History and philosophy of science

Falsifiability as the line between science and non-science.

Science moves through long stretches of normal work broken by paradigm shifts.

Knowledge grows by bold guesses that we then try to refute, not by proof.

A first-hand account of the race against Linus Pauling to find DNA's structure.

How the bomb was built, from the discovery of atomic energy to Hiroshima.

How the Copernican revolution unfolded, as a turning point in scientific thought.

The history of molecular biology from the 1930s to the 1970s, told by its makers.

A history of discovery: time and the clock, the earth and seas, nature and society.

A life across economics, psychology, organisations and artificial intelligence.

How the sciences and humanities can be unified by causal links from physics up.

Jennifer Doudna, co-developer of CRISPR gene editing, and what followed it.

How scientists came to know what they know, from cosmology and geology to biology.

Knowledge can grow without limit through good explanations that are hard to vary.

The search for the periodic table; reasoning from the elements upward

Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting

The limits of scientific knowledge and what cannot be measured

When the simpler theory is the better one: the principle of parsimony tested.

How present certainties will look to the future; outside view applied

A poem arguing that all is atoms and void, the soul dies, and religion breeds fear.

Essays, talks and letters from 1934 to 1950 on social, religious and school issues.

Argues that scientific knowledge joins personal experience, moral judgement and data.

How science developed, and the discoveries that set humans apart from other species.

A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery

Thirty selections from Popper's writings, chosen to show the range of his ideas.

Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work

A collection of Richard Feynman's best short works.

Myths about the sun, night and earthquakes set against what science has found.

Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin and the Midlands friends who experimented.

Two maverick scientists, Delbrück and Gamow, who helped start genomics and cosmology.

A scientific biography of Feynman, pairing his turbulent life with clear physics.

The whole of history, from the big bang through the present and into the far future.

How Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga built quantum electrodynamics.