Physics 55: General Interest Books

Astronomy

• Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe by Simon Singh (Fourth Estate, 2005).
• Black Holes & Time Warps by Kip Thorne (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994). One of the better books about black holes, by one of the main contributors to black hole physics.
• Coming of Age in the Milky Way (a historical view of astronomy and its impact) and other books by Timothy Ferris such as The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, a summary of current cosmology.
• The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, Second Edition by Steven Weinberg (Basic Books, 1993).
• Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe by Martin Rees (Basic Books, 2001). A short, nontechnical, but fascinating book by the British Royal Astronomer about how the existence of patterns and structures (life, stars, planets) depend on a few key physical constants whose values are such that, if changed by just a tiny tiny bit, would cause the universe to have a drastically different structure and likely no life as we know it.
• Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos by Alan W. Hirshfeld (Henry Holt and Company, 2001). Interesting historical summary of key people who figured out how to measure the distances to stars.
• The Sleepwalkers : A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe by Arthur Koestler (Penguin, 1990).

Science

• The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin (Random House, 1983). An engaging and enjoyable nontechnical book about the history of science, with an emphasis on how cultures and perceptions of the world evolve because of advances in science. Not just about astronomy but mentions many astronomical discoveries.
• The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999). A deservedly popular and well-written nontechnical discussion of string theory, a leading approach to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity.
• The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age by John Horgan (Little Brown & Company, 1997, New York). Will science continue to make significant discoveries arbitrarily far into the future or will science come to an end, where the basic principles of all phenomena become known? This books takes the controversial view that science will come to an end and is likely in its twilight now.
• The New World of Mr. Tompkins by George Gamow and Russell Stannard (Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Gamow's book One, Two, Three...Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.
• Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics, by Nina Byers and Gary Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2006, 498 pages).
• Physics for Entertainment, Volume I by Yakov Perelman. (Free online copy of 1936 book.)
• Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. An up-to-date and non-mathematical survey of what makes quantum mechanics so strange and intriguing. Makes contact with and explains some recent experiments.

Astronomy-Related Science Fiction:

• The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem.
• Return From the Stars by Stanislaw Lem.
• Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.
• Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.