Popular Science Writing

[theBruiser500]

One of my favorite genres, if you can find the right author here the books can be really amazing. These are some of my favorites, Briane Greene, The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos. This is about physics stuff, time, spacetime, quantim physics, relativity, string theory.

Matt Ridley, his most famous book is the genome one I forget what it's called which was good, my favorite book by him which is packed full of tons of really interesting stuff is The Red Queen. About sexual selection, how some plants have 50 different sexes, or why are we sexual not asexual (goes into a lot of depth and debunks popular myths that you probably hold), fascinating book.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, really great book funny and fascinating. About volcanoes, astroids, tidal waves not boring science information but the kind of thigns you will find very interesting about this stuff.

Richard Dawkinds the Selfish Gene, all about genes and evolution and the paradigm to view it in. What do you gusy like?

[lu_hawk]

i read a lot of science stuff, probably read 2/3 evolution books and 1/3 physics books. maybe something else thrown in every once in awhile.

[wacki]

I can't help you as far as science books, for that stuff I use websites/journals. For some soft science stuff, I suggest Rob Greenes books Art of Seductioon/48 laws of power. If I ever have children, I will make them read those books.

[SmileyEH]

I used to really enjoy stuff like this, now that I'm a sophmore physics major most of the physics science writing out there at least is really unfullfilling. Much of it is misleading, innacurate, or overblown. Also, its really impossible to understand most of the topics beyond analogies and metaphors without a really strong mathematical/physics background.

-SmileyEH

[Lazymeatball]

Bill Bryson is a good author. He doesn't just write about scientifc topics. Since you like to travel alot you would probably like "Notes from a Small Island" about his travels in Britain, it's just a good representation of his writing style.

And if you havn't already read it, I hear those books by Richard Feynam (famous physicist, "Surely, you're joking Mr. Feynman") are pretty interesting. I don't read books myself, but from the people I talk to who do, they like the above mentioned books.

[Prevaricator]

Yeah I've liked Bill Bryson's other books a lot too.

[U235]

I loved The Elegant Universe.

Lederman wrote a fun and interesting book dealing with the creepiness of quantum theory called "The God Particle".

Another fave of mine is called "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny". More of a social science book, but I like the idea that it stated that civilization in general has been steadily improving for millions of years, and therefore concludes that it is in our nature to keep improving as a society.

[pokerjo22]

A book I thought was interesting was 'The Language Instinct' by Steven Pinker. All about whether language is innate, unique to humans and how it develops etc.

Another one was called 'The Psychology of Judgement and Decision-making', and in a similar vein 'Irrationality'. Both books have a ton of stuff that is applicable to poker. All about how bad people are at judging probability, randomness, using things like Bayes theorem (some shocking stuff about how bad doctors are at using medical tests to determine the likelihood of having a disease) and how utility theory doesn't explain a lot of decisions. Good stuff, and written in a very easy to understand way.

[woodguy]

Chaos: Making a New Science — Gleick

Great book and it dumbs down the math enough for those of us who never got more than an undergrad degree.

Regards,
Woodguy