Science! Message Board

I enjoy biographical or autobiographical stories of scientific discovery. Any suggestions? I recently enjoyed The First Human by Ann Gibbons.

Two of my all-time favorite discovery books are Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man and Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory.

I seem to having a bit of a problem joining this group, but I'm sure it will work out. I had the priveledge of hearing Jane Goodall speak , just last week, she is a very inspirational person. Cheers, Feach.

Reading The Selfish Gene in my late teens changed my entire way of thinking about the world, and has had enormous influence on my life since then.

Hello Shiloh,

I have just started to catalog, but this subject is one of my favorites also. I will send you some suggestions as I come across them in my efforts.

Also, It's good to be in a group like this.

Yours,

I loved science and the natural world since childhood. My favorite science books I can recall are The Blind Watchmaker and Boltzman's Atom.

Please come checkout the new group I have created.

Evolve!

Anybody ever read Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks? I love that book, but I gave my copy away.

I got interested in science by reading some of Roy Chapman Andrews autobiography (Under a Lucky Star) and his fiction (The Quest of the Snow Leopard). He was the model for Indiana Jones, and a real story-teller paleontologist. If you run across any of his works, they are worth a good read. However, some of his accounts to the Gobi desert in the 1920s or along the Vietnam border hunting tigers are not now politically correct- they are still great adventure stories.
Borrow a couple from your local public library. You'll be glad you did.

hey hadden, you might also like Mark Norell's book Unearthing the Dragon. Fun stuff there.

hey hadden, you might also like Mark Norell's book Unearthing the Dragon. Fun stuff there.

How strange that the shared list I have on my screen seems to be all Harry Potter and Tolkein? Is that a glitch, or is there a connection between science and fantasy? I have been reading a lot of neuroscience since finding Rita Carter's books on consciousness. Just finished Bill Bryson's popular science tomb. Loved it. I am not a scientist, so finds some of the physics etc a little to hard.

The Tao of Physics gave me a very different view on Science! It's written by a Physicist linking it to Eastern philosophy.

Any Carl Sagan fans? I read The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark not too long ago, and I loved it so much. I started to read Cosmos, but when they started re-airing the TV series, I started watching it. I do plan on reading it eventually, but it's pretty much verbatum on the TV show, and it's really interesting to hear it from Sagan himself.

Next I plan on reading Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. I loved The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I'm interested in hearing his thoughts about animals on the verge of being extinct. I had to order it from Amazon, so I have to be patient, which is so difficult for me :-).

I recently enjoyed The Seashell on the Mountaintop. It's a short, light read and a great tale of scientific discovery and society.

Last Chance to see: the book Douglas Adams said he was most proud of. At anotherchancetosee.blogspot.com you can see how the endangered animals described in the book are doing today.

Just adding the touchstones for the selfish gene and Tao of physics that have been mentioned earlier.

If you like biographies of scientists and turn-of-the-century stuff, I strongly recommend the biography of Marie Curie called Madame Curie; I found it excellent. It was written and published by her daughter only a couple of years after Mrs Curie died.

All science fans should read The Unnatural Nature of Science, a small but essential book by Lewis Wolpert.

I also recommend The Eighth Day of Creation, a wonderful account of the origins of molecular biology, including the discovery of the structure of DNA. Horace Freeland Judson is a master of the science narrative.

If you like personal memoirs, try any book by Oliver Sacks, e.g., The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales and Uncle Tungsten.

I liked the autobiographical Adventures of a Mathematician by Ulam which includes the Los Alamos project.
Not biographical, but Mind Children, The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Moravec gave me quite a surprise and introduced me to the possibilities of machine intelligence.
I also think that McCrone's book on consciousness, Going Inside is an excellent synthesis with the whole being much more than the parts.

Thanks for the Ulam recommendation... that looks like an amazing book. If you like math biographies, I can highly recommend A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy. It's very sad but still a quite amazing look at the mathematical mind.

Norbert Wiener's memoir Ex-Prodigy seems to be little read these days, but I read it last year and found it really absorbing.

Has anyone else read the fairly recent book Sex, Drugs, and DNA? I don't quite know how I feel about it and others like it. On one hand they open up some ideas to a more public forum that they might not have otherwise considered, but it also takes something away from research and puts some of it in an almost mocking light.

So many writers (books and columns) poke fun at how inconclusive science can be or how manipulated when funded by the wrong people-- which is true at times, granted-- but it does put a negetive face on it all. I think the only really good book in the realm of layman's science has been Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Some of my favorites in terms of popular science:

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garett, and The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker

I have long been impressed with how well many world-class scientists write about science in general--how science works and its profound place in modern culture. In this genre I recommend Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins and a couple of classics, which if no longer current on the specifics of the science they discuss, remain extraordinarly important to general discussions about science, science education, and the like: Science and the Modern World by A.N. Whitehead and Science and Human Values by Jacob Bronowski.

mosshead, yes, I read that from the library. The only book of Sacks' in my library is the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Most of his books are enjoyable because he has such a fresh way of looking at people and events. His uncle tungsten is a real character.

Shiloh, do you want to dig into physics? read Richard Rhodes the making of the atomic bomb and follow with his Dark Sun about the hydrogen bomb. NOT TERRY PRATCHETT!!--LT is extrapolating with the incorrect book. Ah well, no one is perfect.

robertsgirl and others, Thanks for all of these incredible book ideas. Now if I could only quit my job and read fulltime!

One great book I recommend to all is Lonely Planets, by David Grinspoon. It's all about extraterrestrial life. I loved it.

Shiloh: check out Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick. It is a wonderful read. Feynman invented quantum physics interaction notation and was the guy who figured out how the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster happened. Very interesting bio. Also, I highly recommend ALL of Gleick's works, especially Chaos: the making of a new science. Cheerio...

I'd recommend What Little I Remember by Otto Frisch which besides being a charming autobiographical book, also describes the discovery of nuclear fission. Then there's The Double Helix by James Watson, and any of the Feynman books.

Among mathematical biographies, I liked I Want to be a Mathematician by Paul Halmos and Adventures of a Mathematician by Stanislaw Ulam. And of course, E. T. Bell's Men of Mathematics is a great read that covers lots of mathematicians -- it is a bit dated but brings all the greats to life.

-K

One book I'd definitly recommend is Critical Mass by Philip Ball - it's a very good introduction to complexity science, which is kind of the big new fashionable area in science (arguably too fashionable as the university I work at's just employed about 10 new academics in it - but then I'm probably just an embittered condensed matter physicist....:-( ).

A book I actually found a bit dissappointing was 4 Colours Suffice - wouldn't want to put anyone of reading it (it was very readable), but it seemed a bit anticlimatic to me.

I recently read The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma. It was an interesting recap of the various theories. There is a chapter devoted to the wacky theories, but most of the book is about the science of each real one. Very well done.

MrKris,
I found Richard Feyman just wonderful to read, speaking as a science dunce. What a maverick!

Feynman is, of course, my hero. I recommend The Pleasure of Finding Things Out or QED: the Strange Theory of Light and Matter. These books are not about him, but by him, and so give a great insight into his own way of thinking without the technicalities of his physics lectures.

I have always been interested in science, but it was Gleick's Chaos that rekindled that interest and got me reading everything I got my hands on. I discovered the works of Dawkins, Gould, and Wilson in biology, and many works on quantum theory.

It all comes to a head, however, with Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery. This is a beautifully written work that delves into what we know, how we know it, and what it means to know something. It could be the most important work of the twentieth century, as it takes account of the best work in physics, as well as the implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

I noted earlier that I admire the work of Horace Freeland Judson. I'd like to add a recommendation for his The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. It's a serious, important book written with vigor.

Richard Feynman was involved in the Manhattan Project as a young man fresh out of college, but when he saw the results of that program i.e. the atomic bomb he vowed to never do anything but theoretical science! That is he would never again participate in a scientific venture aimed at a specific result. 'The bomb' scared a lot of the people who helped build it! Feynman had a wide range of interests & a great sense of humor he wrote several books some on science but some about his other interests & very funny! Vanye

A couple of good reads that come to my mind are Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney and The Big Questions by Richard Morris.

(I tried to fix the touchstones in my previous post, but they wouldn't fix, so I just posted them again. They seem to be working this time.)

There's an interesting debate going on over in the Christianity group right now about teaching religious beliefs in science classes.

Link.

I read Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimention. Now I'm a Physics Major.

I've just finished Critical Mass. I was wandering how much the physics in it were simplified for the mass public. It's nice to hear a recommendation from a physicist for it.

There's been a discussion among science bloggers about the idea of having a science debate included in the presidential debates. A bunch of them have come together with other scientists to start a campaign to bring science into the debates.

View the ScienceDebate2008 website.

#48, thanks for posting this. I also posted about it in the "Happy Heathens" group.

This sort of debate is really needed these days!

hi. Science rocks…

I read molecules of emotion in high school after my biology teacher mentioned it in class. Excluding microbe hunters, it was the first adult-oriented science memoir/biography I'd read. So I've got a soft spot for it. And it's easy to understand for those with little science background.

I enjoyed uncle tungsten. I wanted to hear him speak but the line was down the street.