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Asked by marcusw to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
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Catherine Rix answered on 14 Mar 2012:
I like Contact by Carl Sagan. It’s about a female scientist who works with radio telescopes. Her team receive a message from an alien civilisation and the book describes how society reacts and what happens.
Recently I read a really good non-fiction science book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. it’s all about how the media report science badly and how it’s really important that everyone, even non-scientists, should understand a bit about science because it’s important for everyday life.
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Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:
That’s a really hard question.
I think I would have to go with something by Richard Feynman. He published a lot of collections of shorts stories about his life and career, but he had a really nice way of writing. The way he describes things makes even really difficult stuff easy to understand and his motivations are great. I love how he describes his relationship with his father as being the thing that made him such a great scientist – where other boys were trying hard to remember the names of all the different birds, his father taught him to observe the birds themselves because “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts.”
I think my favourite part would be when he writes about his experience being on the Rogers commission, which investigated why the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. It is a real insight in how science interacts with other fields like politics and engineering and it’s great that he used really simple science to show how such a terrible thing could have happened.
This is the book I mean: http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0141030887/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1331734453&sr=8-3
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Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:
I really like books by Richard Feynman. He has some fantastic quotes. I named my blog after one of them (from his lectures in physics).
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?” – Feynman
(http://thebeautifulstars.blogspot.com/)For Sci Fi my favourites are probably by Arthur C. Clarke. I really enjoy his descriptions of the machines and stuff. Oh but I also love Douglas Adams – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a must read for all budding astronomers in my opinion! 😉
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Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:
My favourite science book must have been ‘The Meaning of Pi’, which explains a lot about Maths: is it a science, so do we discover mathematics, or is it part of philosophy, so do we invent mathematics? It made me think quite a lot about numbers! (For thousands of years, many people made do without the number zero!)
I agree with Karen, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (the first 4 books) is very good too and I enjoyed Greg Bear’s ‘Eon’. The ‘Mars Trilogy’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (I think) is rather good to, and has fairly accurate science in it but also a lot of politics.
Plus don’t forget New Scientist and Scientific American magazines.
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Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:
Mine is actually a science fiction book by Carl Sagan called Contact – and it was made into a film. Not only is it based on as much science as possible, but it also tells you about all the relationships between scientists that go on!
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