you intend to read
\n3. Add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list
\n4. Link back to me (leave links or suggested additions in the comments, if you prefer) so I can keep track of everyone’s additions. Then we can compile it all into one giant “Top 100” popular science books list, with room for honorable mentions. (I, for one, have some quirky choices in the list below.) Voila! We’ll have awesome resource for general readers interested in delving into the fascinating world of science!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t read tremendous amount of pop-sci, and not much in physics since A Brief History of Time<\/em>, as I’ve gone to grad school since then and really don’t need much prose on how weird quantum mechanics and relativity are. (I had to put my foot down on getting pop-sci books as gifts after getting a pop-up book of cosmology<\/em>; I felt a bit like John Cleese in a Monty Python sketch<\/p>\n

Do you like your rattle? Do you like your rattle?<\/em>
\nAh, yes, the rattle.
\nOoh, he’s talkin’ already<\/em>
\nOf course I can talk, I’m the Minister for Overseas Development<\/p>\n

But I digress.)
\n<\/p>\n

1. Micrographia, Robert Hooke
\n2. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
\n3. Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
\n4. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman<\/em>
\n5. Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
\n6. The Devil’s Doctor, Philip Ball
\n7. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
\n8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
\n9. Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman
\n10. 1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow
\n11. *The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene (picked it up for free, so why not read it?)
\n12. Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer
\n13. Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore
\n14. Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley
\n15. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
\n16. A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
\n17. Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
\n18. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking<\/em>
\n19. Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz
\n20. Vermeer’s Camera, Philip Steadman
\n21. The Code Book, Simon Singh
\n22. The Elements of Murder, John Emsley
\n23. Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer
\n24. Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis
\n25. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson
\n26. Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
\n27. Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter<\/em> (I think<\/em> I finished it)
\n28. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine
\n29. A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre
\n30. The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
\n31. E=mc, David Bodanis
\n32. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
\n33. Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
\n34. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin
\n35. Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
\n36. Apollo’s Fire, Michael Sims
\n37. Flatland, Edward Abbott
\n38. Fermat’s Last Theorem, Amir Aczel
\n39. Stiff, Mary Roach
\n40. Astroturf, M.G. Lord
\n41. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
\n42. Longitude, Dava Sobel<\/em> (more history than pop-sci, IMO)
\n43. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
\n44. The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle
\n45. The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
\n46. Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay
\n47. This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin
\n48. The Executioner’s Current, Richard Moran
\n49. Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
\n50. Pythagorus’ Trousers, Margaret Wertheim
\n51. Neuromancer, William Gibson
\n52. The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios
\n53. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel
\n54. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik
\n55. Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, Peter Galison
\n56. The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan<\/em>
\n57. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
\n58. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
\n59. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
\n60. Consilience, E.O. Wilson
\n61. Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould<\/em>
\n62. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
\n63. Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel
\n64. The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
\n65. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
\n66. Storm World, Chris Mooney
\n67. The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
\n68. The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
\n69. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
\n70. From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
\n71. Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
\n72. Chaos, James Gleick<\/em>
\n73. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
\n74. The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
\n75. Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais<\/p>\n

Books I would add, which I have read and easily come to mind or are visible on the bookshelf:<\/p>\n

The Beak of the Finch<\/em>, Jonathan Weiner
\nWhy We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine<\/em>, Nesse and Williams
\nLucy<\/em>, Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey
\nGuns, Germs and Steel<\/em>, Jared Diamond
\nThe Third Chimpanzee<\/em>, Jared Diamond
\nThe Dinosaur Heresies<\/em>, Robert Bakker
\nVoodoo Science<\/em>, Robert Park<\/p>\n

(My taste in pop-sci leans toward evolution and paleontology)<\/p>\n

There’s also The Story of Science: Einstein Adds a New Dimension<\/em> by Joy Hakim, of which I have read only p. 162, because (as I’ve mentioned<\/a>) that’s where a cartoon of mine appears.<\/p>\n

If we really do go with fiction, there’s also
\nCryptonomicron<\/em>, Neal Stephenson
\nbut my opinion is that the list should steer clear of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jennifer has started the great pop-sci book project, a natural evolution (and yet intelligently designed progression) of The Big Read The rules are familiar 1. Highlight those you’ve read in full 2. Asterisk those you intend to read 3. Add … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,35,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-other-science","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}