100 books like The Purpose-Guided Universe

For a very long time, Dr. Larry Dossey has been fascinated by the outer reaches of human consciousness.

In this inspiring and important book, he examines a wide range of phenomena (e.g. epiphanies and creative breakthroughs, remote healing, premonitions of danger, near-death experiences, reincarnation, communication with the dead). These phenomena are presented through anecdotal stories, as well as in connection with captivating scientific research.

Taken together, they suggest that all individual minds are part of an infinite, collective dimension of consciousness Dossey calls the One Mind. This view represents a major shift in our understanding of mind and consciousness.

Kenneth R. Miller is a professor of cell biology at Brown University who’s co-written several widely-used biology textbooks and contributed to journals including Nature, Cell, and Scientific American. 

In 2000, I attended a conference on Intelligent Design, with leading speakers both for and against. Miller was unique as a believing Catholic who opposed Intelligent Design in favor of Darwinian evolution. I was predisposed against him, but wound up being convinced by his arguments.

Finding Darwin's God is an excellent book for explaining why no outside “Designer” is necessary to explain the origin of species, and also why this shouldn’t cause anyone to lose their faith in God or conclude that life is meaningless.

For several decades Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has been prodding us to awaken beyond the limitations of western science as we know it.

Trained as a scientist at some of the world’s top institutions, he began to understand that science itself needed to be set free from its own dogma that has accumulated over the centuries. He shows the ways in which science is being constricted by its own assumptions that are not only limiting but dangerous for the future of humanity.

Should science be a belief system or simply a method of inquiry? In the skeptical spirit of true science, Dr. Sheldrake turns the 10 fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions and shows how all of them open to startling new possibilities for discovery.

Bernardo Kastrup has PhDs in Computer Engineering and Philosophy, and has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Philips Research Laboratories. He’s today’s leading proponent of Idealism—the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others—which asserts that consciousness is the fundamental reality. 

I’ve read nearly all of Kastrup’s books, and found them difficult but rewarding. His most accessible work is this collection of essays (originally published in Scientific American and elsewhere), Science Ideated. 

Reading Kastrup can literally turn your worldview inside out, inducing a sort of mental vertigo. I’ve often had to set down a Kastrup book because my head is spinning!

In all my twenty-five-year career as a Science Fantasy writer, few books have blown my mind like this one did. 

All the esoteric texts and theory I’d read over the years suddenly manifest in world as science in the form of Quantum Physics.

This book brings together the work of several scientific studies from around the world that were all, in their own way uncovering evidence for an underlying energy field that connects all living things. 

What was archaically known as Ether or the Etheric Realm, was now being proven via Zero Point Field Theory,  Lynne does a fantastic job of recounting each scientist’s fascinating story and discoveries, in a way that is both easy to understand and profoundly thought provoking!

Anyone who uses an 11-year-old to explain black holes and the big bang is worth listening to!

This is serious physics explained in a way we can all understand, mixed up with the usual life of an 11-year-old, It makes for one fun and fascinating read. If you think physics is too complicated to understand, this book will show you how simple it can be. Science made easy and fun!

Thanks to spectrum analysis, the development of improved photographic capabilities, and the construction of powerful new mountaintop telescopes, early 20th century astronomers were able to ask and seek answers to an entirely new range of intriguing questions about the nature and structure of the celestial realm. But the inability to resolve all nebulae into stars left them with a nagging mystery to untangle:  are these luminous clouds relatively nearby embryonic solar systems, or extremely distant aggregates of countless stars? 

In The Expanding Universe, author Robert Smith ably transforms archival material into a lively narrative of the dramatic twists and turns -- the disappointing failures, dead-ends, careless errors, contentious controversies, welcome surprises, and successes -- of the decades-long international effort to find answers to this perplexing quandary.

You’ll find a thousand books that tell the Apollo story, describing the missions and the astronauts and the drama, and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin is most people’s gateway drug. It’s a great book. But being on the technical side myself–and needing all those messy in-depth technical details to get my own book right–I found Woods’ book perfect for delving deep into the scientific and technical ingenuity of the missions, of all the procedures and maneuvers from launch through splashdown, and many other fascinating aspects that other books leave out. If you’ve ever read an Apollo history and wondered: “But how did that really work, how long did it take, what was the process, why did they do it that way?” or even just “Uh, they did what, now?” then this is totally the book for you.

This is my favorite book about the discovery of dark energy—the mysterious stuff that is currently speeding up the expansion of the universe.

It all started in 1998 when cosmologists presented their evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. I was completely stunned and puzzled. I already knew that most of the mass in the universe is in the form of mysterious dark matter, but now I had to acknowledge that the cosmos also contains a large amount of equally puzzling dark energy.

Richard Panek’s book helped me to get to grips with this new reality: the people, planets, stars, and galaxies that we know of constitute just a few percent of everything there is. Panek is a skilled writer; I thoroughly enjoyed how his book not only describes the science but also portrays the scientists.

This Harvard-trained cosmologist takes us on a journey into the universe, from colliding black holes to neutrons and protons “faking it” as elementary particles. If you ever wondered why the universe has more matter than antimatter, and what is dark matter made of, this book is for you. And physics is about more than theories; it’s about people doing physics. Black lives matter, and Black lives are the stuff of stars. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her exploration of a universe that is “bigger than the bad things that are happening to us.” Along the way, we gain new clues to the fate of our galaxies full of stars.