Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer has cast a baleful eye on the various lists of the world's greatest books, and decided that we really need is a list of the world's greatest popular-science books. I think the goal is to find the top 100, but many nominations are pouring in from around the internets, and I suspect that a cool thousand will be rounded up without much problem. We played this game once ourselves, but like basketball, this is a game that can be enjoyed over and over. So pop over and leave your own suggestions, or just leave them here. To prime the pump, off the top of my head here is a list of books I would nominate. A variety of criteria come into play; originality, readability, clarity, and influence -- but just because a work appears here doesn't mean that it scores highly on all four counts.
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hoftstadter
Cosmos, Carl Sagan
Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison
How the Universe Got Its Spots, Janna Levin
Chronos, Etienne Klein
The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth
The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick
The Double Helix, James Watson
Prisoner's Dilemma, William Poundstone
The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
One, Two, Three... Infinity, George Gamow
Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, Hans Christian Von Baeyer
Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, Huw Price
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman
Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman
Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
The Mathematical Experience, Davies and Hersh
The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Sharon Traweek
The Diversity of Life, E.O. Wilson
The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose
Longitude, Dava Sobel
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
Flatland, Edwin Abbott
The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
Nobel Dreams, Gary Taubes
I didn't peek at anyone else's lists, but I admit that I did peek at my own bookshelves.
