🧲 Books like this
What Should We Be Worried About? Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night
John Brockman · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Oliver Sacks · 243 pages
In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who
The Best American Science Writing 2011
Jesse Cohen, Floyd Skloot · 327 pages
This book collects into one volume the most crucial, thought-provoking, and engaging science writing of the year. Culled from a wide variety of publications, these selections cover the full spectrum of scientific inquiry. Provocative and engaging, The Best American Science Writing 2011 reveals just how far science has brought us — and where it is headed next.
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould · 422 pages
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms is the newest collection of bestselling scientist Stephen Jay Gould's popular essays from Natural History magazine (the longest-running series of scientific essays in history). In this collection, Gould consciously and unconventionally formulates a humanistic natural history, a consideration of how humans have learned to study and understand natu
I Think You'll Find it's a Bit More Complicated Than That
Ben Goldacre · 485 pages
The very best journalism from one of Britain's most admired and outspoken science writers, author of the bestselling Bad Science and Bad Pharma. In 'Bad Science', Ben Goldacre hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In 'Bad Pharma', he put the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. Now the pick of the journalism by one of our wi
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Lewis Thomas · 175 pages
Includes material on warts, DNA, cloning, and medical economics.
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Carl Sagan · 398 pages
Explorers various aspects of several fields of science and examines the role of the intellect in scientific achievement.
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe · 312 pages
Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a
Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries
Neil deGrasse Tyson · 352 pages
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Richard Feynman · 133 pages
In April 1963, Richard P. Feynman gave a series of remarkable lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. These three consecutive talks were classic Feynman - full of wit and wisdom - but their subject matter was wholly unexpected: Feynman spoke not as a physicist but as a concerned fellow citizen, revealing his uncommon insights into the religious, political, and social issues of the day
A Devil's Chaplain
Richard Dawkins · 272 pages
'Moet u zich eens voorstellen wat voor boek een kapelaan van de duivel zou kunnen schrijven over de onhandige, verspillende, blunderende en gruwelijk gemene werken van de natuur.' Dit schreef Darwin in 1856 aan een vriend. Maar, hoe gruwelijk en onhandig ook, willekeurig zijn de evolutionaire processen allerminst, zo laat Richard Dawkins zien in zijn even nuchtere als helder onderbouwde werk. Ka
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan · 457 pages
A prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news stories and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected American populace “A glorious book . . . A spirited defense of science . . . From the first page to the last, this book is a manifesto for clear thought.”—Los Angeles Times How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don
Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley · 283 pages
Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact
Steven Kotler · 284 pages
The Planets
Dava Sobel · 288 pages
The sun's family of planets become a familiar place in this personal account of the lives of other worlds. With her gift for weaving difficult scientific concepts into a compelling story, Sobel explores the planets' origins and oddities through the lens of popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history.--From publisher description.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011
Mary Roach · 384 pages
The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity
Steven H. Strogatz · 336 pages
Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, insight, and brilliant illustrations. Whether he is illuminating how often you should flip your mattress
Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society
Bill Bryson · 503 pages
As editor of "Seeing Further," Bryson has rounded up an extraordinary roster of scientists who write and writers who know science in order to celebrate 350 years of the Royal Society, Britain's scientific national academy. The contributors include Margaret Atwood, Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, James Gleick, Richard Holmes, and Neal Stephenson, among many others, on subjects ranging from metaphysic
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Walter Isaacson · 560 pages
A scientific biography of Jennifer Doudna, a founder and co-developer of the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism, and an examination of what happened after CRISPR hit the marketplace.
Nothing: From Absolute Zero to Cosmic Oblivion - Amazing Insights into Nothingness
Jeremy Webb · 266 pages
"Nothing needs a rethink: all too easily, we ignore or dismiss the faxcinating possibilities of emptiness and non-existence. For centuries, scientist have known that nothing may in fact be the key to understanding everything, from the true nature of consciousness to the expansion of the cosmos. Because without nothing -- or rather, what we've long taken to be nothing -- we'd be literally nowhere.
This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
Susan Blackmore, Rebecca Goldstein, James J. O'Donnell, Paul J. Steinhardt, Shing-Tung Yau, Frank Wilczek, Thomas Metzinger, Sean Carroll, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Gottschall, David G. Myers, Matt Ridley, Armand Marie Leroi, Gerd Gigerenzer, Martin J. Rees, Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran, Carlo Rovelli · 432 pages
Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most deep, surprising, and brilliant explanations of how the world works, with contributions by Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more”— Provided by publisher
The Ascent of Man
Jacob Bronowski · 448 pages
Traces the development of science and the discoveries that have made man unique among animal species.
Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong
Paul A. Offit · 287 pages
What happens when ideas presented as science lead us in the wrong direction? History is filled with brilliant ideas that gave rise to disaster, and this book explores some of these missteps: from opium's heyday as the pain reliever of choice to recognition of opioids as a major cause of death in the U.S.; from the rise of trans fats as the golden ingredient for tastier, cheaper food to the heart d
Chaos: Making a New Science
James Gleick · 360 pages
The author describes how scientists studying the growth of complexity in nature are discovering order and pattern in chaos. He explains concepts such as nonlinearity, the Butterfly Effect, universal constants, fractals, and strange attractors, and examines the work of scientists such as Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, Edward Lorenz, and Benoit Mandelbrot.