Recommended Books

Science and Society

Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001).
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1973).
James Burke, Connections (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1978).
Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York: Dover Publications, 1957).
Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
James Randi, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1996).

John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988).
John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (New York: Anchor Books, 1996).
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (New York: Graphics Press, 2nd edition, 2001).

Peter Atkins, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb (New York: W.W Norton and Company, 1982).
Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Solly Angel, The Tale of the Scale: an Odyssey of Invention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Henry Petroski, The book on the bookshelf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
Henry Petroski, Design paradigms: case histories of error and judgment in engineering (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Henry Petroski, Pushing the limits: new adventures in engineering (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

Richard Phillips Feynman, Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character, as told to Ralph Leighton; edited by Edward Hutchings (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003).
Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (New York: Vintage Books, 2002).

Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
John Rennie Short, The World through Maps: A History of Cartography (Buffalo [New York]: Firefly Books, 2003).

Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1963).
Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959).