100 books like Eating the Sun

This book also gives a vivid and dramatic account of the way science proceeds, but one that is strikingly different from that of Popper’s account. According to Kuhn,  much of science is what he calls “normal” science: a basic theory, or “paradigm,” is taken for granted, and scientists seek to increase its experimental range and accuracy. But then “anomalies” begin to accumulate; crisis sets in until a new paradigm is proposed, a revolution occurs, the old paradigm is defeated, and a new phase of normal science begins. 

I loved the drama Kuhn finds in this procedure of normal and revolutionary science, his depiction of the tragedy of those scientists left behind who remain devoted to a paradigm that has been rejected and superseded. There is no doubt that both normal and revolutionary science are features of science as they actually exist.

I regard this book as perhaps the greatest book about the nature of science ever published. In it, Popper spells out his dramatic view that science proceeds by putting forward bold, imaginative guesses, which are then subjected to ferocious attempts at empirical refutation. When these conjectured theories are refuted, scientists are forced to think up a better conjectural theory–and that is how science makes progress.

In this book, Popper shows how this dramatic account of how science proceeds by a process of conjecture and refutation has implications for fields beyond science, such as philosophy, in that it implies that, whatever we are doing, our best hope of success in solving our problems is to consider possible solutions and subject them to ferocious criticism.

What I love about this book is its clarity and honesty. It is a work of philosophy that has nothing to do with the fashionable task of analyzing concepts at the time of its publication. It sets out a clear view about the nature of the world–what it is that science is telling us about the nature of the world–and discusses problems that this view gives rise to with admirable clarity and honesty. 

And the author makes a vital contribution in connection with his discussion of the nature of sensations and consciousness. Above all, I admire the patent honesty of this book so much, the capacity of the author to pursue his basic idea wherever it may lead, to the ends of the earth, with scrupulous honesty and integrity.

I love how this book tells a dramatic story about dark corruption at the heart of modern science set after the Second World War, especially in the USA.  Physicists allowed politicians to think that the vast sums of money they gave to physics would result in weapons even more terrible than the atomic bomb. But actually, the money was spent on particle colliders, experimental devices that had nothing to do with weapons of war. 

Scientific funding was based on a quagmire of duplicity and deception, and Greenberg tells this story vividly and grippingly. I first read the book with the excitement that one might read a thrilling political thriller. A political/intellectual scandal is revealed.

Surprisingly enough, our planet has been home to horse-shoe crabs for longer than it has had fire. After all, you cannot have fire without atmospheric oxygen (a product of photosynthesis), and until the evolution of land plants, there was no fuel for lightning sparks to ignite. As Stephen J. Pyne eloquently describes, humanity’s exceptional relationship to fire has literally shaped our world, from the development of small guts and big heads through cooking food, to climbing the food chain by cooking landscapes, to harnessing the world-changing fire-power of fossil fuels. This insightful overview of human history puts forward the compelling idea that human actions (including prehistoric actions) have moved our planet from an ice age to a fire age.

Yew is packed with fascinating information about these mysterious, exceptionally long-lived trees.

Fred Hageneder has spent years studying every aspect of the yew and his book presents that knowledge in a compact, highly readable form. The botany, ecological interactions, and extraordinary longevity of yew trees are examined, as well as their unique uses, past and present, including the historic supply of timber for longbows and, more recently alkaloids for modern medicine. The tree's symbolism, sacred status, and spiritual significance to people since the prehistoric past are also described.

Richly illustrated throughout and meticulously referenced, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural and natural history of the yew tree.

While you will learn much about the nature and management of weeds from this book, you will also find yourself painlessly learning the basics of botany-- the parts of plants, how they live, how seeds evolved, how ecosystems evolve. While she keeps weeds at bay, Stein favors a garden, as do I, in which the desirable plants may self-sow a bit. It is a gardening philosophy that is current and can produce lovely, serendipitous gardens. 

It’s a powerful update on Noble’s book, zooming in on the workings of the biomolecular circuits surrounding the DNA.

Some of the circuits are studied in great detail, looking closely at how they work, and at how they evolve in response to mutations in the DNA. A disadvantageous mutation is eliminated by natural selection. But as well as advantageous mutations it turns out that ‘neutral’ mutations, conferring no immediate advantage, are important and indeed crucial. That resolved one of the dichotomized disputes noted in Wills’ book.

Isaac Asimov rarely wrote about aliens, but this Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel contains an astounding thought experiment, not only imagining a truly alien species but placing them in a different universe with different physical laws from our own.

I first read this novel as a teenager and was blown away by Asimov’s ability to make me understand and care about the fate of such vastly different alien creatures that possessed three distinct sexes and derived their life energy from photosynthesis.

The fact that the novel inextricably links the fate of these creatures with the fate of our own universe gave me a greater appreciation of how truly diverse life can be. A fact–along with the lessons I learned from the other novels listed here–that continues to inform my own writing on aliens and alien cultures. 

I almost put this book down when Marra started to describe what happened one early morning off the coast of Iceland, where he was trying to measure photosynthesis by marine microbes. A day earlier, he had filled bottles with seawater spiked with a radioactive form of carbon, carbon-14, and thrown the bottles overboard to incubate in the ocean. Now he had to retrieve them. As Marra recounted how the ship rolled in huge waves whipped up by 55-knot winds, my stomach churned as I remembered similar experiences on other vessels, in other seas.

Luckily for me and perhaps other seasick-prone readers, Hot Carbon returns to land for several chapters to sketch out the discovery of carbon-14 and its use in C14-dating historical artifacts such as the Shroud of Turin and in unraveling the mechanism of photosynthesis.

In the last part of the book, Marra returns to the ocean and outlines… show more.