Science Books - Lisa Randall's Readings on Physics

The Character of Physical Law (Modern Library) by Richard Feynman

Although Feynman's life story made bestseller lists, I never wanted to know about his shenanigans since I figured they would be annoyingly distracting when studying his truly great writings on physics. 'The Character of Physical Law' is a beautiful book, based on a series of lectures Feynman gave, that describes via many examples the nature of physical laws: how they are deduced, what they mean, and the concepts such as symmetry and conservation laws that are involved. Those who know more math a...2 points

The First Three Minutes: A Modern View Of The Origin Of The Universe by Steven Weinberg

This book tells a beautiful scientific story. Physicists understand many of the important processes that occurred early on in the universe's evolution, including how radiation cooled from the time of the hot Big Bang and left the imprint on the sky we see today and how nuclei were created from more fundamental elements once they cooled enough to bind together. Weinberg explains this and much more in this wonderfully written book in which the physics speaks for itself without superfluous distra...

The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report by Timothy Ferris

This is a very nice book summarizing some important physics developments, both recent and historical, with particular emphasis on some notable achievements in cosmology. It's easy to read and unusually broad-ranging.

The Whole Shebang

The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott, Ian Stewart

Strictly speaking, 'Flatland' is a book about mathematics, not physics. But some of the most important ideas that physicists study today rely on the higher-dimensional notions that Edwin A. Abbott so clearly (and amusingly) describes. This is a delightful book that brings extra dimensions to life.

The Annotated Flatland

Asimov on Physics by Isaac Asimov

I didn't read many popular physics books as a kid, but this is one of the few that has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It's a compilation of essays on physics that Asimov wrote in other earlier books and although the essays are by now fairly old, they illuminate some key physical concepts, including escape velocity, energy, the uncertainty principle, and ideas about light--both new and old (including the answer to questions such as why 'c' is used for the speed of light). Asimov had a re...

Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Commonwealth Fund Book Program) by Kip S. Thorne

A trustworthy friend told me how much he learned from this book, in which Kip Thorne does a beautiful job of explaining the key physical insights underlying the mathematics that tells physicists about the existence of black holes and other bizarre possibilities.

Black Holes and Time Warps

Einstein in Berlin by Thomas Levenson

I read this delightful book when returning from an interdisciplinary conference celebrating Einstein's 1905 achievements that took place at the Einstein Forum in Berlin in January of this year. This book is really a history book with some physics thrown in but both are extremely well presented.

Einstein in Berlin

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene

The first half of this book explains quantum mechanics and special relativity patiently and gracefully. Greene assumed people would want to read a book that was heavy on substance and his gamble proved correct.

The Elegant Universe

Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe by Martin Rees

This book is also one that a nonphysicist acquaintance enthusiastically endorsed. It's a lovely little book that starts off presenting six basic numbers essential to describing our universe, the forces we know about, and the properties of space. The numbers he describes are associated with some of the biggest open questions for physicists and cosmologists. Rees combines his extensive knowledge of both astronomy and cosmology to give life and context to these numbers.

Just Six Numbers

Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero by Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison, Office of Charles and Ray Eames

This book is based on the excellent film 'Powers of Ten' (The Films of Charles & Ray Eames - The Powers of 10 (Vol. 1)), which cleverly illustrates the range of distance scales involved in physics and the very different physical processes that occur at each of these scales. The best part of the book is the part that is faithful to the film that shows pictures of what the universe looks like ranging from the scale of 1 billion lightyears (mostly empty space) to 0.1 fermi (.0000000000000001 meters...