Books like The Disordered Cosmos — picked by fans

I've always been inspired by the story of the Black women mathematicians at NASA — the "human computers" who calculated the formulas to launch rockets and astronauts into space. Shetterly's book brings them to life, making their feats even more remarkable, especially given their tools (adding machines, pencils, and slide rules) and challenges (they worked in the Jim Crow South).

The four amazing women the book focuses on—Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden—deserved to be brought to light. There's a movie version that conveys their brilliance in a dramatized way, but the book gets into depth in ways the movie can't. It's a great narrative about what it takes to be an innovator, no matter if you're a woman or a man.

This book shifted the paradigm of my life.

I discovered it and its author by listening to David Oakes’ nature podcast Trees A Crowd, which I devoured religiously every day while living in Alaska during the second year of the pandemic. I only intended it as research, but this book changed the composition of my soul. 

It’s a fascinating and genuinely captivating exploration of one of the most evolved lifeforms on Earth. Their survival is essential to our own, and if we won’t learn from them, we’ll fall beside them. But more likely, they’ll outlast us!

While there has been some controversy about the science in Simard’s book, there’s no doubt that it’s a great read that juxtaposes Simard’s personal life with her scientific life.

I was drawn to her personal story, which takes place in both government and academic spheres. I cried with her when her brother passed away, and I was proud with her when her daughter said she might want to study forestry at university.

The mix of science and memoir works well in this book, showing how the two are inextricably entwined. I was impressed by how hard Simard worked to keep her family together, particularly when she was a professor at UBC in Vancouver, and they were living in Nelson.  

I liked that Jahren told the unvarnished truth of her experience in academia; like Zimmerman, she also shares how academia treats pregnant people. 

She talks about training the next generation of scientists, which is one of the main goals of the scientific enterprise.

Though I wasn’t impressed with the hazing ritual she and her lab manager had for new students in the lab, I did appreciate the excellent writing and well-paced narrative. Jahren is a stunning writer, and her book is neatly separated into sections about a tree, followed by a chapter about life mimicking that tree. 

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.

Every good book recommendation list needs a twist. The nature of this list tends to lend itself to more fantasy/ fiction books, but this one is different. This book was like standing under a night sky, staring up at the stars, and feeling simultaneously insignificant and extraordinary.

I love how it made the universe feel vast and beautiful yet somehow personal. It’s not just science—it’s poetry, a reminder of how miraculous our existence is. It’s the twist on my list, but I recommend it because it showed me how the mystery of the cosmos mirrors the wonder of childhood discovery. It’s breathtaking and grounding all at once.

Apart from offering a particular perspective on cosmology and extragalactic astrophysics, the well-known heterodox astrophysicist Halton Arp offers some observations on the corruption of academic science and the difficulties scientists claiming new ideas face.

I do not think what he says about astronomy is right, but certainly his complaints on how physics and astronomy gets done contains valuable wisdom on sociology of science.

As I recall, this short summary ranges a bit more widely than the two volumes I've listed above. It is short, accessible and to the point, with rather more emphasis on the theory than the observations. I like the fact that it looks forward to possible new discoveries about our Universe and provides a glimpse of topics that lie outside the mainstream of contemporary cosmology. Quantum cosmology, anyone?

I savored this book sip by sip, wishing that each chapter would have lasted a little longer, a little longer. I felt a “healthy envy” for anyone lucky enough to have had a teacher like Klein in high school.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with the cosmos while reading his work. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts in an accessible and poetic manner is admirable.

Each chapter has given me an unforgettable early morning coffee, revealing at a pace the magic that science holds in every corner.

It's a history of scientific advances, particularly in cosmology. It’s old now and I don’t know if it’s the best book on the topic, but it influenced my thinking a lot when I was a teenager.

Many advances in science require letting go of what you think you think you know. Letting go of even obvious assumptions – that the sun goes around the earth (plain to the naked eye); that the world is made of 4 elements – fire, water, earth, wind; that time flows the same everywhere for all people.

My book similarly shows some of the current assumptions that are holding us back – that human intelligence explains our success, the nature of intelligence, and what ultimately drives growth and prosperity.