Science & Nature

A Sequel That Earns Its Place Stephen Hawking published The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001, thirteen years after A Brief History of Time made him the world’s most famous scientist. The earlier book had sold over 10 million copies but was notoriously cited as one of the least-finished books on educated people’s shelves –…

A Sequel That Earns Its Place Stephen Hawking published The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001, thirteen years after A Brief History of Time made him the world’s most famous scientist. The earlier book had sold over 10 million copies but was notoriously cited as one of the least-finished books on educated people’s shelves –…

Feynman Thinking Out Loud In 1964, Richard Feynman delivered seven lectures at Cornell University as part of a BBC Messenger Lecture series. He was 46, had recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics, and was at the height of his powers as both a physicist and a communicator. The…

The Most Important Book in the History of Science Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection on November 24, 1859. The entire first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the day of publication. It remains one of the most consequential books ever written – not just in the…

A Book Unlike Any Other Douglas Hofstadter was a graduate student in physics at the University of Oregon when he began writing Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. He had become obsessed with a set of connections – between Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems, M.C. Escher’s self-referential drawings, and J.S. Bach’s recursive musical structures –…

The Most Controversial Science Memoir Ever Written James Watson published The Double Helix in 1968, fifteen years after he and Francis Crick built the model of DNA that explained how genetic information is stored and copied. The book was controversial before it was published – Francis Crick tried to stop it, the original publisher Harvard…

A Revolution in How We Think About Life When Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976, he was a young Oxford zoologist trying to explain to general readers what he took to be the most important conceptual advance in evolutionary biology since Darwin. The gene-centered view of evolution – the idea that the fundamental…

A Personal Voyage That Became a Cultural Touchstone Carl Sagan published Cosmos in 1980 as a companion to his thirteen-part PBS television series of the same name, and the book has never gone out of print. That longevity is not accidental. While many science books date quickly as knowledge advances, Cosmos endures because its deepest…

The Book That Made Physics Personal When Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time in 1988, the received wisdom was that every equation in a popular science book would cut sales in half. Hawking ignored this warning and included one – E = mc2 – and watched the book spend 237 weeks on the…