53 Books Like The Planet in a Pebble

I spend a lot of my time trying to clarify the bilge poured out by the merchants of fake science: the flat-earthers, creationists, and climate deniers mainly, but also medical quacks and other fruitloops who throw out alternative science, stuff which is like normal science, with one small exception. I was already fighting these fights when Wolpert came to Sydney, and I chaired a lecture he gave. He showed us where the problem lay in combatting idiocy: the idiots depend on naïve and naked intuition.

Invariably, these unhinged pseudo-realities rely on a simple misreading of scientific lore, and Lewis explained that this is because a great deal of science is counter-intuitive. We can’t see evolution happening, the world looks flat, the sun appears to go around us, and common sense says that kinetic energy must be proportional to velocity, not it's square. Enter the simpleton who slept through a key… show more.

I have to deal, from time to time, with nervous would-be experts who have an abject fear of hybrid species in the sanctuary where I am a volunteer. One of the main lessons you take away from this ecological history is that hybrids drive a great deal of evolution, and trying to wipe out the hybrids is, in fact, an attempt to interfere with nature.

Looking at Europe as an evolutionary melting pot, we see that time and again, species migrated into the continent and were transformed, whether the immigrants were humans, elephants, or plane trees. Like all of Flannery’s books, Europe is food for thought, something to savour.

I never knew that the telegraph started as a series of physical towers conveying coded messages by line of sight from one hill to another. It took years for the word telegraph to refer to the system we know so well, relying on electrical lines, the telegraph key, and Morse code.

I love how Standage finds the through line from this 19th-century communications network to the Internet we all take for granted today.

I have had my copy since about 1972, when I was a penurious post-grad, and it lacks an ISBN, but it is based on a famous phrase that may or may not have been written by Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, and it is an uproarious and undisciplined history of that phrase. Merton calls it a Shandean postscript, because there are parallels with the style of Tristram Shandy.

I am afraid (or so two of my more literate editors have assured me), Merton infected my own style to an extent, but you can just tell that he enjoyed telling a story, almost as though it came from Falstaff himself. Any would-be understander of science needs to read it, but if you cite it, don’t make the mistake of Charlesworth et al., who, in Life Among the Scientists,… show more.

Chemistry saves our lives every second of every day without us usually noticing it. Primo Levi’s personal history with chemistry perhaps saved him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

This extraordinary book is a series of snapshots from Levi’s life each linked to a different element. I would recommend reading anything Primo Levi has written, The Periodic Table is just the best place to start.

Sontag’s historic novel focusses on two great romances: the one between Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, and the other between her husband Sir William Hamilton and the volcano Vesuvius.

Hamilton is the titular ‘volcano lover’ (he also dallied with Etna) who documented the fluctuating moods of the crater with attentive devotion.

He is a fascinating figure – an eighteenth-century diplomat, collector, and connoisseur, he worked at a time when the foundations of modern science were being laid down.

Hamilton’s observations of Vesuvius and the flaming sulphur fields around Naples were recorded in the beautiful Campi Phlegraei.

European men of his time were driven to document, catalogue, name, and impose order on the world, often in a deliberate effort to distance themselves from natural religions and animistic beliefs that prevailed in territories exploited in the colonial era.

Sontag describes Hamilton caught in the balance between the worlds of… show more.

Raffles explores geology through both a historic and an autobiographical lens.

We might understand the ‘unconformities’ of the title as both unconventional geological formations and members of Raffles’s own family (though I imagine he might question my urge to distinguish between the two.)

The book is episodic, and follows Raffles on his travels to sites of geological and personal significance.

Throughout he also draws out the long history of exploitation bound up in our relationship to the mineral realm, including the removal of iron-rich meteorites from indigenous communities in the arctic circle, and the forced labour of the Glimmerwerke – mica splitting workshops – at Theresienstadt ghetto during the Second World War.

In my book I describe geology as a storytelling science – Raffles is something closer to a poet.

Fortey is a literary, opinionated, and very engaging science writer.

One of the foundational books for my book was a geological walk across the Great Britain called The Hidden Landscape which was a revelation when I first read it (I can’t believe it’s now 30 years old!).

I’m a keen walker and know many of the landscapes he described in the book – learning about the rocks far beneath my feet, the forces that had formed them and the impact they had on the history of each region really transformed my relationship to the landscape.

For anyone looking for a global perspective, his more recent book Earth: An Intimate History is also an excellent and illuminating read.

My copy (published in 1954) is a childhood gift that I have treasured for more than 50 years. Flicking through the well-thumbed and weather beaten pages brings back so many wonderful memories of holidays and collecting trips.

As an avid collector of pebbles from an early age, this was the book that fuelled my interest in geology. Amazed to find that no two pebbles were the same or had the same story, I was fascinated by their diversity and beauty, what they were made of, and how they were formed.

When the book was re-issued in 2018, I couldn’t resist buying another copy. I read it from cover to cover with as much excitement as I had as a child and was reminded that this was the book that inspired me to become a professional geologist.

Restoree is a stand-alone novel by Anne McCaffrey of the Dragon Riders of Pern fame. The protagonist, Sara, is swept up in a mass kidnapping and carried away to a planet where she ends up in a new body. She is given the job of caring for a man who seems largely unresponsive. Sara and the reader slowly come to understand what’s happening and she makes a bold move to rescue herself, her charge, and the other restorees. Like all the best science fiction, Restoree is less about the trappings and more about the human story.