Not to marginalize the discussion on geopolitics (Thanks for the awesome list!), but I'm curious if any of the sciency-minded people on hubski can contribute any lists in the same vein of this on other genres.
Thanks for the mention lil. I have replicated the list from that article below, along with some additional books that I either A) forgot to mention last time, or B) have since read and feel worthy of inclusion: --- The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 by Alfred Crosby (1972) Orientalism by Edward Said (1979) Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan (1985) The Global Brain by Peter Russell (1985) Hyperspace by Michio Kaku (1994) Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan (1994) History of God by Karen Armstrong (1994) The Major Transitions in Evolution by John Smith & Eors Szathmary (1995) The Demon-Hauned World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (1996) The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm (1996) Beyond art: Pleistocene image and symbol by Margaret Conkey (1997) The Symbolic Species by Terrance Deacon (1997) Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins (1998) The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behaviour by Craig Stanford (1999) The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil (2000) The Origins of LIfe: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language by John Smith & Eors Szathmary (2000) Global Brain by Howard Bloom (2000) A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins (2003) On The Shoulders of Giants by Stephen Hawking (2003) The unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial development by David Landes (2003) Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2004) A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2004) The Epic of Evolution by Eric Chaisson (2005) Holistic Darwinism by Peter Corning (2005) Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll (2006) The Living Cosmos: Our Search for Life in the Universe by Chris Impey (2007) The Extended Mind by Robert Logan (2007) The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker (2007) History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer (2007) Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku (2008) The Wayfinders by Wade Davis (2009) The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester (2009) Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shuban (2009) Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham (2009) Jane Goodall: 50 Years at Gombe by Jane Goodall (2010) The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (2011) Big History and the Future of Humanity by Fred Spier (2011) Evolution: The First Four Billion Years ed. by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis (2011) The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (2011) The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (2011) Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2012) Masters of the Planet by Ian Tattersall (2012) Debt: The first 5,000 years by David Graeber (2012) Wild Cultures: A Comparison of Chimpanzee and Human Cultures by Christophe Boesch (2012) The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking (2012) Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth by Chris Stringer (2012) --- Hope you find it useful thundara
Haha, I'd be impressed too - but no I copy and pasted from my old list and added a few extra books from a bibliography on my hard drive.
This is hard. Because I want to give you books where you could easily LEARN physics and learn about the problem solving methodology, but at the same time, learning science comes from DOING science and not from reading about science.
What I mean is this: So you can read the Feynman Lectures but without having problem sets at the end, you're not going to retiain more than an abstract view of the situation. On the other hand, I could also suggest Griffith's "Introduction to Electrodynamics" Which is widely regarded as the best resource for learning about Electrodynamics, but you'd be scared off by the time you got to the first chapter if you weren't prepared to do multivariable calculus. In either of these cases though you still aren't learning about the science, you are learning about how to calculate the things we already know. So in this case I would suggest G. Polya's "How to Solve it" while focused on the pedagogy of mathematics, also offers a great way to learn about and solve problems. Of course there are popular science books, and those are fine if you are fine with having an abstract view of the course of science Six Easy Pieces - Feynman
A Brief History of Time - Hawking
Cosmos - Sagan
Demon Haunted World - Sagan
What Evolution Is - Ernst Mayr For me though the more satisfying route in the long run is to sit down and look at the problems others have solved, and try to solve them yourself. See what kind of conclusions you come to.
A bit inside me is humored by the fact that I originally asked this question with molecular biology in mind, then got two big reply consisting of largely anthropology and physics topics. Good on you for picking out the more general problem-solving / abstract approaches to understanding arbitrary phenomena though!
Hi thundara - maybe you didn't see this post by theadvancedapes about a year ago. It's called Shoulders of Giants. The hubski link will take you to Cadell's article where he writes, "The following is a list of the top 10 modern scientists who have influenced my perceptions, ideas, and thoughts regarding the universe and our species’ place within it." It's a wonderful list of scientists and their books. Check it out.
List the genres to pick from? I'm primarily interested in science history at the moment (How do we know what we know, what were the big changes in philosophy over time, etc), but it's much more fun to be reminded of what you're not already thinking about. Currently working on this lil' book on the lambda virus, previous to that was one on oncogene research (Little out of date, but does a good job of following the history up to the 1980s).
Yeah, I can't do it that way. "Give us a list of stuff you're well-read on." It's more like "hey, this discussion came up, and as it turns out I've got an assload of research in my background." Inconvenient, I know, but there it is. As far as the history of science, I'm far more of a populist. I will say that anyone who hasn't seen Connections in its entirety is missing out, particularly as they're all up on Youtube.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson