Whatever your field of expertise, are there any popular science books you'd recommend that do a good job of presenting it to the public?
Whatever your field of expertise, are there any popular science books you'd recommend that do a good job of presenting it to the public?
I've been hoodwinked too many times by well-reviewed pop-sci books which I later discovered to be hated by the actual scientists who do the work. Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku was the final straw 😆
Cheers!
Circadian biology here.
Internal Time, by Till Roenneberg. Written by one of the "old guards" of the circadian field, old enough that he could be considered a founding father of the field in his own right.
The book is written as a collection of short stories, each one about a real circadian experiment or phenomenon that occurred, and the book invites you to interpret and think about the short stories before explaining the deeper biology and history behind the stories. It's a very fascinating book and quite approachable for a non-scientific audience, though I think it's very appropriate even for a scientific audience
Circadian biology here.
I once helped with an experiment that sent beetles up in the space shuttle (yes, I am old) in Beetle Activity Monitors, in order to study their circadian rhythms in microgravity.
Maybe a bit heavy unless you have at least some background in mathematics, physics, or chemistry, but "Quantum mechanics and path integrals" by Feynman and Hibbs is fantastically well written.
If you ever want to read about, understand, or dabble in quantum mechanics, this is the book you want to read. It's great because of how Richard Feynman expresses things: It's very verbal, and feels so much more based in intuition and physical common sense than the mathematical rigor that often makes texts in the field near unreadable.
I love this suggestion. Now this topic is something I'm very interested in, but I'd like to get good on the math too, do you also have a great suggestion for that? Either way, thanks friend!
You're welcome! I only wish I had a really good mathematics book to recommend.
However, I can give you the pointer that, while most (operator-based) quantum mechanics requires quite a bit of linear algebra, you should be able to read "Path integrals and quantum mechanics" if you have a decent intro course in calculus. You really only need to understand the basics of how multiple integrals, path integrals, and parametric curves work.
As an immunologist I absolutely love the book Immune by Philip Dettmer (the guy behind kurzgesagt)
Rust: The Longest War, by Jonathan Waldman. It somehow makes metal corrosion interesting.
Also Napoleon's Buttons by Penny Le Couteur, a good look at chemistry throughout history.
Seconding Napoleon's Buttons.
Adding The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean as another great chemistry book with a similar theme.
Omg. I went to a Michio Kaku "lecture" like 15 years ago. Had no idea what he was about, it just seemed like an interesting way to spend an evening.
The entire hour and a half was painting his achievements like biggest thing since sliced bread, and trying to sell his books. I am still not even sure if he's educated in his field or if he fell into it by speaking with a patronizing affect
Edit: to answer your question. I enjoyed Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds by Mohammed Noor
but I admit I haven't read it since I began my Biology degree. I'll have to read it again!
That is quite different from a talk by Carl Sagan I saw when I was a kid... which is ironic because that likely what Michio Kaku is sort of imitating.
That's what I was expecting, something along the lines of Carl Sagan enthusiastically talking about the marvels of the universe in a way that is contagious.
That may have contributed to my disappointment lol
That's disappointing to hear about Michio Kaku. I bought one of his books a long time ago, after hearing an interesting interview with him on a podcast. (Never actually got around to reading the book, though.)
Maybe he's mellowed out, this was before podcasts were widespread. I definitely felt like I had been scammed for the ticket price of that event though 😅
Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct is a famously great, engaging, and approachable introduction to the field of linguistics for anyone interested.
And if you want to learn about grammar, you should read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. It'll really make you appreciate how vapid and smug precrptivists are.
Annals of the Former World is great, for a physical/historical/structural geology primer that's also a digestible travelogue.
Stephen Jay Gould did a lot to make shale interesting in his book on the Cambrian Explosion.
Not exactly my discipline, but closely related: A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster is probably the closest thing to a pop-sci book about game design.
Well-regarded, well-written, and very approachable.
Hartmann & Kester's Plant Propagation: Principles and Practices is great for Horticulture, Botany and Phytobiology. I even memorised the Krebs Cycle using it and I fucking hated learning the Krebs cycle.
I'm a fan of 'your inner fish' by Neil Shubin. Slightly dated, but the information is still good.
A good resource in general is The Teaching Company which produces The Great Courses.
Not books, but dvd's of college courses, typically about 300 level but also intro courses too, from places like Columbia, Harvard, etc.
Pick a subject, they likely have a course. I've found these instructors to be engaging and honest about what they know, what they don't, and what they suppose is likely (this applies to the sciences as well as history).
Many of them you can just listen to. I get them from my local library and convert them to video and audio files.
Geology is such a broad field, I couldn't recommend just one book. Now if you want to know about a specific field of geology, I can probably point you in the right direction.
Wouldn't pointing me to a field count as geography? /s it's a joke
My friend, the Geologists and Geographers have been in a war since time immemorial.
I'm a senior computer programmer/developer, so I have to say: not what I know about.
Two books I found really useful at the time:
The Little LISPer by Daniel P Friedman
Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier
Both are rather niche, but helped me understand general computing and design concepts.
Trusting trust is pretty good, if you want to develop paranoia.
It's a solved problem now: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
Might be a bit more basic and/or wide in scope than what you want but just in case it's worth picking up anything by Karl Kruszelnicki; AKA Dr Karl.