Saturday, August 30, 2008

The Thousand Best Popular-Science Books

The Thousand Best Popular-Science Books: 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. (Via Cosmic Variance.)

Follow the links for some interesting lists. Since my library is scattered among several places in Philadelphia and Palo Alto, I'll rely on my very fallible memory for this unordered list of ten books that stayed:

  • Microcosm, Carl Zimmer
  • The Best of All Possible Worlds, Ivar Ekeland
  • The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
  • Annals of the Former World, John McPhee
  • Thin Ice, Mark Bowen
  • The Plausibility of Life, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhardt
  • Battle of Wits, Steve Budiansky
  • Alan Turing: the Enigma, Andrew Hodges
  • The Illusion of Conscious Will, Daniel Wegner
  • Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Lee Smolin

No comments: