100 Books Like The God Particle

This is both a popular physics and philosophy book explaining at great length physics’ answer to life, meaning, and the Universe.

I like his clear account of the fundamental laws of nature, emergent theories and levels of reality, their implications and how we can talk about the Universe from the big bang to human experience, consciousness and meaning, without resorting to any mystical agents. 

This book explains what not to do to know the Universe, with examples from non-fiction postmodern nonsense "texts." These texts include discourses detached from experimental verification and scientific terms used completely out of context.

I love this book because I find pseudo- and postmodern science distasteful and harmful. I think it shows clearly how some famous postmodern intellectuals promote antipathy for facts, clear thinking, empirical tests, and, in general, science — our best shot at understanding the Universe. These postmodern intellectuals have huge influence and have helped spread the trend of rejection of reason and science throughout the World.

I adore this book stressing science is not an arbitrary "narration" or a collection of metaphors for postmodern essays. I share the authors’ dreams about a future after postmodernism. 

This book is about the attempts of physicists to understand the nature of time. The author tells the story of the concept of time from ancient Greece to the end of the 20th century through the progress in relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics.

The best thing about the book is the anecdotes about great physicists with whom Novikov met in the former Soviet Union and in the West, such as Zeldovich, Guseinov, Longair, Hawking, and Trimble. I also like how Novikov shows the readers that many new phenomena and laws of nature are waiting to be discovered. It is also inspiring to learn about how physicists have been able to contribute to the understanding of nature even under very difficult situations. 

I like the main idea promoted in the book that even laws of nature (including general relativity) result from "collective effects," i.e., many-body interactions. This is supported by examples from the material nature of the vacuum of elementary particles to proteins and daily life.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN (after the book was written) already greatly increased our confidence that the vacuum is not empty but a type of matter from which elementary particle properties emerge.

I also like his thoughts on the philosophy of physics from the collective-effects (or non-reductionist) perspective. He claims that for a scientific measurement or even a law to be possible, nature should allow precisely measurable quantities via collective effects.

There are many short, accessible introductions to what current philosophers of science spend their time arguing about; this is one of the best. It wisely doesn’t cover everything, but instead uses Francis Bacon’s crucial break with the authority of Aristotle as a point of entry into current debates on half a dozen core issues such as inductive inference, progress, and realism.

It achieves an important and unusual cross-fertilization between two very different kinds of expertise. Both authors are highly innovative, and creative, thinkers, Cohen in biology and Stewart in mathematics.

Cohen is a biologist fascinated by the complexity observed in the living world, and Stewart is an expert on the mathematics of chaos and complexity. The result is a profound and multifaceted view of many natural phenomena, and of evolution in particular. It becomes very clear how selfish-gene theory fails to take account of important evolutionary mechanisms.

Bookshelves groan under the weight of highly skilled science communicators, and through them those of us with no specialist knowledge can learn about evolution, quantum mechanics, neuroscience et al, and then bore people to death with our newfound knowledge. There is, however, a world of difference between the things science discovers and the stories we tell about these discoveries. I love this book because it makes the reader do the hard yards, thinking not just about the breathless new discoveries, but also the very nature of this knowledge, and hence its limits.

In my opinion, Horgan’s book is of great value, and I find it an important reference in considering the subject of “the end of science.”

This book is brave and lucid, with plenty of good ideas on topics related to the limits of knowledge in science. The intuition that the scientific age is declining is prophetic, I guess, but not so the causes Horgan gives. It is possible the limits of knowledge is one of the causes, but there is much more behind the twilight of science, and I think it is more related to being sated with knowledge rather than to the limits of knowledge.

It is more a sociological/anthropological question than a pure debate about whether there remain scientific problems to be solved. 

This is a collection of essays by Kuhn, written later in his life, as he tried to clarify and develop the view he initially presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn reflects on developments in the sociology of science that were influenced by his work, as the Strong Programme sociologists of science identified as Kuhnians and relativists.  Kuhn tries to clarify what he meant by “paradigm change”, motivated by a concern to address his critics and to distance his own view from certain types of relativist views.

The autobiographical interview is very engaging, as Kuhn takes this opportunity to reflect on the impact of his book, as well as on the effects the book has had on his life and career. I think much of what Kuhn had to say in these later papers provides important insight into understanding science, especially his remarks on scientific specialization.

I regard this book as perhaps the greatest book about the nature of science ever published. In it, Popper spells out his dramatic view that science proceeds by putting forward bold, imaginative guesses, which are then subjected to ferocious attempts at empirical refutation. When these conjectured theories are refuted, scientists are forced to think up a better conjectural theory–and that is how science makes progress.

In this book, Popper shows how this dramatic account of how science proceeds by a process of conjecture and refutation has implications for fields beyond science, such as philosophy, in that it implies that, whatever we are doing, our best hope of success in solving our problems is to consider possible solutions and subject them to ferocious criticism.