Books like The Man Who Found Time — picked by fans

I wanted to read this book to learn how Enrico Fermi could be the “last man who knew everything.”

It turns out he didn’t know “everything” about “everything,” but rather knew nearly everything in physics. Especially noteworthy was Fermi’s genius for both theoretical and applied physics. It was he, after all, who planned and carried out the first successful atomic chain reaction in a squash court at the University of Chicago and co-invented the nuclear reactor.

I loved learning about a relatively shy boy and a late bloomer (albeit with a photographic memory!) who became a brilliant, extremely supportive teacher and a scientist, about whom more positive things were said after his death than about any other twentieth-century scientist.

I was amazed at how a complete outsider, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who grew up in relative poverty, could rise to the highest levels of the British academic world through the sheer force of his intellectual genius.

How could this self-taught mathematical prodigy, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the youngest to win that honor and only the second Indian, make such extraordinary contributions to several areas of mathematics? How lucky for humanity that he was discovered and, though sickly, brought to England!

How many more contributions could he have made had he not died at age 32? How many undiscovered geniuses, hidden in remote corners of the world, have never realized their extraordinary potential?

I loved the story of Joseph Needham, an eccentric English scientist who fell in love first with a Chinese woman and then with China itself.

I could relate to the passion he felt for learning about a completely different culture, immersing himself in the language, and pursuing countless friendships with Chinese people.

Although I had known that Chinese artisans developed some of the world’s greatest inventions (paper, woodblock printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass), Needham discovered and cataloged dozens of others in many thick scholarly volumes, showing the world the greatness of the ancient Chinese culture.

The ability of brilliant scientists in recent centuries to grasp the inner workings of nature fascinates me.

William Gilbert understood magnetism, Isaac Newton formulated a theory of light, and Benjamin Franklin comprehended the unitary nature of electricity. I admire the man who put it all together, James Clerk Maxwell. He was kind, a bit awkward, creative, a devoted husband and teacher, and deeply religious, like many people I know.

Extraordinarily curious from a young age, Maxwell discerned that electric current pervades all things, moving at the speed of light and constantly generating magnetic fields. And this was only the most powerful of his many discoveries.

Einstein declared that “one scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.”

This book expanded how I thought about time and about the landscape we take for granted.

It opened up the prehistoric world from a contemporary perspective, showing how a sense of deep geological time can help us understand our own place in the world better today.

Gordon explains why categories of things can be useful in deepening our understanding of a place: as she says, ‘a named landscape thickens.’

I also found this book so useful in working out how to cram 100,000 years of history into one volume for my book!

This fascinating book by the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould taught me so much about what good non-fiction writing looks like.

Although it is strictly a science book, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle is history, philosophy, and storytelling at its best. It illustrates how complex metaphors work in our conceptualization about the past, time as following a repeating cycle and time as linear, forward moving.

Using the concepts of arrow and cycle, Gould explores the discovery of “deep time” a few hundred years ago. The almost unfathomable age of the earth and the universe was a shock and had monumental consequences for our understanding of human history, just a short bubble of existence.

This book also excels in imploding some of the myths that arise about scientific discoveries and the stories we tell about them.

I think understanding the intellectual background to a historical period is always important, and I was introduced to the Scottish Enlightenment at West Virginia Wesleyan College through this book. I have since had the pleasure to meet and work with Alexander Broadie while at Glasgow, and he is a kind, generous, and supportive scholar.

The Scottish Enlightenment covers the significant breakthroughs in the thought of the movement, and the contributions of the characters behind it such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The importance of studying history, morality in civil society, religion, and art. The Enlightenment laid the groundwork for our modern society, so how could anyone not study it?

Historical fiction at its very best; it’s so sad that Thompson died shortly after the book's publication. This book follows Charles Darwin circumnavigating the world aboard The Beagle but is told largely from the viewpoint of the Beagle’s captain, Robert FitzRoy.

The science, then, is mainly Darwin’s theories of evolution by natural selection. But it’s also an account of FitzRoy’s meteorology: he was the person entrusted to set up Britain’s Met Office.

This may all seem a bit dry, but I thought it was as exciting as the best thrillers. It’s a big book, 700 pages or more, but I raced through it.

A superbly written account of, perhaps, the most famous British naturalist-explorer, Charles Darwin, on his great voyage aboard HMS Beagle to Patagonia and the Galápagos in 1831-6. The author also covers the furious aftermath, the debate resulting from Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) findings and contentious, to some seemingly blasphemous, theory on the origin of species. Profusely illustrated in colour with contemporary material. I have read and long admired several of Moorhead’s books and particularly enjoyed this one as it deals with a personal hero of mine.

Janet Browne's biography of Charles Darwin caused one of the greatest leaps in understanding in my entire life. Browne depicts this amazing phase in young Charles Darwin's life when a young man's inquisitive brain lit up as he found his purpose.

It's worth noting that Darwin was a misfit in everything he’d tried up to that point. In desperation, his father sent him on a voyage around the world as a companion to the captain, and Darwin's innate curiosity led to a life-changing investigation into why there were so many different species in so many different places. I relate to that wonderment and his question of how all this remarkable flora and fauna got here.