Science

Species change over time as natural selection favours heritable variations.

How mathematics and physical forces shape the forms of living things.

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.

Selection acts on genes; bodies are vehicles that genes build to copy themselves.

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

Six physics lectures with little maths: atoms, energy, gravity and quantum behaviour.

How Haber and Bosch's ammonia synthesis transformed world food production.

A short primer on energy: its forms, units and role in nature and economies.

How much steel, cement and plastic the world uses, and whether growth needs less.

The gene from Mendel and Darwin to genome editing, beside a family's mental illness.

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

Why organisms, cities and companies follow power laws set by their supply networks.

How the science of cause and effect moved past 'correlation is not causation'.

How organisms, populations, machines, economies and civilisations grow, and stop.

Seventy-one short pieces that correct common impressions with plain arithmetic.

The physical basics of modern life: energy, food, materials and globalisation.

Control and communication in animals and machines run on the same principles.

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 computer model of world growth that overshoots its limits and then declines.

Why structures hold up or fail: tension, compression, shear and fracture explained.

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

How natural selection, not a designer, produces the complexity of living things.

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

The founding of the Santa Fe Institute and the people who built complexity science.

Sex evolved as a defence against parasites, and that shapes human mating.

Papers showing positive feedback and lock-in govern parts of the economy.

How machines and economies grow so complex that they behave like living systems.

Twenty years of watching Galapagos finches show evolution happening in real time.

Language as a human instinct, and what science knows of grammar and learning.

Evolutionary psychology explained through Darwin's own life and behaviour.

Chronic stress and how it affects the quality of decisions.

How cooperation and morality evolved from self-interest, via the prisoner's dilemma.

How the Bell Labs team of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor.

Reality through four strands: many-worlds physics, computation, evolution, Popper.

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

Why parents have less effect on how children turn out than people assume.

Twenty-three chapters, one per chromosome, each using a gene to open a subject.

A mathematical theory of causation for statistics, AI, economics and science.

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

Seven everyday ways memory fails, from fading over time to blocking a known name.

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

How genes and experience interact, each shaping how the other acts.

How a few scientists with ties to industry ran campaigns to deny settled science.

Prosperity grows as trade and specialisation let ideas meet and combine.

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

How drug companies distort medical evidence, starting with unpublished trials.

Big changes in human affairs emerge from the bottom up rather than by design.

How ancient DNA has rewritten the story of human prehistory and migration.

The costs and benefits of a shrinking world population.

Innovation is gradual, collective and bottom-up, not the work of lone inventors.

How Hinton, LeCun and Bengio kept neural networks alive until deep learning took off.

Six materials the world runs on, sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, traced.

How genes and experience interact, each shaping how the other acts.

Insider history of liquid rocket propellant development

Human behaviour read from evolutionary biology; a Munger latticework staple

Genes as a river of digital information; a short Dawkins primer

Honeybee colonies as a decentralised allocation and search system

Power laws, scaling and critical points across physical and social systems

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

A sceptic's conversion to nuclear power, and how public fear of it formed.

Uranium: its mining, its boom towns and the geopolitics of its supply.

How complex systems, from subprime lending to space shuttles, drift into failure.

The economics of cheap water and what happens when it stops being cheap.

Why humans tell stories: a rehearsal for life's social problems.

Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting

Talent, training and genetics in elite athletic performance

Nuclear accidents, what went wrong in each, and what each taught about the atom.

The limits of scientific knowledge and what cannot be measured

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

Forest ecology as a connected system; background for timberland owners

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

The brain's appetite circuits, why people overeat and why diets fail.

Behavioural genetics on how much of an outcome is inherited

Data-driven look at emissions and what actually reduces them

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.

A comic memoir of a boyhood on Corfu with an odd family and the island's wildlife.

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

Quantum theory applied to atoms, molecules, solids, nuclei and particles.

The theory that consciousness is learned, arising from a once two-chambered mind.

A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery

The botany and chemistry of hallucinogenic plants and how people have used them.

Metaphor as a basic mechanism of thought that shapes how people understand the world.

The relative size of things in the universe, each step adding another zero.

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

The Standard Model of particle physics for readers with one introductory course.

Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work

How economics copied the maths of 19th-century physics, and what that cost it.

The engineering design of liquid-propellant rocket engines, with 470 illustrations.

Quantum field theory built from quantum mechanics, with path integrals.

A one- or two-semester modern physics course built on quantum theory and its uses.

Investigations into Ebola and other African viruses, their strains and outbreaks.

Fictional sexual scenes, each read by an evolutionary biologist for its instincts.

What patients with odd neurological disorders reveal about the brain and the self.

Techniques for mathematical modelling, aimed at simple, efficient computer code.

A collection of Richard Feynman's best short works.

How a game designer built artificial life from simple rules of biology.

The chief engineer on designing, building, testing and flying the lunar module.

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

Popular history of temperature and heat; entropy for the general reader

The species the world is about to lose, and how conservation can pay economically.

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

Quantum field theory for students who have finished a course in quantum mechanics.

Argues that string theory is not a theory at all, since it makes no predictions.

The career of Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The economy as a complex evolving system rather than one in equilibrium.

What brain science says about learning, sleep, stress, memory and multitasking.

An A-to-Z perfume guide whose authors praise, joke about and scold each scent.

How far death rays, force fields and invisibility cloaks could become real, and when.

Argues that the quality of a life depends on what a person pays attention to.

How lactose tolerance, malaria resistance and blue eyes evolved in 10,000 years.

How trivial-seeming questions lead to deeper insight into how science works.

Seven patterns, such as the adjacent possible, in the settings that produce ideas.

Radical life extension and what longer lifespans do to markets

Science-inspired cooking techniques of modern gastronomy, across six volumes.

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

How people will get energy two centuries from now, once fossil carbon is gone.

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

The case that fast-improving technology will make scarce resources cheap.

How the unconscious mind shapes perception, judgement and dealings with others.

How Bell Labs turned research into the transistor, the laser and information theory.

Results in quantum field theory obtained by topological methods.

Why glass is clear and paperclips bend: the science of everyday materials.

A condensed course in the fundamentals of mathematics, physics and calculus.

The hypothesis that physical reality is a mathematical structure, through physics.

An introduction to quantum field theory for beginners and self-learners.

The theory and mathematics of quantum mechanics, from uncertainty to particle states.

The knowledge survivors would need to rebuild technological society after a collapse.

Rare metals such as tantalum and rhodium, and why phones and weapons need them.

What trails, from ant paths to continental hiking routes, show about the world.

From the origin of the universe through life and consciousness to what it all means.

The nature of space, time and the quantum world, on the road to quantum gravity.

How lack of sleep damages nearly every system in the body, and what sleep does.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

The brain science that matters to designers and how it shapes people's daily use.

The science, myths and business of blood, from bloodletting to plasma sales.

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

The scientists racing to make the immune system fight cancer: immunotherapy's story.

Why organisations kill breakthrough projects, and how structure can protect them.

A tour of the human body: how it works, how it heals itself and how it fails.

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