5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind • Hacker News Board

Re: 5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

#21

Post by helveticaman » Fri, Oct 03, 2008, 7:48 AM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #20

Five (or six) good books about five different sciences: Materials Science: Gordon, Structures, or Why Things Don't Fall Down . Linguistics: Pinker, The Language Instinct Evolutionary Biology: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker Molecular Biology: David Clark, Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun Physics: the canonical answer is "Feynman". I won't argue with that. His little books ( QED and The Character of Physical Law )…

+1 The Blind Watchmaker, although I'd argue The Selfish Gene is a better introduction to the field. The Blind Watchmaker is somewhat more focussed on argument evolution versus creationism. Still, awesome stuff.

Re: 5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

#22

Post by mickt » Sat, Oct 04, 2008, 12:05 AM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #19

mickt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a good basic Chemistry book?

I picked up Linus Pauling's book. Famous guy, fairly literate book, but I haven't gotten far enough through it to see if it's really great or not.

Good reviews on Amazon and it's inexpensive. So maybe I'll pick up a copy. I'm asking cause I might get a gig working for a non-profit that does a lot of biological research.

Re: 5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

#23

Post by mickt » Sat, Oct 04, 2008, 12:08 AM UTC

hugh wrote: post #18

mickt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a good basic Chemistry book?

Hmmm, can't think of one. There's a lot of freshman chemistry textbooks, but they're all pretty similar, and pretty boring. Chemistry, the in-between science, doesn't really lend itself so easily to popularization as physics or biology. There's no deep principles, and no amazing phenomena, it's pretty much just stamp collecting. Maybe somebody else will have some suggestions though?

Yeah that's the problem, they're all boring and don't lead to a bit of light reading after a hard day at work.