Tuesday Media Recommendations: Nonfiction Science Books

Post your recommendations in the comments; other weeks, there'll be other posts for other topics and other formats.

Comments

[Sarcastr0]

Peter Atkins - The Laws of Thermodynamics

Haven't read it yet but:
Brian Christian - The Alignment Problem - Machine Learning and Human Values

[BRonstott]

I read it, and I recommend it highly.

[Brett Bellmore]

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

I've been following progress in nanotechnology since before it was termed that. It's not coming as fast as we originally thought it would, but when it hits, it's going to be a societal bombshell.

[William Cheswick]

any thing by James Trefil.

[Frank Drackman]

Not really a book, but Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Original German version is best) is as the late Larry King would say “A real Page-Turner”.
Don’t let the math scare you, it’s simple High Screw-el Trigonometry and College Calculus (OK, just skip over the math, it’s not essential to get the point)
Best part to me is where Al (why do we call most famous Scientists by their first names, Galileo, Leonardo, but not with Einstein) blithely dismissed the concept of the “Luminiferous Ether” (The substance “Every Respected Scientist” of the day said was essential if light was propagated in waves) They kept trying to prove there was one, and every experiment was negative, didn’t keep them from still saying there was one (Michelson and Morley (I know, “Who?”, google that shit) went to their graves thinking their experiment* was flawed)
as Al put it
“with the unsuccessful attempts to discover
any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,”
substitute “Global Warming” and you’ll see why Al didn’t get into Grad screw-el and was examining Patents (not a bad gig actually)
* Michelson-Morley experiment, done at Case-Western Reserve, had a huge Spectrometer floating in a huge vat of Mercury (I know what you’re thinking, but elemental Mercury is non-toxic, you could drink the entire vat and only get a bad case of the runs) supposed to measure the “Ether Wind” as the Earth spun on it’s axis, and also in it’s orbit around the sun (if you buy that “Round Earth” theory)
Frank

[Brett Bellmore]

Probably IS a page turner. In high school I was really into that stuff, filled page after page of notebooks doing things like deriving special relativity. Which turns out to be actually pretty straightforward given the "speed of light is equal in all reference frames" assumption. Deriving orbital mechanics was actually harder.

A lot of these things are dirt simple if you know a bit of math, but only once you have the key insights people like Einstein produced.

I must confess that the math for general relativity was beyond me. You barely need beginning calculus for special relativity, though.

In that spirit:

The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Vol. I, II & III Bundle

It's great reading, Feynman was a fantastic lecturer, and a real character.

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

A real, bona fide loonie.

[Doug Huffman]

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
by E. T. Jaynes (Author), G. Larry Bretthorst (Editor)
Cambridge University Press; Annotated edition (June 9, 2003)

Develops Bayesian Inference, maximizing entropy of naive subjective priors and, my favorite, argues against ad-hockery. Advanced undergraduate mathematics familiarity required.

[SRG2]

Thinking, fast and slow, Kahnemann - our two systems of thinking and why and how they differ.

Biophilia hypothesis - Kellert and Wilson - how and why humans are drawn to nature (and incidentally, how that should affect design and interirors of our houses)

Fractal Geometry of Nature - Mandelbrot. As the title says, by the Man.

For fun:
What does a Martian look like? The science of extraterrestrial life - by Cohen and Stewart. (Friends of mine - Jack Cohen was my intellectual "rabbi".)

[Doug Huffman]

Mandelbrot proposes that reality is fractal.

[NOVA Lawyer]

"Thinking, fast and slow, Kahnemann – our two systems of thinking and why and how they differ."

Essential reading. And lots on various cognitive biases and how easily we slip into system 1 for system 2 tasks.

[BRonstott]

I read Thinking Fast and Slow and I highly recommend it.

[Alan Gunn]

I assume "science books" means books intended for people who aren't scientists. My undergraduate major was geophysics, and the only book from those days I remember anything about is Officer's "Introduction to the Theory of Sound Transmission," which I wouldn't recommend for general reading. So, ....

Stephen Jay Gould, "The Panda's Thumb." Gould said foolish things in some of his books, maybe even in this one, but it's well worth reading.

James Gleick, "Genius." This is a biography of Richard Feynman, but I think it counts as a book about science because it's in large part about his thinking.

Lewis Carroll Epstein, "Relativity Visualized." One of my favorite books about relativity, the other being Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory," a book for lay readers, which will disabuse you of the notion which many people have that Einstein thought space is "curved. " Epstein's "Thinking Physics" is good, too, though more for people who really want to learn some physics than for general readers. But every lawyer should read the its last chapter, "All the Trouble in the World," which says some things about us which we should take seriously.

[SRG2]

My friend Jack Cohen (mentioned in my post) knew Stephen Gould and introduced us.

Most of his popular biology books are worth reading, but as you note he did say some foolish things being on occasion blinded by his political views.

[Dan Schiavetta]

His takedown of Bork’s view of evolution, at least, was right on the money.

[Riva]

Would you mind elaborating on that takedown?

[Sarcastr0]

I did a high school internship at the evolutionary botany lab at the NY Botanical Garden.

At the time I was devouring audiobooks (on cassette tapes) by SJG.

The head of the lab was no fan of Stephen Gould. Called him a BS artist.

I didn't understand why he didn't like this smart guy evangelizing about his field...until I was a baby scientist and started seeing Niel Degrasse Tyson's deal.

But yeah, his books are absolutely worth reading.

[Brett Bellmore]

Gould nearly killed me once. I'd bough his "Wonderful Life" as an audio book for a long drive from Michigan to Florida.

Everything was fine until about halfway through he starts into this tedious, never ending discussion of sports scores in order to illustrate a really basic point about state spaces and statistics, (That I got in the first 30 seconds.) and the next thing you know, the rumble strip wakes me as I'm drifting off the road.

Aside from that, great book. And thank God for rumble strips.

[Sarcastr0]

LOL.

[Riva]

I thought only girls used “LOL”?

[Sarcastr0]

Maybe I'm a girl.

[Riva]

No argument from me there

[Sarcastr0]

You seem to think being a girl is an insult.

No wonder you're so frustrated-seeming all the time.

[santamonica811]

Your history of posting here makes it difficult to know when you’re doing your usual trolling, and when you’re asking a genuine question.

I will (naively?) assume the latter for now. Since I know literally 100+ men who use LOL in emails and/or texting, I’m not sure if this says more about my acquaintances or about your own circle. I did a quick Google of “do men use lol” and nothing jumps out to suggest it’s one of those “women do it, but men don’t” things.

Like most people who were fully-formed adults before emails and texting were things; I’m sure I’m hopelessly behind the times. And I certainly don’t understand the gibberish that the kids today use in texting. But LOL seems solidly in the “both sexes use” camp . . . although I did see a few articles that suggested that LOL is now outdated for both men and women, and both are using LMAO/LMFAO in its place.*

*I’m quite skeptical about this, to be clear.

[Reallynotbob]

I'm dense... can you elaborate on your Niel Degrasse Tyson comment?

[Brett Bellmore]

Fact checking Neil Degrasse Tyson

Much like Bill Nye the Not a Scientist Guy, if you actually have any general scientific knowledge, and pay much attention to Tyson, you're going to be face planting a lot.

[GKHoff]

Bill Nye the Nonsense Guy is not fit to light Mr. Wizard's Bunsen Burner.

[Sarcastr0]

As someone who saw both, they both had great shows doing basically the same thing a generation apart.

You want to let Nye's later more political stands effect your judgement of him, go ahead. But that's you, not him.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Well, no, if he changed to include more politics, that's him, not his listeners.

[Flight-ER-Doc]

As a scientist he was a mediocre mechanical engineer at Boeing.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Tyson really lost it with his one-line constitution for "Rationalia":

All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.

Before that, he was just another bloviating talking head. After that, he was either stupid or thought his audience was.

[Michael P]

It's probably pretty close to this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/neil-degrasse-tysons-tweets-are-so-bad-and-he-needs-to-go-away/
Or this: https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/17/some-days-its-very-hard-to-defend-neil-degrasse-tyson

Science popularizers inherently rely a lot on their own popularity, so they tend to cultivate that -- and especially in today's media culture, hot takes are a common technique to do that.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think the bigger factor is that you don't tend to go into science popularizing if you're... actually any good at science. It's a fallback position if you pursue a science education, and are good at talking but bad at actual science.

[Sarcastr0]

I don't think that's right.

Different people are driven by different things. You can be good at science, but get a bigger charge out of sharing it than performing it.

I think it's more the demand signal - we want flash and drama and that is in direct tension to well performed science communication.

[Brett Bellmore]

I agree that it’s possible to be a science popularizer and be good at science, though that combination of skills won’t be common. Carl Sagan, for instance. He was both. C. L. Stong, author of SciAm’s Amateur Scientist column, is another example. Mr. Wizard demonstrated that you didn’t have to be a serious scientist or engineer to be a good popularizer, though he did have SOME science background.

But I don’t think you can make the case that Tyson is both. That link I provided has a long list of him simply getting things face palmingly wrong, and he doesn’t have any track record at actual science. I think he’s simply not very good at science, but he IS good at promotion.

[Sarcastr0]

Oh, I'm not making the case about Tyson, just in general.

I've not done a dive into his PhD or bench work, but it is clear that right now he is bad, whether by laziness or lack of ability does not matter.

[Sarcastr0]

Less pointedly than those below, it's about a public intellectual versus a bench scientist.

Different standards of fidelity, of what's relevant/interesting, of how much to couch your statements, etc.

I also don't much like how much he gatekeeps, but that's more personal to him and I was making a broader statement about performing science versus popularizing it.

[Reallynotbob]

Thanks for the elaboration! It's tough to be on the popularizing front for any developing science, I think. On one hand, the public has a difficult time accounting for proper nuance and varied levels of certainty. On the other hand, the more one paves over detail in service of comprehension, the less "scientific" one is being.

Tyson, to me, is a science evangelist. He both popularizes specific science news, and advocates a broader objectivist philosophy.

None of which is to excuse factual errors he has made in public comments.

[Sarcastr0]

It is challenging - I think some unpopularity with those in the weeds is baked in.

But as an evangelist I think he has too much of an 'experts as put-upon priesthood' vibe. Especially in his Cosmos miniseries.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Geology Illustrated by John S. Shelton.

Spectacular. It's the ultimate Rocks for Jocks resource. A masterpiece of explanation. No longer in print, but widely available used. Just Google the title.

The method is systematic review of physical and historical geology. The presentation is organized around superb black and white photographs (often aerial photographs). Those are presented side-by-side with painstaking geologic diagrams, illustrating each photograph to a matching scale. Those are accompanied by lucid explanatory captions and texts. Thus, for each topic illustrated (hundreds), you get outstanding geologic exemplars, photographed, diagrammed, and explained.

If you have studied this book, no matter where you go, you will see with new insight, again and again, the geologic history which formed—and crucially, continues to form—the ground under your feet.

Anyone who proposes to buy a home, or site a new one, would be especially wise to get this book before looking at what is on the market.

[DaveM]

Geology is destiny.

[Stepped Reckoner]

If geology is your bag, you need to read Annals Of The Former World by John McPhee. (Pulitzer Prize, 1999, back when that award was more trustworthy) Brilliantly written, almost magically so.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Stepped Reckoner — Agree. I read it, and re-read it every five years or so. I recently loaned one of my copies to my former-English professor neighbor, who was somehow unfamiliar with McPhee. Now he raves about McPhee's style.

[LawTalkingGuy]

The Theoretical Minimum Series by Leonard Susskind and various co-authors. A step by step to understanding the math behind physics. In theory you don’t need more than familiarity with basic algebra. He explains the basics of many concepts. So a lot will seem familiar if you have taken calculus or linear algebra. If not it can be a bit of a challenge (I took undergrad calc so the first book on classical mechanics was pretty breezy but didn’t take linear algebra so I have done a lot of re-reading of the quantum mechanics book) But it does get more and more advanced as the series goes on.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Not a book, but 3Blue1Brown is a great mathematics YouTube channel.

[Mark Regan]

Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation -- dumb title, great history of molecular biology.

[Sarcastr0]

"The God Particle' by Leon Lederman was formative for me growing up wanting to do physics.

I got him to sign it years later when I was an intern at Fermilab.

[Brett Bellmore]

I've always regretted that I never had my copy of The Prospect of Immortality signed back when I had dinner at Ettinger's house.

[ducksalad]

Any recommendations for an entry-level textbook in quantum mechanics / particle physics?

Not looking for a popular science book that's mostly words, discussions of famous experiments, and inspiring personal stories of discovery. More like something that assumes knowledge of undergraduate level calculus, linear algebra, probability, and is intended to get someone (eventually) to where they can do useful quantitative work, for example, estimate the basic properties of a semiconductor material given the structure. It would be nice to have worked examples with numbers.

Most of the textbooks I've looked at that aren't pop-sci go too far in the other direction: lots of reasonably well-explained formalism but very vague on concrete meaning. Sometimes I want to yell at the author something like "what are the damn units?".

[DaveM]

Don’t get me started. However, Sabine Hossenfelder has a series of of courses on the topic over on brilliant.com that she claims will make one understand it all (https://brilliant.org/courses/sabine/).

[ducksalad]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

[Jerry B.]

"The Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail" by Keith Heyer Meldahl.

[santamonica811]

+1

[DaveM]

One of the more interesting "soft" science books I've read recently is "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" by Mattias Desmet (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60430391-the-psychology-of-totalitarianism), a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent. In this book he identifies the emotional needs and group dynamics that lead to successful totalitarian regimes. Quite interesting and insightful, I thought.

[Reallynotbob]

"Schroedinger's Kittens" by John Gribben. Excellent layperson's review of the formative light and quantum mechanics experiments, plus implications. It's a little dated from 1996 (but you're reading for the basics anyway) but the author has done updated audiobooks available on Audible.
https://a.co/d/7u6kx7c

"Why Trust Science?" by Naomi Oreskes. Accessible philosophy of science discussion. First third of the book is an engaging history of the philosophy of science. Oreskes argues science is as social as it is empirical. She offers examples of systematic macro errors in history and suggests ways to counter science-wide biases.
https://a.co/d/fmNzEWu

[Rossami]

Sorry but I think Oreskes knows as much about science and the scientific method as the author of the recent article "Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University" knows about free speech. That is, just enough to get everything spectacularly backwards.

[Flight-ER-Doc]

Principia - Newton. The second most important book ever written

[Frank Drackman]

Newton, how he never ended up on that "Meeting of Minds" show in the 70's....invents Calculus in an afternoon, invented the Reflecting Telescopes still in use today,

[The Margrave of Azilia]

The *most* important book ever written was Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things, by Berkeley Breathed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Dreams_and_Stranger_Things

[Ridgeway]

History of the Atomic Bomb (Rhodes) is a mixture of history and science, but it is great for both.

[Stephen Lathrop]

History, science, and brilliant capsule biography.

[NOVA Lawyer]

It is an absolutely brilliant book.

[JonFrum]

Who we are and how we got here : ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, by David Reich The ability to get DNA out of skeletons has revolutionized archaeology. On top of that, it has revealed 'ghost species' of humans that we didn't know existed. A real eye opener.
Blueprint, by Robert Plomin. Behavioral genetics doesn't sound appetizing, but it tells us an enormous amount about ourselves. With the tools of molecular genetics and using twins and adopted people, many uncomfortable truths have been revealed regarding the old nature/nurture battle. Such as, adopted kids are more like their birth parents than the parents who raised them from earliest childhood. IQ is the same. The science is in.

[GKHoff]

I second that recommendation.

[Sarcastr0]

Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder.
I don’t care for her framing device, but her thesis and base argument is revelatory.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Douglas Hofstadter: "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "I Am A Strange Loop"

[SRG2]

What a great book GEB was! I lent my copy to a hot potential GF and when she went, she kept it.

[Brett Bellmore]

I love that book, too. I've given my copy to my son.

[Doug Huffman]

A great book. I have given away many copies, not all intentionally. Just recently one wandered back to me.

[Rossami]

This will be a fun one. In rough order:
- Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman - R Feynman
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - R Feynman
- The Panda's Thumb - S Gould
- A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown - Baker, et al
- The Dinosaur Heresies - R Bakker
- What Do You Care What Other People Think - R Feynman
- The Physics of Baseball - R Adair
- Why We Get Sick - Nesse & Williams
- The Hot Zone - R Preston
- almost anything by Mary Roach but I especially liked Bonk and Stiff
- Girls of Atomic City - D Kiernan
- How To - R Munroe
- A Brief History of Time - S Hawking

If the "science" topic includes math, include:
- Flatland - E Abbott
- Godel, Escher, Bach - D Hofstadter
- How to Lie With Statistics - D Huff

If it includes economics, add:
- Freakonomics - Levitt & Dubner

[ducksalad]

"Popular" Math:

Flatland – the math/geometry isn’t anything very enlightening for someone who’s already thought about it. But the society he constructs and his attitude toward women are amusing.

The History of Pi by Beckmann. Some actually interesting math mixed with the type of cynical politics and reading of history that might appeal to VC readers.

Mathsemantics by MacNeal. Useful reading, even for people who are (or think they are) already good with numbers. Wish I could make all college STEM freshmen read it.

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos.

[SRG2]

Good selection - I've read most of those.

[epeeist]

Similarly on the assumption math is included, a choice that was aimed at elementary school students (old enough that there was once a filmstrip!), but gets into advanced topics entertainingly enough that I later bought them as an adult
:
aha! Insight
aha! Gotcha
by Martin Gardner

Later collected in one volume.

Amusing, illustrated with simple cartoons, Gotcha is my preference though they're both excellent. Gets into some very advanced topics in an understandable way such as infinite set theory and cardinality (levels of) infinity aleph-zero, etc. (i.e. one infinite set may have a higher cardinality, be more infinite if you like, based on one set not being mappable to another, e.g. natural numbers are infinite aleph-zero but real numbers have a higher cardinality, aleph-one). Pascal's wager and criticisms of it discussed (not that that's math, logic and paradoxes also addressed, but by way of example of an advanced topic - good luck having a discussion about that in today's schools though...)

[sbratman]

To shamelessly self-plug:
Spontaneous Order and the Origin of Life (a popularization of Smith and Morowitz's The Origin and Nature of Life and Earth, well reviewed by Smith).

What Evolution Learns (a popularization of ideas from computational evolutionary biology that find a close correspondence between evolutionary processes and neural network learning)

Cooperation and the Evolution of Human Nature (a popularization of Kim Sterelny's ideas on how human ancestors evaded the Prisoner's dilemma and created a novel form of cooperation, one that is not limited to relatives).

[GKHoff]

The best explanation of quantum physics I've found is Waves In An Impossible Sea, by Matt Strassler.

An interesting expose of "fraud, bias and hype" in scientific research: Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie.

[Kazinski]

I really liked "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law".

The math is way over my head, but it does a good job of explaining the concepts of string theory, and why they are likely a dead end.

[ClinardHanby]

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. It's very readable. It's very persuasive. It almost literally shook up the world. Everyone should read it.

[Frank Drackman]

the Category is "Nonfiction"

[Absaroka]

In that vein, any of the translations of Galileo's "Starry Messenger". This included his telescopic observations of craters of the moon. His deduction that the moon was cratered instead of a perfect sphere was heresy at the time - heavenly bodies must be perfect spheres, after all.

Anyone with a pair of decent binocs can verify his findings today, but they were revolutionary in his day. He lays it all out with irrefutable logic. We take it for granted today, but it was a giant intellectual leap at the time.

(and +1 on Darwin ... that's how to do science right)

(I like to take binocs out on half moon nights at our cabin and check him again ... yep, he's still right!)

[Zarniwoop]

John McPhee, The Control of Nature

The Control of Nature is a 1989 nonfiction book by John McPhee that chronicles three attempts to control natural processes that had varying success. The book combines three long essays previously published in The New Yorker: “Atchafalaya”, “Cooling the Lava”, and “Los Angeles Against the Mountains”. These respectively describe the Old River Control Structure regulating inflow to the Atchafalaya River; the Eldfell volcanic eruption of 1973; and debris flow from the San Gabriel Mountains.

Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume made The New York Times Best Seller list,[1] was the 1991 winner of the Royal Society’s Rhone-Poulenc Prize, the American Historical Association’s Forkosch Award, and was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

In the area of scientific biography, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, by Kenneth Silverman, Hachette Books, 2004

[Robert Efroymson]

The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl, a (former?) colleague of yours.

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

General Chemistry or The Nature of the Chemical Bond both by Linus Pauling

Relativity, the Special and General Theories: a Simple Explanation which Anyone Can Understand by Albert Einstein

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall

Modern Molecular Photochemistry by Nicholas J. Turro. Let’s get back to the fundamentals!

In Vivo Incorporation of Unnatural Amino Acids into Proteins by Peter G. Schultz. This is probably more important to you than you probably think. Sure, our kids are learning what the genetic code is, in high school, but why is it what it is? (Sure, AUG codes for methionine – everybody knows that – but what makes it code for methionine? More broadly, why do natural proteins consist of only 20 canonical amino-acids (plus a few occasional modifications after the protein is synthesized)?

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

Almost forgot: The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World by Ira R. Bashkow

[Brett Bellmore]

That last one reminded me of one of the essays in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, which I'd enjoyed, so I thought of buying it. But, man, is it ever expensive at Amazon, $110 for a used paperback!

The same question can be asked of DNA and RNA; The nucleotides that are actually used in our biology aren't the only possible ones. In fact, substituting one of the nucleotides with an unnatural one that codes anyway is a technique in MRNA vaccines to protect them against swiftly being eliminated by cellular machinery. Some viruses use this technique, too.

Nucleotide "recoding", where codons that correspond to particular amino acids are changed from the near universal code to something different, has been proposed as a way to render cells totally immune to viral infections.

[Internet sloth]

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel E Lieberman

A Soil Owner's Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health by Jon Stika

[NOVA Lawyer]

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Along with Kahneman, probably the two most important non-fiction science (for popular audiences) I have read. Both are fascinating and will deepen your understanding of the world.

[vinny]

“The Drunkard’s Walk” for how probability is around us

“A Splintered History of Wood”

The first is technically non-scientific (just highly mathematical) while the second is kind of all over the place for wood and woodworking in general with some history, some science, some pop culture uses, and some tidbits (eg the massive trees out west are so large you can find smaller trees growing on their branches/crotches)

[Bill Poser]

For those who like Gould's Wonderful Life, I recommend Simon Conway Morris's Crucible of Creation. Morris is a specialist in the Burgess Shale fauna that Gould discusses. He disagrees with Gould on a number of points, but whoever you agree with , he has a lot of interesting things to say about the Cambrian explosion.

[Bill Poser]

A true classic in mathematical biology is D'arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, which explains a variety of facts in biology as physical optimizations, e.g. why honeycomb cells are hexagonal. He did not cast his explanations in evolutionary terms, but his work generally remains valid when so recast. It is beautifully written. A fairly high mathematical level is required.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Notions of Numeracy: The Seductive Boundary Between Mathematics and Ideology.

Not yet written. A title I made up. Somebody, please write this book!

[Doug Huffman]

The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal 1st Edition
by Professor James Franklin (Author)
The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1st edition (June 22, 2001)

Includes an hermeneutic evaluation of the propriety of Christ’s conviction. Then two witnesses of adequate stature were considered proof.

[Frank Drackman]

The year I was homeschooled (5th grade can you tell?(must have been the grade they teach capitalization), my Mom sure could, drove her crazy) I had to read “Asimov’s New Guide to Science.” (a few years later read his "Understanding Physics", I still don't understand Physics (Electricity mostly)
and “A Primer for Star Gazers” (Published in 1946, still great, the stars haven’t moved much in the last 78 years) Highlights of 73-74, Comet Kohoutek and the night I saw Uranus with the naked eye (for fun, tell someone “Uranus was very beautiful last night”
(And no Ritalin for ADD Frankie in 1974, I had one of those Library desks where you can’t see to either side, and “Blinders” taped to the Bill of my baseball cap) and with no disruptions, other students, Mom taught me up to 9th grade level in a few months (except for the capitalization)

Frank

[FDG]

Moonwalking With Einstein - Joshua Foer

[hobie]

Geez...no one said "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Green

[Frank Drackman]

No Homo, but good pick and maybe you are the “Anti-Frank”(Bizarro Frank? Negative Frank? (-) Frank? Anti-Frank? but I love that one also, the sequel, not so much.

[Phosita]

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my own popular science-law book The Genome Defense, https://genomedefense.org Genetic diagnostics, cancer and patents.

[Randal]

The best example of how to change the world in under 100 pages:

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Claude-Shannon/dp/0252725484/

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf

Technical, but concise. The math isn’t even complicated.

[MN2828]

The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind

If this is the book I am remembering, it explains string theory at a lay person level. Really, don't need more than high school physics to understand what Susskind is saying. Also, Susskind has an interesting (and amusing) insight into physicists and their mind set.

[Spencer]

George Polya, How to Solve It.

Accept no substitutes. This is the Real Thing. The best thing ever written about Science. Or about solving any problem. Nothing else comes close.

Superficially about heuristics for solving math problems, but really about what Science is and how to do it. Accessible to any moderately intelligent 10 year old.

Two other thoughts:

Math is not a science, but, since most people are misguided on that topic:

Hardy & Wright, An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. Any moderately intelligent 15 year old could devour it.

Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology is the best thing ever written about Math, about Mathematicians and about why Mathematicians do Math.