This is a list of the greatest and most influential science books of al-time.
I have listed the classic ground-breaking books as well as my favorites
and other seminal works that all future scientists should read. I have also
included popular books from various lists and surveys (e.g. Discover
Magazine, Goodreads.com and New Scientist Magazine).
The first six would surely appear on all lists due to their influence, and
how each one changed the course of scientific inquiry and how we look
at the world and the universe. After the first six book, they are in no
particular order or ranking.
Charles Darwin,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
Isaac Newton,
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)
Galileo Galilei,
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
Nicolaus Copernicus,
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (1543)
Aristotle,
Physics (~330 BCE)
Albert Einstein,
Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916)
Andreas Vesalius,
On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543)
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene (1976)
Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History in Time (1988)
Carl Sagan,
Cosmos (1985)
Stephen Jay Gould,
Wonderful Life: Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989)
Primo Levi,
The Periodic Table (1975)
James Watson,
The Double Helix (1968)
Desmond Morris,
The Naked Ape (1967)
Jacob Bronkowski,
The Ascent of Man (1973)
George Gamow,
One, Two, Three...Infinity (1947)
Oliver Sacks,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)
Jane Goodall,
In the Shadow of Man (1971)
Steven Weinberg,
The First Three Minutes (1977)
James Lovelock,
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1975)
Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring (1962)
James Jeans,
The Mysterious Universe (1930)
Steven Pinker,
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994)
Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
Charles Lyell,
Principle of Geology (1830)
Kip Thorne,
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein Outrageous Legacy (1994)
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
Roger Penrose,
The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics (1989)
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (1998)
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979)
Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe (1964)
Ray Kurzweil,
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)
Matt Ridley,
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999)
Robert Jungk,
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1970)
Meriwether
Lewis and William Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1814)
Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
Richard Feynman,
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)
Alfred Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
Dian Fossey,
Gorillas in the Mist (1983)
Roy Chapman Andrews, Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure (1943)
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1962)
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish (2008)
Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape (2005)
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
James Gleick,
Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin,
Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)
Carl Sagan,
A Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark (1995)
Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
Jerry Coyne,
Why Evolution is True (2009)
Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb (1980)
Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (2012)
Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
Christiaan Huygens,
The Celestial Worlds Discovered: Or Conjectures Concerning The Inhabitants, Plants And Productions Of The Worlds In The Planets (1722)
Carl Zimmer,
Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Went back to Sea (1999)
