The most recommended history of science books

Harvard historian of science professor Lemov’s account of the history of behavioral science includes a chapter analyzing the work of three of the central figures in MKUltra, the CIA’s decade-long program of classified research into “mind control.”

Excellent on the scientific context out of which that research arose.

It’s one thing to appreciate that fossils record the history of life, but something else altogether to understand how we came to know that. Rudwick’s classic book recounts the discoveries, large and small, that over centuries revealed fossils to be remnants of lost worlds. An exceptional exercise in the history of science. The Meaning of Fossils is required reading for students of paleontology.

The Middle Ages in Europe weren't quite the festering stew of ignorance, superstition, and pointless theological arguments about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin as they have often been portrayed. In God’s Philosophers, James Hannam offers a refreshing challenge to the orthodox portrayal that all was darkness until the dawn of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. He also reveals how, far from being the enemy of science, religious belief actually stimulated scientific enquiry during this time. Moreover, while Isaac Newton may have once remarked that he had seen further thanks only to standing on the shoulders of giants (a remark which Hannam points out was not actually original at the time), many of those giants–such as the scholars Nicole Oresme and John Buridan had been leading lights of Medieval science.

In Dan Nott’s eye-opening and masterfully drawn nonfiction book, we get a glimpse into the intricacies of how the systems we use (and take for granted) every day actually work!

I love this book because my kids can pick it up from our coffee table, read a few pages, and unlock a mystery. I also appreciate how Dan’s explanations included the social and ecological impacts and implications of these systems. This book is for anyone who has ever been curious about our world and the fascinating things humans have built. 

I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I was in college many (many) years ago, and it fundamentally changed the way I think about organizational change and innovation. 

Written by a physicist, the book is about the philosophy and history of science and how we make advances in knowledge. Kuhn argues, and provides plenty of examples, of how science isn’t just the slow accumulation of data, but is actually influenced by “paradigms” that help us make sense of the data. Every so often however data emerges that doesn’t fit the paradigm. 

At first this kind of anomalous data is disregarded or its integrity is questioned. Eventually, after much struggle, the data that “doesn’t fit” becomes the starting point for a new and revolutionary paradigm which changes how we see the world.

OK, this sounds pretty theoretical. But think about organizations and simplicity. Many of our standard organizational practices… show more.

As the Western Roman Empire crumbled in the early 5th century, science and learning were extinguished for a thousand years…or, perhaps not. As Ehsan Masood shows in this highly enjoyable book to accompany a BBC series, Islamic scholars did much more than simply blow on the cinders of ancient Greek learning to keep them burning from the 8th to the 16th century. Names such as ibn-Sina, Jabir ibn-Hayyan, and Al-Khwarizmi may not be quite so well known to Western European ears as Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes, but Masood shows that they were actively involved in medicine, chemistry and mathematics during this time. So go with Masood on a journey through the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, and beyond to be persuaded that the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were perhaps not quite so dark as we’ve been led to believe.

This comprehensive account traces the instrument makers, the instruments, and the social and scientific factors that resulted in the burgeoning European scientific instrument trade during the 17th and 18th centuries. Huge scientific advances were made during this period, and these would not have been possible without corresponding advances in the capabilities and accuracy of the available scientific instruments, and the development of new types of instruments. M. Daumas describes the scientific challenges faced by scholars, practical astronomers, surveyors, navigators, and others, and the close collaboration between them and the artisans who developed and produced the required instruments. Translated from the French by the science historian Dr. Mary Holbrook, this is a fascinating, and highly informative book.

The discovery of insulin in early 1922 was a medical milestone that has since saved countless lives–my own included. Until this moment, a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes was a certain death sentence. But as diabetes clinician and historian of medicine, Chris Feudtner points out, the success of insulin has distorted historical accounts of diabetes by marginalising the experience of the patient in favour of narratives that focus on the development of medical technology to treat them. And Feudtner’s diagnosis is confined not just to diabetes but to the history of medicine in general. Following a personal epiphany that patients have an existence beyond X-rays and blood tests, Feudtner set out to address this problem by writing a history of diabetes as told from the perspective of patients. He does so magnificently and offers important insights about our relationship with technology that extend well beyond the treatment of diabetes.

Gregor Mendel was a lone genius who, pottering with pea plants, unlocked the secrets of modern genetics; Charles Darwin boldly took on the power of the Church with his theory of evolution; chance favoured the prepared mind of Louis Pasteur…right? Well, no, not according to historian John Waller who takes a sledgehammer to the heavily mythologised historical accounts of scientific discovery that are so often found in textbooks before kindly picking up the pieces to rearrange them into a much more honest and authentic account of how science works. Physicist-turned-philosopher Thomas Kuhn once warned that trying to learn the history of science from the pages of a science textbook was no better than assuming an intimate knowledge of a foreign country and its customs after having briefly thumbed through a glossy travel brochure. If the past is indeed a foreign country, then Waller is a reliable local guide who speaks… show more.

While not really a kid’s book, Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a fully illustrated graphic novel about a journey through time to visit the historical figures in quantum physics. At each location, the protagonist learns about the quantum world straight from the scientists themselves—fun! The language is a bit complex and so you may have to read it together. It may seem weird to “read” a graphic novel to a child, but I promise it works!

It is both entertaining and informative to learn how some of the greatest scientists have been wrong… at least some of the time.

Because of its triumphs, many people look upon science as unerring. Those of us involved in science, however, know that its power comes from its self-correction. Livio shows how scientific mistakes happen and also how they result in ever-closer approximations to the truth.

The full title of this wonderful book is The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. Bayes’ Theorem is a one-line mathematical formula, named after a Scottish church minister, that calculates the updated probability of an event occurring given new information that we receive.  Applications of Bayes’ Theorem are diverse and profound, from recommendation systems to automated translation algorithms to weather prediction.

This well-researched book does a deep dive into the most important characters of mathematical statistics over the past three centuries, and explains how Bayes’ Theorem was used to solve problems that were deemed unsolvable, including cracking the German Enigma Machine during World War II. I teach Bayes’ Theorem in several of my courses, and have found much inspiration in McGrayne’s book.

Shapin makes the audacious claim that there never really was a scientific revolution in Early Modern Europe, despite the fact that “the scientific revolution” has been a central organizing idea in the history of science and the history of Western culture more generally.

His provocative book provides a useful and engaging assessment of the utility of the concept of “the scientific revolution” for making sense of developments in the history of science.  He challenges us to think about the place of radical changes in the history of science, and whether the claims scientists make about such changes are merely rhetorical constructions.

Despite Shapin’s arguments, I am inclined to think something very significant happened in the sciences in the 16th and 17th Centuries, something that deserves to be called “revolutionary”. But Shapin’s book will certainly make readers reflect on what they mean by scientific revolution.

This survey of ancient and medieval Western science delves into theological, philosophical, social, and institutional aspects of developments in the physical and biological sciences, and in medicine.

Its illustrations are beautiful and apt, and the well-written exposition reflects the knowledge and erudition of one of my favorite teachers during my graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, a leading scholar of medieval science during the latter 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is a trilogy of historical fiction about, among many other things, the invention of the modern monetary system and the Scientific Revolution. Yes, it’s a heavy lift, as it’s nearly three thousand pages long, but it’s an incredible read. And if you want to get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the early days of science—both the people involved in it, as well as the ideas that they were playing with—these books are absolutely fantastic.

Here's a simple question: when did people learn exactly where babies come from?

As a historian and father of three, I'm embarrassed to say it never occurred to me to ask, despite all the times I've spent tracing the lives of people in the past and all the pre-natal visits I joined my wife for. The answer is it was shockingly recent.

Until the late nineteenth century, the only certainties were that sex sometimes led to pregnancy, that women had a monthly cycle that was somehow involved, and that men contributed a fluid "seed."

Everyone knows that ultrasounds are a relatively recent invention, but I realized that what separates us from the past is not simply that we can see our babies in the womb, while before, people couldn't. It's also that we know how the babies got there in the first place.

Corkin, a research psychologist, presents a fascinating case study of her patient, Henry Molaison, a man with no memory. Molaison—or H.M., as he was known in the scientific literature until his death in 2008—was a 27-year-old with severe epilepsy when he underwent radical brain surgery in 1953 to cure his intractable seizures.

Though Molaison’s seizures largely abated after the operation, he developed an even bigger problem, which manifested almost immediately after his surgery. Daily events vanished from his mind almost as soon as they had occurred.

Like most patients living with dementia, he could form no new long-term memories. With no new memories, he lived in a perpetual present, disconnected from his past (or at least the past after his surgery) and his future.

Koalas are one of Australia’s most loved and most well-recognized animals, and yet it’s surprising how little is known about them.  They feature prominently in Australian Indigenous stories, and yet were rarely used for clothing or artwork. When Europeans first arrived, it took them over 10 years before they even noticed these strange animals living in the trees above them and they have continued to bemuse scientists ever since. Ann Moyal, one of Australia’s most eminent historians of science, tackles the story of how we know what we do about koalas in an intriguing story about our patchy history with the koala, from neglect and exploitation and near extinction, to protection and international fame as the poster-child for Australian conservation.

Wulf brings eighteenth-century Enlightenment science, philosophy, and thought to life like no other contemporary writer.

Chasing Venus is the amazing story of the first global scientific collaboration: the expeditions to measure the transit of Venus across the face of the sun in 1761 and 1769.

The result, if achieved, would enable scientists, for the first time, to calculate the distance from the Earth to the sun. The teams of astronomers and surveyors that fanned out across Europe, North America, and Asia to take the necessary measurements faced adversity ranging from wars and hostile locals to equipment failures and bad weather. Yet, against the odds, they succeeded, ushering in a new era in astronomy and scientific cooperation. 

Edward Grant’s book begins, as mine does, with the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, but he focuses more intensively than I do on the impact of the new learning on scientific education and discovery. Writing clearly and gracefully, Grant demonstrates that a real scientific revolution began three hundred years before the “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth century. Along the way, he has some fascinating things to say about the curriculum of medieval universities and life among the first generation of European scientists. A valuable and enjoyable read.