Recent Reading

Highlighted titles are especially good.
Most are written for a general audience.

  1. Chaos, Making a New Science [1987] -- James Gleick

  2. Complexity, Life at the Edge of Chaos [1992] -- Roger Lewin

  3. Complexification -- John Casti

  4. Journey to the Great Attractor [1994]-- Alan Dressler

  5. The Science of Fractal Images -- Peitgen, Saupe, eds.

  6. Hyperspace, A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension [1994] -- Michio Kaku

  7. The Matter Myth -- Paul Davies

  8. The Cosmic Blueprint, New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe [1988] -- Paul Davies

  9. God and the New Physics -- Paul Davies

  10. The Red Limit [1977]-- Timothy Ferris

  11. Coming of Age in the Milky Way -- Timothy Ferris

  12. The Mind's Sky, Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context -- Timothy Ferris

  13. The Key to the Universe [1977] -- Nigel Calder

  14. QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter -- Richard Feynman

  15. Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman! -- Richard Feynman

  16. What Do You Care What Other People Think? -- Richard Feynman

  17. Cosmic Catastrophes [1989] -- Clark Chapman, David Morrison

  18. Searching For Certainty, What Scientists Can Know About the Future [1990] -- John L. Casti

  19. Dreams of a Final Theory [1992] -- Steven Weinberg

  20. The Cosmic Code [1982] -- Heinz Pagels

  21. Sympathetic Vibrations, Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life [1985] -- K.C. Cole

  22. The God Particle, If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? [1993] -- Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi

  23. Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman [1995] -- James Gleick

  24. At Home in the Universe, The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization
    and Complexity [1995] -- Stuart Kauffman

  25. The Origin of The Universe [1994] -- John D. Barrow

  26. The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex [1995] --
    Murray Gell-Mann

  27. The Last Three Minutes, Conjectures About the Ultimate Fate of the Universe [1994] --
    Paul Davies

  28. Flyby, The Interplanetary Odyssey of Voyager 2 [1987] -- Joel Davis

  29. The Nemesis Affair, A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science [1986] -- David M. Raup

  30. Bully for Brontosaurus -- Stephen Jay Gould

  31. Eight Little Piggies, Reflections in Natural History [1993] -- Stephen Jay Gould

  32. On a Piece of Chalk [1868, republished 1967] -- Thomas Henry Huxley

  33. Cosmic Coincidences, Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology [1989] --
    John Gribbin and Martin Rees

  34. The Collapse of Chaos, Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World [1994] --
    Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart

  35. The Milky Way, Fifth Edition [1941-1981] -- Bart Bok, Priscilla Bok

  36. A Hundred Billion Stars [1984] -- Mario Rigutti

  37. The Lighter Side of Gravity [1982] -- Jayant V. Narlikar

  38. Chaos in the Cosmos [1996] -- Barry Parker

  39. A Brief History of Time -- Stephen Hawking

  40. Black Holes and Baby Universes [1993] -- Stephen Hawking

  41. Exploring the Galaxies [1976] -- Simon Mitton

  42. The Three Big Bangs, Comet Crashes, Exploding Stars,
    and the Creation of the Universe [1996] -- Dauber and Muller

  43. Mysteries of the Milky Way [1991] -- Goldsmith and Cohen

  44. The Edges of Science [1990] -- Richard Morris

  45. The Privilege of Being a Physicist [1989] -- Victor Weisskopf

  46. Feynman's Lost Lecture [1996]

  47. Cosmic Rays, Tracking Particles From Outer Space [1989] -- Michael Friedlander

  48. Quarks, The Stuff of Matter [1983] -- Harald Fritzsch

  49. How Nature Works, The Science of Self-Organized Criticality [1996] -- Per Bak

  50. In The Beginning, After COBE and Before The Big Bang [1993] -- John Gribbin

  51. The Secret Melody [1995] -- Trinh Xuan Thuan

  52. Neils Bohr, A Centenary Volume [1985] -- French and Kennedy, eds.

  53. The Particle Garden, Our Universe
    as Understood by Particle Physicists [1995] -- Gordon Kane

  54. The Edge of the Unknown,
    101 Things You Don't Know About Science
    And No One Else Does Either [1996] -- James Trefil

  55. Einstein's Legacy -- Julian Schwinger

  56. The Whole Shebang,
    A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report [1997] -- Timothy Ferris

  57. Creation, The Story of the Origin and Evolution of the Universe [1988] -- Barry Parker

  58. In Quest of Quasars, An Introduction to Stars and Starlike Objects [1969] -- Ben Bova

  59. The Twin Dimensions, Inventing Time & Space [1986] -- Geza Szamosi

  60. Blind Watchers of the Sky, The People and Ideas that Shaped Our View of the Universe [1996] -- Rocky Kolb

  61. Heisenberg Probably Slept Here, The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Greatest Physicists of the 20th Century [1997] -- Richard P. Brennan

  62. Beyond the Known Universe, From Dwarf Stars to Quasars [1974] -- I.M. Levitt

  63. The Dark Side of the Universe [1988] -- James Trefil

  64. Perfect Symmetry [1985] -- Heinz Pagels

  65. The Very First Light, The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe [1996] -- John C. Mather and John Boslough

  66. The First Three Minutes,
    A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe [1977] -- Steven Weinberg

  67. Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers [1949] -- Max Planck

  68. The Cosmos from Space [1987] -- David H. Clark

  69. Rain of Iron and Ice, the very real threat of comet and asteroid bombardment [1996] -- John S. Lewis

  70. Worlds Unnumbered, the Search for Extrasolar Planets [1997] -- Donald Goldsmith

  71. Why People Believe Weird Things, pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time [1997] -- Michael Shermer

  72. The Threat and the Glory [1959-90] -- Peter B. Medawar

  73. Gšdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid [1979] -- Douglas Hofstadter

  74. The Inflationary Universe, the quest for a new theory of cosmic origins [1997] -- Alan H. Guth

  75. Wrinkles in Time [1993] -- George Smoot, Keay Davidson

  76. The Meaning of It All, Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist [1998] -- Richard P. Feynman

  77. The Light at the Edge of the Universe [1993] -- Michael D. Lemonick

  78. Chaos and Harmony [2001] -- Trinh Xuan Thuan

  79. The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin of Life [1998] -- Paul Davies

  80. Paradigms Regained, A Further Exploration of the Mysteries of Modern Science [2000] -- John Casti

  81. The Essence of Chaos [1993] -- Edward N. Lorenz

  82. Thinking in Complexity, The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind - 3rd Ed. [1997] -- Klaus Mainzer

  83. Gravitation and Cosmology, Proceedings of the ICGC Conference Held at IUCAA, Pune, India, in December 1995 [1995] -- Dhurandhar and Padmanabhan (eds.)

  84. The Social Meaning of Modern Biology, From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology [1986] -- Howard L. Kaye

  85. Origins of Life [1985] -- Freeman Dyson

  86. In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks [1997] -- Gerard 't Hooft

  87. The Large, the Small and the Human Mind [1997] -- Roger Penrose

  88. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962, 1970] -- Thomas S. Kuhn

  89. Beyond the Black Hole, Stephen Hawking's Universe [1985] -- John Boslough

  90. The Thermodynamics of Pizza, Essays on Science and Everyday Life [1991] -- Harold J. Morowitz

  91. Billions and Billions, Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium [1997] -- Carl Sagan

  92. Beyond the Quantum Paradox [1994] -- Lazar Mayants

  93. Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies [1997] -- Jared Diamond

  94. Einstein, A Centenary Volume, [1979] -- A.P. French, ed.

  95. Science and Beyond [1986] -- Steven Rose and Lisa Appignanesi, eds.

  96. Science a la Mode, Physical Fashions and Fictions [1989] -- Tony Rothman

  97. Goodbye, Descartes, The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind [1997] --Keith Devlin

  98. The Runaway Universe, the Race to Find the Future of the Cosmos [2000] -- Donald Goldsmith

  99. General Relativity From A to B [1978] -- Robert Geroch

  100. Quantum Reality, Beyond the New Physics [1985] -- Nick Herbert

  101. The Flamingo's Smile, Reflections in Natural History [1985] -- Stephen Jay Gould

  102. Science, Computers, and People, From the Tree of Mathematics [1986] -- Stanislaw Ulam; Marc C. Reynolds, Gian-Carlo Rota, Eds.

  103. The Flight From Science and Reason, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol 775 [1996] -- edited by Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis

  104. Doing Science, The Reality Club [1991] -- edited by John Brockman [not recommended]

  105. A Tour of the Calculus [1995] -- David Berlinski

  106. A Beautiful Mind, The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash [1998] -- Sylvia Nasar

  107. Euler, The Master of Us All [1999] -- William Dunham

  108. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times [2000] -- Steve Fuller

  109. The Fabric of the Cosmos; Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality [2004] -- Brian Greene

  110. The Life of the Cosmos [1997] -- Lee Smolin

  111. The Universe at Midnight, Observations Illuminating the Cosmos [2001] -- Ken Croswell

  112. Galaxies and Quasars [1979] -- William J. Kaufman

  113. Conflict in the Cosmos, Fred Hoyle's Life in Science [2005] -- Simon Mitton

  114. Big Bang, the origin of the universe [2004] -- by Simon Singh

  115. How The Universe Got Its Spots, Diary of a finite time in a finite space [2002] -- Janna Levin

  116. From Quarks to the Cosmos, Tools of Discovery [1995] -- Leon Lederman, David Schramm

  117. The Big Questions, Probing the promise and limits of science [2002] -- Richard Morris

  118. Alpha and Omega, The search for the beginning and end of the universe [2004] -- Charles Seife

  119. Supersymmetry, Unveiling the ultimate laws of nature [2000] -- Gordon Kane

  120. Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Outrageous Legacy [1994] -- Kip Thorne

  121. The Universe, the 11th Dimension, and Everything, What we know and how we know it [1999] -- Richard Morris

  122. Faster, The Acceleration of Just about Everything [2000] -- James Gleick

  123. Before the Beginning, Our Universe and Others [1997] -- Martin Rees

  124. The Life of the Cosmos [1999] -- Lee Smolin

  125. The Cosmic Landscape String theory and the illusion of intelligent design [2006] -- Leonard Susskind

  126. Chasing Hubble's Shadows, The Search for Galaxies at the Edge of Time [2006] -- Jeff Kanipe

  127. Cosmic Clouds: Birth, death, and recycling in the galaxy [1997] -- James Kaler

  128. Many Worlds in One [2006] -- Alex Vilenkin

  129. Endless Universe, Beyond the Big Bang [2007] -- Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok

  130. Origins: How the Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe Began [2006] -- by Stephen Eales

  131. Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos [1995] -- by Robert Osserman

  132. Extreme Stars, At the Edge of Creation [2001] -- by James Kaler

  133. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines [2006] -- by Janna Levin

  134. The Trouble With Physics, The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next [2006] -- by Lee Smolin

  135. Dark Cosmos, In search of the Universe's missing mass and energy [2006] -- by Dan Hooper

  136. Bubbles, Voids, and Bumps in Time: The New Cosmology [1991] -- James Cornell, Ed.

  137. The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter [2007] -- Helen Quinn & Yossi Nir

  138. The Black Hole War, My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics [2008] -- Leonard Susskind

  139. Not Even Wrong, the failure of string theory and the search for unity in physical law [2006] -- Peter Woit

May 2009