5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind | Hacker News Reader

5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

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38 pointsbabyshake22 comments

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

+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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.)

How about a good basic Chemistry book?

Hmmm, can't think of one. There's a lot of freshman chemistry textbooks, but they're all pretty similar, and pretty boring.

Chemistry, the in-between science, doesn't really lend itself so easily to popularization as physics or biology. There's no deep principles, and no amazing phenomena, it's pretty much just stamp collecting.

Maybe somebody else will have some suggestions though?

Yeah that's the problem, they're all boring and don't lead to a bit of light reading after a hard day at work.

I picked up Linus Pauling's book. Famous guy, fairly literate book, but I haven't gotten far enough through it to see if it's really great or not.

Good reviews on Amazon and it's inexpensive. So maybe I'll pick up a copy. I'm asking cause I might get a gig working for a non-profit that does a lot of biological research.

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

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