100 books like Science Ink

I love animals, so I was fascinated to learn from this book that some of my favorites are considered pests by others. In this book, Bethany Brookshire talks to experts who study rats, mice, bears, pigeons, and many other animals.

It's especially interesting to see the same animals from different points of view: elephants are amazing to people who live far away from them but quite annoying to farmers who need to protect their crops from these large, destructive creatures.

In other chapters, we meet biologists who study bears, deer, or cane toads to help manage the way people and animals continue to coexist. The book made me look at animals in a new way, but I still love them.

I enjoyed reading about Gary Marcus's journey of learning guitar because I know what it's like to try to master an instrument. I didn't know, at least not back when I was taking violin lessons, that neuroscientists have been studying what happens in our brains when we learn to play music.

Marcus is a neuroscientist, so he followed his musical progress through a scientific lens and created this entertaining and educational book about the science of music. 

I spent much of the past few decades online, in different online communities that each have their own special way of communicating. With how fast the internet evolved, it should be no surprise that language rapidly changed with it.

In Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch takes the reader through a linguistic analysis of the internet, from leetspeak to doge memes. It’s already missing more recent internet language a few years after publication. Still, I love the book for a casual yet academic look at the silly side of the internet's teenage years. 

This next book takes a historical approach and explores what Shakespeare would likely have known about science in his lifetime and how that shows up in his works. If the premise sounds contrived, don't worry: the book emphasizes many ongoing debates about connections between Shakespeare and scientists of his era.

I particularly enjoyed learning about the Shakespeare Scholars' Conference and how different it was from the science conferences I knew! Overall, the book taught me much about 16th-century astronomy and Shakespeare. As a student, I would have loved this and always felt I had to choose between science and literature.

This book was written to promote the Superconducting Super Collider in the US (that soon after got cancelled by the congress) with a lot of humour. Unlike some popular science books, it doesn’t include any wrong or exaggerated statements about modern science. It tells the story of the search for the "atoms," now called elementary particles, which are the building blocks of the Universe, from ancient Greece to modern times.

Among others, the book describes the then-missing last two particles of the Standard Model, the top quark and the "God" particle — the Higgs boson — and the laboratories (Fermilab and CERN) that eventually discovered them.

Very often in popular physics books speculative physics ideas detached from experiments are promoted. Lederman’s book is quite the opposite, and I really like that.

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.

Once I finished reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it wasn’t long before I learned that he had followed it up with a collection of deeper analyses in the realm of the philosophy of science.

His sequel book took me deeper into the minds and conflicts of noted greats of science whose scientific contributions’ acceptance is now taken for granted by most. Yet, in their own day, they, too, often had to contend with the tension of science’s and scientists’ history of preferring what consensus had ordained as settled knowledge instead of welcoming new insights and discoveries.

This is a collection of twenty-four essays by thirty-six prominent researchers, demonstrating how important this topic has become for both scientific and philosophical research. In 2016 (after I had published ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence [2012], where I discuss Paul Humphreys’ view on pp. 231-2), he published EMERGENCE: A Philosophical Account, Oxford University Press, New York.

What I find especially significant in this more recent (and more challenging) work is that, in effect, emergence theory has developed into both a metascience and a metaphilosophy–as is evident in Humphreys’ Chapters 2, “Ontological Emergence” and 5, “Conceptual Emergence,” as well as Chapters 6, “Philosophical Topics Related to Emergence,” and 7, “Scientific Topics Related to Emergence.” This parallels very closely my own perspective on both scientific and philosophical conceptions of emergence.

We are living in a time when ideology, myth, superstition, and ignorance seem to have more influence than ever in shaping our future.

This excellent and important book by Shawn Otto explains the forces (political and economic) at work that are aimed at undermining the role that knowledge and rational empirical evidence might play in making rational public policy decisions. This includes the effort to weaken the role that science might ideally play in helping us to address real-world challenges.

As one who studies and seeks to assess disaster preparedness, response, and mitigation, I have come to believe this “war” on science holds the potential to give birth to ever greater and more expensive (especially in terms of human costs) disasters.  

This book explains what not to do to know the Universe, with examples from non-fiction postmodern nonsense "texts." These texts include discourses detached from experimental verification and scientific terms used completely out of context.

I love this book because I find pseudo- and postmodern science distasteful and harmful. I think it shows clearly how some famous postmodern intellectuals promote antipathy for facts, clear thinking, empirical tests, and, in general, science — our best shot at understanding the Universe. These postmodern intellectuals have huge influence and have helped spread the trend of rejection of reason and science throughout the World.

I adore this book stressing science is not an arbitrary "narration" or a collection of metaphors for postmodern essays. I share the authors’ dreams about a future after postmodernism.