More Favorite Books

Looking back at my history with physics books, e.g., 8,9, and 10 below and so many others, I can see that I would have been a lot better physicist if I had paid more attention. Of course it would have helped if I had been smarter too ...

First, a really important book that I haven't read all of: Darwin's Origin of Species. Despite having read only about half I can assure you that no book has had greater influence on me except maybe Newton's Principia of which I have read zero... You can tell a book is really important if you don't need to read it for it to be a big influence.

I promise I did read all the rest of these books carefully though, or at least most of them...

(1)Godel, Escher, and Bach and Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. So many ideas connected into one big idea.

(2)Wonderful Life and several other books by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould is frequently blinded by his prejudices but he's a very fine writer and even his mistakes are instructive. One of the big reasons Chuck's book was so important to me. Others are:

(3)The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is closer to the truth than Gould, but I love to catch his mistakes too - a good one in the first edition of TSG was an argument he tried to have with Astronomer and Science Fiction writer Fred Hoyle. Suffice it to say that Dawkins got his numbers all mixed up - numerics is not a strength for him.

(4)The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion by Tolkien. If reality offends thee, pluck it out, or at least read some good fantasy - a rather rare commodity.

(5)Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. A great big picture vision of how and where civilization developed. Diamond argues very convincingly that the development of agriculture and civilization had an awful lot to do with geography. Civilization developed in the Middle East because that was where the domesticable plants and animals were, and spread through Eurasia because the continent's East-West orientation facilitates the spread of agriculture. The Americas were nearly opposite. I like several of his other books as well, including The Third Chimpanzee and Collapse a cautionary tale of the environment.

(6)All of Richard Feynman's books, especially Surely you're Joking and the three big red books. They aren't really suitable for complete beginners, but almost everybody else can profit greatly from them, I think.

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