Science
Physics, chemistry, cosmology, earth science, complexity and the broad popular-science shelf, including textbooks and lecture courses. Read by the scientifically curious and by students working through the fundamentals.
536 books
Books 536
James D. Watson · 1968 · Watson's insider account of the race to DNA's structure
Richard Rhodes · 1986 · The origin of the industry and its physics, told definitively.
Charles Darwin · 2002 · The founding text of natural selection
Vaclav Smil · 2006 · Smil's short primer on energy conversions and their physical limits
T1 The Gene
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2016 · History of heredity from Mendel to gene editing
T1 Behave
Robert M. Sapolsky · 2017 · Biology of human behaviour across timescales, from neurons to culture
Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie · 2018
Vaclav Smil · 2022 · The materials and energy arithmetic that any transition thesis has to survive.
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1957 · Kuhn on how one model replaced another and why it took so long
Horace Freeland Judson · 1969 · The definitive history of molecular biology's founding discoveries
J. E. Gordon · 1981 · Why materials and structures hold; engineering reasoning made intuitive
Daniel J. Boorstin · 1983 · How humans discovered time, geography and nature; a history of knowing
Richard Dawkins · 1986
Herbert A. Simon · 1991 · Memoir by the Nobel laureate who founded bounded rationality
Jonathan Weiner · 1994 · Evolution observed in real time among the Galapagos finches
Steven Pinker · 1994 · Language as an evolved instinct; a Munger multidisciplinary reading
Robert Wright · 1994 · Evolutionary psychology as an account of motive and reciprocity
Matt Ridley · 1996 · Cooperation as an evolved strategy; reciprocity and the prisoner's dilemma
T2 Crystal Fire
Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson · 1997 · The transistor at Bell Labs and the birth of the information age.
David Deutsch · 1997 · Four strands of explanation; knowledge as the engine of progress
T2 Consilience
Edward O. Wilson · 1998 · Wilson's argument for the unity of knowledge across disciplines
Judith Rich Harris · 1998 · Challenges the evidence that parenting shapes adult outcomes
T2 Genome
Matt Ridley · 1999 · Chromosome-by-chromosome tour of human genetics; a Munger latticework staple
Daniel L. Schacter · 2001 · How memory fails, including the biases that distort recalled evidence
Bill Bryson · 2003 · Popular survey of how science established what it currently knows
Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway · 2010 · The tobacco playbook for manufacturing scientific uncertainty.
Matt Ridley · 2010 · Matt Ridley's evolutionary argument that exchange and specialization are the deep engine of human progress — older than capitalism, older than agriculture. His data on long-run improvement in living standards is well-sourced; his dismissiveness toward environmental risks is the book's main weakness and worth holding separately from its core claim.
T2 Bad Pharma
Ben Goldacre · 2012 · Trial design, publication bias and regulatory failure.
Jon Gertner · 2012 · Bell Labs, and what a regulated network monopoly could afford to fund.
T2 Factfulness
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund · 2018 · Global development data set against intuition; the outside view applied
David Reich · 2018 · Ancient DNA rewriting human population history
T2 Empty Planet
Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson · 2019 · The argument that global population peaks sooner than the UN projects.
Matt Ridley · 2020 · Innovation as gradual recombination rather than invention.
Cade Metz · 2021 · How deep learning found the GPU, the demand Nvidia was built on.
T3 Ignition!
John Drury Clark · 1972 · Insider history of liquid rocket propellant development
Jared Diamond · 1991 · Human behaviour read from evolutionary biology; a Munger latticework staple
Richard Dawkins · 1995 · Genes as a river of digital information; a short Dawkins primer
Thomas D. Seeley · 1995 · Honeybee colonies as a decentralised allocation and search system
Didier Sornette · 2000 · Power laws, scaling and critical points across physical and social systems
Paul Strathern · 2000 · The search for the periodic table; reasoning from the elements upward
Gwyneth Cravens · 2007 · A sceptic's conversion, useful on how the public risk perception formed.
T3 Uranium
Tom Zoellner · 2009 · The rock itself: mining, boom towns and the geopolitics of supply.
Charles Fishman · 2011 · The economics of cheap water and what happens when it stops being cheap.
John Brockman · 2012 · Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting
David Epstein · 2013 · Talent, training and genetics in elite athletic performance
James Mahaffey · 2014 · What actually went wrong, and how much of the fear is proportionate.
Marcelo Gleiser · 2014 · The limits of scientific knowledge and what cannot be measured
Peter Wohlleben · 2015 · Forest ecology as a connected system; background for timberland owners
Chuck Klosterman · 2016 · How present certainties will look to the future; outside view applied
Stephan J. Guyenet · 2017 · The appetite biology the drugs act on; explains why diets failed.
T3 Blueprint
Robert Plomin · 2018 · Behavioural genetics on how much of an outcome is inherited
Hannah Ritchie · 2025 · Data-driven look at emissions and what actually reduces them
Richard Phillips Feynman · 1963
James H. Austin · 1978 · A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery
Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch · 1979
Richard Dawkins · 1981
John Marks Templeton · 1981
Robert Wright · 1988 · Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work
Philip Mirowski · 1989 · How economics borrowed physics metaphors, and what that cost it
Alastair G. Dawson · 1991
Dieter K. Huzel · 1992
Stephen T. Thornton · 1993
Antonio R. Damasio · 1994
Richard Hamming · 1996
Richard P. Feynman · 1998
Neil Gershenfeld · 1999
Steve Grand · 2000 · Artificial life and emergence; complexity built from very simple rules
Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan · 2000
Amit Goswami, Deepak Chopra · 2000
Gerald Jay Sussman · 2001
Lynne McTaggart · 2001
Gino Segre · 2002 · Popular history of temperature and heat; entropy for the general reader
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi · 2002
Keith Stanovich · 2004
Gerald M. Edelman · 2004
Charles C. Mann · 2005
Istvan Hargittai · 2006
Morton A. Meyers · 2007
Hans C. Ohanian · 2008
Richard Lynn · 2008
John Little, Doug McGuff · 2009
Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending · 2009
Burton Richter · 2010
Henry Schlesinger · 2010
T4 The Tiger
John Vaillant · 2010
T4 100 Plus
Sonia Arrison · 2011 · Radical life extension and what longer lifespans do to markets
Ted G. Lewis · 2011
Lawrence M. Krauss · 2011
T4 Abundance
Peter Diamandis · 2012
James R. Flynn · 2012
Nancy L. Segal · 2012
Joel T. Dudley, Konrad J. Karczewski · 2013
Nicholas Wade · 2014
Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon · 2014
Andrew W. Lo · 2017 · Princeton University Press. Open Library API unreachable this pass.
Daniel C. Dennett · 2017
Safi Bahcall · 2019 · Open Library unreachable this run; edition OL28720236M seen in search only.
Gregory Zuckerman · 2021 · OL lists title as 'Shot to Save the World'
Christian Ziegler, Egbert G. Leigh
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Gabrielle Walker
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Robert M. Sapolsky
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Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison
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Alan Lightman
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Theodore Gray
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Michael Allaby, Robert Coenraads
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Tim Flannery
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James Gleick
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Ray Kurzweil
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