I was an A student all my years in school. But I know now that when it comes to science, I’m illiterate. Would you recommend me some books that would help me satisfy my curiosities about our world without having to go through another school experience.
Physics for Future Presidents is excellent.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a good place to start. Very entertaining too.
I’ve always found Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction and science essays to be very readable and engaging. Some of his older stuff is available for a few cents and still worth a read. Amazon.com : asimov
Depending on your interests, for conservation and ocean science:
Song for the Blue Ocean is good and well written, probably a few years old now, but the fundamental issues haven’t changed much.
Sea Change is another good one.
Bryson’s book and Asimov are always good suggestions too.
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a great read about the scientific method and why humans believe stupid shit. It’s compelling as all hell and really easy to read.
Michael Crichton has done a good job in explaining lots of science in his stories. Jurassic Park and Timeline did a lot for my understanding of advanced science.
It’s just the basics, but it’s presented in a way that a pleasure to read.
If you are interested in picking up some useful knowledge that will help you understand and be sceptical of the ‘science’ you see on the telly, I highly suggest ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre.
It’s short, readable and cheap. Written by an NHS doctor.
pdts
While not strictly about science, “The structure of scientific revolutions” is a great book for understanding how radical breakthroughs slowly percolate through the community and go from being outlandish to orthodox over time. A great example of this is how the idea of infectious proteins (prions) was first received to how it is regarded now.
Please clarify:
Are you interested in learning about the things science has enabled us to learn (e.g. the life cycle of the naked mole rat, or how internal combustion engines work),
or
are you interested in learning more about how science itself works (i.e. how we know what we know and don’t know)?
I’ll second both The Demon Haunted World and A Short History of Nearly Everything as excellent starting points - they’re good general overviews of, well, the world and nearly everything.
If you have the slightest interest in physics, or if you want to figure out if you have the slightest interest in physics, pick up Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces. It’s surprisingly accessible and probably the best ‘physics for people who haven’t thought about atoms since high school’ book out there.
Are there any particular fields or topics you want to explore? “Science” is kind of broad, so I’d say if you’re just looking for a broad-but-shallow introduction, you probably want to do some reading on the history of science. For that, you want to start with John Gribben’s The Scientists, which is kind of a collective biography of science (don’t let the page count turn you off - it’s an engaging read). If you want something even more broad than Gribben, see if you can your hands on The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin - again, don’t let the heft of it scare you off.
I’ll second Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces. Also, if you’re looking for an overview of certain subjects, I really enjoyed the Cartoon Guide to Physics and the Cartoon Guide to Genetics.
The book may be entertaining (depending on how palatable you find Bryson’s prose stylings) but no alleged facts stated within should be regarded as correct or canonical except purely by accident. I spent about twenty minutes skimming through a few chapters in a bookstore and found no less than one error per page, some of them absolutely glaring. Although Bryson claims that the book was vetted by peers in the respective fields, I find it hard to believe that an undergraduate astronomy student wouldn’t have torn out his chapters on cosmology and the solar system and left them in the bin; it would be difficult to pack more wrong onto the page. In [POST=8729648]this thread[/POST] I describe just a few of Bryson’s more egregious errors. The only thing I’ll believe out of this book is Bryson’s introduction where he explains that he learned virtually nothing about science in school.
It is difficult to cite a single book for the self-described “science illiterate” but a good starting point for general knowledge about science would be Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (though it has a few errors and anachronisms), or Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy. Richard Feynman’s autobiographical writing (mostly transcriptions from lectures and informal writing) are good at providing the mindset behind actual science, i.e. how to think about things in a skeptical but constructive way. The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out is probably a good summary, though you can find most of the content online if you look around.
I think there is a lot of merit in reading some science history to understand how different fields came about. One particular favorite is Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species, Darwin’s (edited) diary of his famous trip around the world, including his definitive researches of the Galapagos finches, and his basic, paradigm-changing thesis on natural selection, which was incidentally the height of popular science writing of its day, and save for the somewhat prolix prose is extremely accessible by the general public.
The Best Science Writing of XXXX are also pretty good collections of science writing, drawing from both unknown writers and old hats like David Quammen, John McPhee, Natalie Angier, and the late Stephen J. Gould. They give you a good idea of who you like to read and what fields you’re actually interested in, and you can then go and find books and compilations by those authors; Gould, in particular, was both prolific and lucid; in many ways a modern-day Asimov.
Stranger
You can get this one cheap. How the world works: A guide to science’s greatest discoveries