5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

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by babyshake • 18 years ago

38 22 18 years ago

babyshake• 18 years ago

Godel, Escher, Bach is one of the best books ever written in this cosmos.

yters• 18 years ago

It's definitely clever, but he seems generally confused about his thesis. As I recall, he defines intelligence as the ability to step outside the system. So, if intelligence is a system, then if it steps outside of itself to formalize itself into AI, then it has not formalized itself.

robg• 18 years ago

I agree, but it's also probably one of the most owned but never finished books in the cosmos. Brief History of Time (by Hawking) too.

bookhuddle2• 18 years ago

Agree that "Brief History..." is a great book.

judegomila• 18 years ago

To add to this:

The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose. Really cool book.

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, by Penrose again.

Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Penrose.

jsmcgd• 18 years ago

I'm reading 'The Road to Reality. A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe'. Be warned: Penrose doesn't use the word 'complete' lightly. Well worth the effort however.

ionfish• 18 years ago

I've always been rather dubious about Penrose's approach to consciousness. He seems to be of the school of "Put two metaphysically mysterious things together, in the hope that we can explain one in terms of the other."

sown• 18 years ago

Road to Reality is nice but the other two books you mention are not so much. Biology is very much a show-me science and if you can't actually prove or demonstrate it then ... I dunno what to say. Don't bother anyone with it? That sounds harsh but it is the case.

kqr2• 18 years ago

Since you mentioned The Road to Reality, I have to put in a plug for Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

jaaron• 18 years ago

Complexity is a great book. Inspired me when I read it in high school years ago.

mickt4• 18 years ago

Anyone know any good books about Chemistry for those of us that know naught about it (particularly books related to programming)?

hugh2• 18 years ago

Chemistry and programming? You mean, like, computational chemistry? (That's an awfully hard subject to get into, and I don't know any books written at an introductory level.)

mickt4• 18 years ago

How about a good basic Chemistry book?

bookhuddle2• 18 years ago

Not related to the cosmos, but "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters" is a great book. It presents information in a story format that allows people without much scientific background to understand and appreciate the genome.

kirpekar• 18 years ago

Missed out: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared M. Diamond

zandorg• 18 years ago

I thought Godel, Escher, Bach to be too hard to read.

Instead I recommend Kip Thorne's Black Holes & Time Warps, a great book.

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

Five (or six) good books about five different sciences:

Materials Science: Gordon, Structures, or Why Things Don't Fall Down.

Linguistics: Pinker, The Language Instinct

Evolutionary Biology: Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

Molecular Biology: David Clark, Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun

Physics: the canonical answer is "Feynman". I won't argue with that. His little books (QED and The Character of Physical Law) are quite nice.

helveticaman• 18 years ago

+1 The Blind Watchmaker, although I'd argue The Selfish Gene is a better introduction to the field. The Blind Watchmaker is somewhat more focussed on argument evolution versus creationism. Still, awesome stuff.

5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

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