Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Shuster, 1986.
Rhodes’s book remains the definitive history of science’s most momentous, terrible application. The still-haunting question: Did the U.S. need to demonstrate the bomb’s power by destroying not just one but two Japanese cities?
Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Harper Perennial, 1987.
In his first book, the neurologist transforms medical case studies of brain-damaged patients into gripping forays into the mysteries of mind, knowledge and reality. Question: Does Sacks confirm or contradict Noam Chomsky’s dictum that we will always learn more about ourselves from literature than from science?
Sale, Kirkpatrick, Rebels Against the Future. Perseus, 1995.
I love my Thinkpad, Prius, 42-inch LCD HDTV, but I also love this book by the cranky anarchist-Luddite Sale. He provides a lively history of the original Luddite rebellion against England’s industrial revolution and a rousing call for a neo-Luddite movement. Death to the Machine (except my Thinkpad, Prius, etc.)!
Schrodinger, Erwin, What Is Life? Cambridge University Press, 1944.
These reflections by the quantum pioneer on the mysteries of biology--and particularly the riddle of how cells store and transmit genetic information--turned out to be remarkably prescient.
Sharp, Gene, The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Porter Sargent, 1973.
Is political science science? I vote yes, if only so I can list Sharp’s underappreciated work. Arguing in practical and empirical rather than moral terms, Sharp argues persuasively that nonviolence is more effective than violence at achieving positive social change; people have reformed unjust governments, toppled dictators and resisted invaders through nonviolent means. If only more people—whether Islamic terrorists or leaders of the world’s most powerful state--would heed Sharp’s message!
Shermer, Michael, Why People Believe Weird Things. W.H. Freeman, 1997.
Skeptics are often such mean, obsessive, humorless cranks that they hurt their cause. Shermer is cool and witty, and his youthful dalliance with Christianity helps him empathize with believers. In this most popular of his many books, he invokes science to explain not only why our superstitions are wrong but also why we are so superstitious in the first place.
Shulgin, Alexander and Ann, PIHKAL. Transform Press, 1991.
An acronym for “phenethylamines I have known and loved,” PIHKAL is a lightly fictionalized memoir by the chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin and his wife Ann, a psychotherapist. Phenethylamines are compounds that include many psychedelics. This startlingly original book tells how “Shura” and “Alice” fell in love and embarked on a career as “psychonauts” who tested hundreds of psychotropic compounds synthesized by Alexander.
Skinner, B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Knopf, 1971.
This book represents the clearest and hence most disturbing popular account of behaviorism, which for decades was an even more dominant theory of human nature than psychoanalysis or sociobiology. Legend had it that some of Skinner’s students at Harvard became clinically depressed on exposure to his relentlessly mechanistic view of human nature.
Stent, Gunther, The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress. Natural History Press, 1969.
The Berkeley biologist Stent argues that science will soon bump up against physical, cognitive, economic and social limits. Stent’s doubts about the myth of eternal scientific progress provoked howls of outrage from other scientists. But Bentley Glass, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, found Stent’s perspective more persuasive than that of Vannevar (Endless Frontier) Bush.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man. Harper & Row, 1959.
Today, the notion that computers and phones and the internet are bearing us toward an “Omega Point” of global cosmic consciousness is old hat. But the legendary Jesuit and biologist anticipated this techno-mysticism in this strange, visionary work, which fuses evolutionary theory with Christian eschatology.
Valenstein, Elliott, Great and Desperate Cures. Basic Books, 1986.
Lobotomies, insulin-injection, fever inoculation, shock treatments, barbiturates, sleep deprivation, tooth extraction—these are some of the “cures” that psychiatrists once inflicted on hapless mental patients, as the neuroscientist and historian Valenstein reveals in this gripping history. The Scientologists must love this book, but it’s all true and—given psychiatry’s persistent lack of progress--still relevant.
Watson, James, The Double Helix. Atheneum, 1968.
It’s a truism now that world-class scientists are not rational automatons but can be as awkward, arrogant, lustful and nasty as the rest of us. But beginning with its infamous opening sentence (”I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood”), Watson’s gossipy account of the discovery of the structure of DNA is still refreshingly candid.
Wegner, Daniel, The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press, 2002.
The Harvard psychologist draws upon research by himself and others to demonstrate that our subjective sense of self-control is often—but not always!—illusory. Witty, clear-eyed, grounded in empirical data, this book yields deeper insight into the ancient riddle of free will than shelves of mere philosophy.
Weinberg, Steven, The First Three Minutes. Basic Books, 1977.
The Nobel laureate shows how astronomy and particle physics have converged to provide an astonishingly clear picture of the birth of the cosmos. The book merits listing just for Weinberg’s wonderfully gloomy comment: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”
Wertheim, Margaret, Pythagoras’s Trousers. Random House, 1995.
The feisty provocateur and journalist offers a challenging feminist critique of the history of physics and mathematics. Like religions, Wertheim argues, physics and mathematics have been and still are dominated by a male “priesthood” enamored of reductionist solutions to reality and hostile to women.
Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics. Wiley & Sons, 1948.
In this magnum opus, subtitled “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,” the MIT polymath Wiener set forth ideas that inspired researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, computer science, physics, biology and psychology. The boom and bust of cybernetics anticipated that of subsequent meta-theories whose names begin with “c”: catastrophe theory, chaos and complexity.
Wilson, Edward O., Sociobiology. Harvard University Press, 1975.
One of the great scientists and prose stylists of our age shows how evolutionary theory and genetics can account for the behavior of all social animals, from ants to humans. Although they shun the controversial term “sociobiology,” modern evolutionary psychologists remain indebted to Wilson’s seminal book.
Wright, Robert, Nonzero. Vintage, 2001.
Denser, more difficult, less popular than Wright’s The Moral Animal, Nonzero is also more original. Wright proves that a mere journalist can more than equal scientists in thinking through the implications of scientific fields, in this case evolutionary biology and game theory. Nonzero almost persuades me that Darwinism, if you look at it in just the Wright way, yields a hopeful, even spiritual outlook on life.
Zimmer, Carl, Parasite Rex. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
It takes a talented writer to make us enjoy learning about organisms that can make our flesh literally crawl. But Zimmer—arguably our best bio-journalist and a favorite of scientists--is up to the task.
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