I second The Ancestor’s Tale.
Bryson’s book is fun - but hardly mind-blowing. It doesn’t try to change the reader’s worldview as much as condense our history of thinking and delve into the characters behind some of the stories.
Timothy Ferris is a much better “science writer for the layman” than Bryson - Coming of Age in the Milky Way and the Whole Shebang are great.
If you really want your mind blown, though, try reading “Programming the Universe” by Seth Lloyd. He is the scientist credited with creating the first viable design for a computer that exploits quantum mechanical properties for data processing.
What’s cool and mind-blowing is that Lloyd puts forth a solid, convincing argument that ***information * ** - it’s creation, preservation, destruction, etc. - is as critical a dimension to analyze as energy/matter when considering how the universe was formed, evolved and currently functions. So he is basically arguing that previously, we might as well have been analyzing the length of things, not realizing that we need to take width into acount width, too - we were missing a critical dimension: information. His descriptions of how information manifests as a critical dimension to cosmology is fascinating.
It is not an easy read - it was written intended for the layman, but this type of stuff doesn’t lend itself to spoon feeding. But it is reasonably accessible - and certainly mind-blowing…
Richard Feynman’s QED is an amazing read, dealing with particle physics in an amazingly accessible format.
James Gleick’s Chaos, about chaos theory and mathematics, is one of the only biography/history books about math that hasn’t put me to sleep.
J-P Luminet’s Black Holes takes a wonderful speculative thought experiment approach to the subject, which was great fun, and I came out of it with the urge to write a dozen sci-fi novels.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman is technically fiction, but it definitely makes you think about some of the biggest things there are to think about. And reading it is just a beautiful experience.
You know, this is kinda disappointing. Of all the suggestions in this thread you choose the one that has by far the worst science and the one that is the oldest (1980) meaning that however good it was it will have missed out on a lifetime’s worth of new discoveries about the universe. As with dinosaurs, probably 50% of what we know has come since 1980.
I hope you go on to some of the other books, because these will give you a seriously warped understanding of today’s science.
Cosmos is still a good read, but I agree that many aspects of it are dated, and when Sagan gets outside of his area of expertiese (particularly in his misbegotten explanation of the evolution of the heikegani (Samurai) crab) he sometimes misses the mark. On the other hand, he’s very good at laying out the history behind various discoveries in physical science and astronomy, and imbues the book with his enthusiasm. It’s not the first book I’d pick among the options listed, but I wouldn’t eschew it just due to its age, either.
The less said about Bryson the better.
Stranger
Well, I intentionally chose those because they seemed like the most accessible general surveys of and introductions to the subject matter. After I read them, I can move on to more specific and specialized books.
. . . mindblowing . . .
The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul by Francis Crick
While they don’t match the OP’s criteria, I think the folks reading and/or posting in this thread would really enjoy these two books:
What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty - edited by John Brockman and
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable - edited by John Brockman
Fascinating collections of short essays on these questions by fascinating writers. Made me think of the dope when I read them. (what is your dangerous idea could be a good thread).