The best popular science books

I just ran across this post by Steven Weinberg listing the best science books for the general reader. For the most part, I like the list (see below). I own 6 of the books, and have read most of 4 of them. There are some that I think are excellent, like Gamow's The Birth and Death of the Sun, although I prefer One, Two, Three...Infinity by the same author better. Feynman's The Character of Physical Law I think is excellent. But my favorite book, although it's probably best for someone with a technical bent, not a general reader, is Weinberg's own The First Three Minutes. I first read that book between my junior and senior years as a physics major at UC Santa Cruz, and was literally blown away. It had a huge impact on me. Although I had already decided to lead a life in physics, that was at a point where I found everything having to do with physics incredibly cool and interesting.

I was led to Weinberg's article (which is an interesting and well-written article, completely separate from his list of books) by this article by Chad Orzel. To be honest, I wasn't very impressed by Orzel's book on 'how to teach your dog physics.' It may play to the general reader who doesn't know anything about physics, but I'm more interested in books that are geared toward intelligent readers that know something about physics. Along this vein, I hand out such books to students in my introductory (and advanced) physics classes who score well on exams. Especially freshman students taking university-level physics for the first time, I want to expand their knowledge about different kinds of physics and astronomy, and how to actually use the physics that we're learning. Along this line are the three books listed above, or Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory, or books by Isaac Asimov, or Lawrence Krauss's The Physics of Star Trek. Given the wide interest among students in string theory, the recent book by Jim Baggot, Farewell to Reality, gives a level-headed picture of what physics (and science) is, and how to think about cutting-edge physics when you are a freshman. I also pointedly do not give out any books by Michio Kaku, because he is definitely part of the problem. I've already mentioned in a previous post one of the best books for clearly stating which physical ideas are speculative, and which have lots of observational evidence.

Orzel gives his own list here, and chides Weinberg for being "in the Whig history mode," whatever that means. His first book is probably the worst science book every for the general reader - defined as someone who is not an expert in any of the science in the book, but hopefully will take away a realistic picture of what the important issues are. This bad book is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. First of all, Bryson is not a scientist. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in Bryson's case it is. He has no understanding of what science is all about, and hence he conveys many wrong things. I've read pieces of the book, and what I read seemed OK, even enlightening. This is probably true because Bryson is such a great writer. (In fact his comedy writing, like A Walk in the Woods, is top notch.) However, then I read an interesting review of the book by a scientist. They said that everything looked pretty good, but when he covered the reviewer's own field of expertise, Bryson got things wrong. So the reviewer asked other scientsist their opinion. They said essentially the same thing: "It's a great book, but when he talks about X [my field of expertise] he doesn't know what he's talking about." This means that the reader thinks he's getting an understanding of some technical issue, but he's getting the wrong understanding. And that's the worst kind of science writing because it's masquerading as good writing.

The only other books on Orzel's list that I've heard of before are Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps, and George Gamow's Mr Thompkins in Wonderland. All three are excellent, but I think the first two are not really for the general reader at all, and would require at least some formal education in physics at the university level, if not an undergraduate degree.

As I said, I give away books to my physics students, and over the past 10-15 years I've given away approximately 150 books. I get them from used book stores, and I often give away duplicate copies of the same book, for example, Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Below I give Weinberg's list of 13 books, and then I give all the books I've given away. There's not much overlap, mostly because I try to give away books that deal with physics and astronomy, either directly or indirectly.

Here is Weinberg's list:

Philosophical Letters (1733) Voltaire

The Origin of Species (1859) Charles Darwin

On a Piece of Chalk (1868) Thomas Huxley

The Mysterious Universe (1930) James Jeans

The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) George Gamow

The Character of Physical Law (1965) Richard Feynman

The Elegant Universe (1999) Brian Greene

The Selfish Gene (1976) Richard Dawkins

The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) Richard Rhodes

The Inflationary Universe (1997) Alan Guth

The Whole Shebang (1997) Timothy Ferris

Hiding in the Mirror (2005) Lawrence Krauss

Warped Passages (2005) Lisa Randall

And here is my list:

Abbott	Flatland: A romance of many dimensions
Andrade	Quanta
Andrade	Sir Isaac Newton: His life and work
Andrade	Rutherford and the nature of the atom
Asimov	Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright
Asimov	Understanding Physics: Motion, Sound, and Heat
Asimov	Atom: Journey across the subatomic cosmos
Asimov	The Collapsing Universe
Aveni	Conversing with the planets
Barrow	Theories of Everything
Barrow	The origin of the universe
Bergreen	Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth
Bodanis	E=mc2: A biography of the world's most famous equation
Bruce	Schrodinger's Rabbits
Calder	Einstein's Universe
Carter	Latitude: How American astronomers solved the mystery of variation
Chaikin	A Man on the Moon
Collins	Carrying the Fire
Coveney	The arrow of time
Crease	The second creation: Makers of the revolution in 20th-century physics
Davies	The Last Three Minutes
Davies	About Time: Einstein's unfinished revolution
Ehrlich	The cosmological milkshake
Einstein	Relativity: The special and the general theory
Einstein	Einstein's Miraculous Year
Ferris	The Whole Shebang
Feynman	Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
Fritz	Understanding Cosmology
Galileo	Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
Gamov	The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein
Gamow	Mr Tompkins in paperback
Gamow	One Two Three … Infinity
Gleick	Chaos
Gleick	Isaac Newton
Glenn	We Seven
Gray	Angle of Attack
Greene	The elegant universe
Gribbin	Spacewarps: A book about Black Holes, White Holes, Quasars, and our violent Universe
Gribbin	Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality
Gribbin	Stardust
Gribbin	Quantum Physics
Guth	The Inflationary Universe
Hawking	Black holes and baby universes
Hawking	A brief history of time
Hawking	A brief history of time: A reader's companion
Helmholtz	On the sensations of tone
Herbert	Faster than light
Jastrow	Red Giants and White Dwarfs
Jones	Physics for the rest of us
Kane	The Particle Garden
Krauss	Fear of Physics
Krauss	The Physics of Star Trek
Levin	How the universe got its spots
Lightman	Ancient Light: Our changing view of the universe
Lindley	The end of physics
Lloyd	Programming the Universe
Magueijo	Faster than the speed of light
Marshall	Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat?
McPhee	The curve of binding energy
Nahin	An imaginary tale: The story of i
Nasar	A beautiful mind
Pagels	The cosmic code
Parker	The vindication of the Big Bang
Peat	Superstrings and the search for the theory of everything
Petroski	To Engineer is Human
Pullman	The atom in the history of human thought
Randall	Warped passages
Reichenbach	From Copernicus to Einstein
Reid	Marie Curie
Rhodes	The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Segre	From falling bodies to radio waves
Shipman	Black holes, quasars, and the universe
Singh	Big Bang: The origin of the universe
Smolin	The trouble with physics
Smoot	Wrinkles in Time
Sobel	Longitude
Stewart	Nature's Numbers
Thorne	Black holes and time warps
Time-Life	The Far Planets
Trefil	The Unexpected Vista
Tufte	Visual Explanations
von Baeyer	Taming the Atom
von Baeyer	The Fermi Solution
Watson	The double helix
Weinberg	Dreams of a Final Theory
Weinberg	The First Three Minutes
Weinberg	The Discovery of Subatomic Particles
Will	Was Einstein Right?
Zee	Fearful symmetry: The search for beauty in modern physics