Terrence Tao: The Cosmic Distance Ladder
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I am humbled by the intellectual capacity of (i) these early philosophers/natural scientists/physicists (they meant the same at they time) and (ii) Tao's gift of making things "as simple as possible, but not any simpler".
On a tangential thought: where are the Taos of chemistry, economics, or physics (Feynman was it when he was alive, but I think Tao's explanation powers surpass even him) and, of course, philosophy. Currently, science popularizers seem to either give you a watered down, sweetened, "intelligent layman" version (e.g. Hawking and Mlodinow's The Grand Design) or hard core stuff that only practitioners can understand.
Vol 1, as sold on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Vol-Pre-Socratics-P...
A sharp person with a high school education, and a willingness to lookup terms or references s/he doesn't understand (with the help of Google, Wikipedia, etc.), would be able to readily digest these books, though even postdocs would find much in them that is challenging and intriguing.
This might be it for economics. My understanding of how markets work has been growing exponentially bedtime to bedtime.
Hubble ended his book _Observational Approach to Cosmology_ with the statement: "... if the recession factor is dropped, if red-shifts are not primarily velocity-shifts, the picture is simple and plausible. There is no evidence of expansion and no restriction of time-scale, no trace of spatial curvature, and no limitation of spatial dimensions. Moreover, there is no problem of inter-nebular material. The observable region is thoroughly homogeneous; it is too small a sample to indicate the nature of the universe at large. The univers might even be an expanding model, provided the rate of expansion, which pure theory does not specify, is inappreciable. For that matter, the universe might even be contracting."