Popular Science

“It’s speculating about alternative biologies. The problem is that we have just one example of biology, the one that happened on Earth. Everything on Earth—from a fungal spore to a blue whale, to a redwood tree—is the same biological experiment. We don’t know what a different biological experiment would lead to, or what the creatures and life forms that emerge would look like. If you vary from the one example we know, you’re immediately in the realm of pure speculation. It’s a tricky business because we simply don’t know. I enjoyed the book. I did have a little asterisk in my head as I read it saying, ‘Wait a minute! We don’t know that that could happen or that it would be like that!’” Read more...

The best books on Exoplanets

Chris Impey, Scientist

“She’s…interested in the quirks of the planets. I wouldn’t call it The Guinness Book of Records approach, but there’s a bit of that. She says, ‘Wow, there are oddball planets!’ Then she takes it beyond that, and asks, ‘How do they happen? How does nature make these strange planets? Why are they strange compared to the planets in our solar system? Is our solar system dull? Is it typical?’ These are important scientific questions, but she does have a lot of fun with the oddballs—the planet where it’s raining molten lava or diamonds or the planets that have been stretched into a pear shape because they’re so close to their star. She writes about all sorts of extreme planets that we’ve found.” Read more...

The best books on Exoplanets

Chris Impey, Scientist

“Michael Carroll is an internationally reputed space artist, and he’s very knowledgeable. There are maybe 200 beautiful, full-color illustrations in the book. The important prefatory comment is that even though we have 5,300 exoplanets that we know of, we don’t have images of more than 100 of them. Most of them are found by these indirect methods of Doppler radial velocities, and the transit of eclipses. Only a very small fraction has had a picture taken of them and even those are just a few pixels or a dot. These illustrations are all visualization, imagination and projection from the basic data. Here’s the mass, here’s the size, we think it might have this in the atmosphere, what would it look like? He follows that through and says, ‘Here’s what I think it might look like.’ It’s nice to see something that, unfortunately, scientists can’t.” Read more...

The best books on Exoplanets

Chris Impey, Scientist

“I see this book almost as one long poem. The style might not be to everyone’s taste, but I think everybody would agree that it’s amazing. The use of language is breathtaking. You feel like you’re part of this extraordinary evolutionary process, both physical and biological. He stops it from just being drearily descriptive, and takes you on this wave of fantastic imagery—describing what was happening, so that you can see it.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2022: The Royal Society Book Prize

Maria Fitzgerald,

“Pale Blue Dot is a contemplation on humanity, and our future. It asks who we are and where we came from, in order to understand where we are going. In particular, it examines the possibilities of space travel within our solar system and to other stars over the next few centuries. The thing I found most compelling about it was how it described the science of these endeavours in such evocative — indeed poetic — ways. I hadn’t realised it was even possible to write like this, combining clarity, accuracy and beauty, and it made a great impression on me.” Read more...

The best books on Big History

Toby Ord, Philosopher

“What makes this such an interesting book for me is the combination of the first person and the more scientific and philosophical analysis. I’ve already mentioned that the author is a scuba diver. He’s brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes” Read more...

The Best Philosophy Books of 2020

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History…We felt this book was just really nicely written. In the first sentence he writes, ‘in the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was smaller than the period that ends this sentence.’ He really has a good way of capturing the enormity of what you’re looking at. The book has nice little digressions too, where he talks about the physics. So there’s a little bit about Newton and the impact that had and then there’s things about the oblateness of the Earth—in other words, it isn’t exactly spherical—and that you’re a little bit lighter at the equator than you are at the poles.” Read more...

The Best Science Books for Kids: the 2020 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize

Mike Kendall, Scientist

“It explains 14 billion years of the evolution of the universe, a sort of engineering experiment on the largest possible scale. It spans all scales of space and time, describing everything from the largest scales of the universe to the smallest scales of molecules and atoms. It’s a good book for putting everything in perspective.” Read more...

The best books on Engineering

Ante Shoda, Scientist

“What I really liked about A Short History of Nearly Everything is that it gives an excellent account of a lot of the personalities and the interconnectedness of important discoveries in cosmology and elsewhere. He does such a great job of bringing together our understanding of cosmology, evolution, paleontology, and geology in a very, very fluid way.” Read more...

The best books on Cosmology

David Goldberg, Physicist

“Kahneman developed research with Amos Tversky, who unfortunately died young—I think it would have been a co-written book otherwise. It’s a brilliant book that summarizes their psychological research on cognitive biases, or is patterns of thinking, which all of us are prone to, which aren’t reliable.” Read more...

The best books on Critical Thinking

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Even if we’re not technically in a mass extinction event like the one that did in the dinosaurs, it’s clear we are in the midst of a crash in species diversity and population size that is so devastating as to influence the operation of the Earth system as we know it. We’ve heard this quite a lot over the years, but Kolbert’s book brought it home in a more intimate, and a more damning way. There’s a calmness, and a detachedness in her writing that makes it that much more powerful and affecting” Read more...

The best books on Global Challenges

Rowan Hooper, Journalist

“Richard Dawkins is very funny. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless…Dawkins also explains a lot about why he disagrees with people who reconcile science and religion. I agree with him on this. I actually do think they are irreconcilable.” Read more...

The best books on Atheism

Susan Jacoby, Journalist

“Kuhn was a famous American philosopher of science, and in this book he was writing about paradigm shifts: how the scientific community, and therefore eventually all of us, change our world views. He looks at where those revisionary revolutions in thought come from. Instead of it being a straightforward ladder of progress, you never know where knowledge is going to come from. It can come from left field, and the book is full of examples of that sort of paradigm shift.” Read more...

The best books on The History of Medicine and Addiction

Louise Foxcroft, Historian

“An educated person is someone who knows at least a little bit about the major disciplines in human endeavour. And in biology, this is what you need to know – not only historically but also contemporaneously, because Darwin was right, and still is right, about so many things.” Read more...

The best books on Evolution

Jerry Coyne, Biologist

“Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which looked at how pesticide use was harming, and in some cases killing, animals and humans, and really was the first book of its kind to illustrate this environmental destruction. I’ve been so involved in the environment for years and years and that has been a great guideline – it was really the awakening, if you will, to the environmental movement and to the progress we’ve made over the last quarter century or more.” Read more...

The best books on Progressivism

John Kerry, Politician

“This book changed the way I thought about my own writing and it changed the way I thought about the world. It really is one of the best books I have ever read.” Read more...

Unexpected Economics Books

Tim Harford, Economist

“What would that be like? What would it be like to be unable to lay down any new memories, to think it’s 1945 all the time and everybody you meet is new? It’s fascinating to imagine, and I feel a lot of sympathy for the Mariner even though he doesn’t know how bad he has it.” Read more...

The best books on Philosophical Wonder

Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher

“Everybody knows Hawking’s greatest contributions: understanding that black holes radiate light and other particles, that they contain entropy and all these things that no one imagined before him. Hawking and Roger Penrose also worked out the Big Bang singularity, the very moment of creation. To hear him describe some of these things with his own word choices, his own phrasing—not to mention his own personal biography and his disability—there’s no other book like it.” Read more...

The Best Books on the Big Bang

Dan Hooper, Physicist

“One of the most impressive popular science books I’ve ever read was Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life. That was a lovely book about the development of complex life, the Cambrian explosion. Knoll’s book is in the same category. It’s very well written and has a broad sweep of 3 billion years of history. He’s a very preeminent geologist and paleontologist and his expertise covers a number of fields. He’s at the top of his game and he lays out the subject beautifully….He’s a good writer, and I like the fact he’s not hyperbolic. He avoids dramatic statements…He’s quite cautious. I appreciate that, because in his field we’re dealing with slender evidence.” Read more...

The best books on Exoplanets

Chris Impey, Scientist

“I really picked this book because for me, and I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. In a very user-friendly way, it gives you some of the basic tools you can use to start thinking about it…The book was synthesising a bunch of ideas that had been developed by a variety of researchers, in particular William Hamilton and Robert Trivers, on how we can think about evolutionary processes to explain things like cooperation and altruism, which has been a long-running puzzle. It lays out a particular way of thinking where you think about genes from the genes’ eye view. You think about what is good for the gene, and that allows you to solve a bunch of puzzles about altruism, about why people would help those who have copies of those same genes…I put it on the list because it was inspirational to me, though I like to think we now have an enriched way of looking at things that goes beyond what we did in the 70s. “ Read more...

The best books on Cultural Evolution

Joseph Henrich,

“I think that he is one of the most intelligent people to live in the 20th century. Yet at the same time, surprisingly, he is an amazingly good teacher. This is quite an unusual combination.” Read more...

The best books on Accessible Science

David Bainbridge, Biologist

“Humans do science, that that means it’s flawed, you know? Maybe they over-hype their findings, sometimes they are biased in their analysis or data collection. He gives several well-known examples—Andrew Wakefield’s MMR paper, or Paolo Macchiarini’s work on transplantation. He reaffirms what science should be about—nullius in verba, take nobody’s word. Which is in fact the Royal Society’s motto. He comes up with ways to limit the damage to science, which makes it quite an important book because you want to ensure science is done to the highest possible standard.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2021: The Royal Society Book Prize

Luke O'Neill, Scientist

“This is a bit like a detective story. O’Sullvan is a neurologist, who specialises in epilepsy. Some of the patients she would see have these strange seizures, that’s how she got into it, I suppose. In the book, she goes around the world to explore these examples of young women who have gone, suddenly, into comas, and cannot be raised. Or they’ve developed epilepsy suddenly. She goes to Sweden, upstate New York, Kazakhstan, and then characterises them all. It’s a good clinical account of our most unusual situations—which aren’t as uncommon as you might think.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2021: The Royal Society Book Prize

Luke O'Neill, Scientist

“It’s a sweeping account of a very important topic, because we are all biased—consciously or unconsciously. A good part of this book addresses whether there is a way to counter this bias. In the case of medicine, there’s the checklist—the doctor can make sure to go through a checklist to ensure each patient is treated equally. There’s a lot on police in America, and the training they are using to reduce bias. Nordell makes the case that we’re biased by nature, so it’s down to us to decrease bias.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2021: The Royal Society Book Prize

Luke O'Neill, Scientist

“Imagine a whole book about breathing! But there was a necessity, I think. Nestor is a journalist; he goes into everything you need to know about breathing. We learn that no matter what you eat, no matter how you exercise, how wise you are—none of it really matters if you’re not breathing properly.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2021: The Royal Society Book Prize

Luke O'Neill, Scientist

“It’s by a female astronomer in a very male-dominated science, historically. She describes her own career, and how she navigated that world. She gives a really good account of the telescopes in Chile and Hawaii—all the challenges, all the things that broke down, bad weather, all sorts—and goes into detail on the great discoveries astronomers have made. Towards the end, she talks about the future of astronomy: now you can do it all remotely, just download data from the telescope. She makes a compelling case of how the science will change because of this.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2021: The Royal Society Book Prize

Luke O'Neill, Scientist

“It’s a splendid book…It’s a group biography of writers and scientists in the late 18th and early 19th century—Herschel and Humphrey Davy on the science side, and the Romantic poets, mostly in England, and their engagement with the sublime and with science. Among Holmes’s qualities are his warmth, his extraordinary depth of knowledge and the fluency in his writing. It’s just a really enjoyable read.” Read more...

The best books on Science and Wonder

Caspar Henderson, Journalist

“This is an outstanding science book, actually. And again: who would imagine you’d enjoy a doorstopper of a book about fungi? He goes through everything you need to know about fungi: he talks about truffles, about psychedelic mushrooms, about yeast and alcohol, penicillin. He even makes the case that life wouldn’t have to moved onto land without fungi.I thought that was fascinating. So, again, great science and really well written.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2021: The Royal Society Book Prize

Luke O'Neill, Scientist

“It’s inspired. Sarah Dry is a science historian specialising in climate. And it is history, she shows, that helps to ground our understanding of the nature and findings of baggy multidisciplinary fields like climate science. So at a time when millions of people worldwide are demonstrating over the climate crisis — basically fighting for a future — Dry looks to the past: to the very roots of the science of planetary change, told through the stories of six dedicated researchers.” Read more...

The Best Science Books of 2019

Barbara Kiser, Science Writer

“It’s a sizzling response to the ongoing intensity of need, in society and some scientific enclaves, to ‘sex’ the brain. That is an issue the psychologist Cordelia Fine, among others, has explored in studies such as Delusions of Gender. But we need to revisit it, Gina Rippon argues: myths and misconceptions persist. She accordingly debunks a great deal of bad science and received wisdom, while also constructing a realistic picture of the brain within its environmental context.” Read more...

The Best Science Books of 2019

Barbara Kiser, Science Writer

“Alex Dehgan’s account of conservation along the country’s ‘biological Silk Road’ is alternately hair-raising, poignant and enlightening. He recounts the setbacks and stresses of assembling a crack team under impossible conditions, of field research in a bullet-strewn wilderness, of setting up the country’s first national park in Band-e Amir. It was, he shows, a grueling, complex operation with many moving parts.” Read more...

The Best Science Books of 2019

Barbara Kiser, Science Writer

“The writing ever edges into the poetic; it’s just a constant pleasure. At a time when many are eyeing up that dusty expanse again for what Morton calls the “Return”, this book steps back, deftly explaining the science on our satellite and its cultural niche in the charged space between the once and future Moons.” Read more...

The Best Science Books of 2019

Barbara Kiser, Science Writer

“It’s a window on the process of discovery, a blow-by-blow account of a long wrangle with theory and evidence. Paul Steinhardt — a cosmologist fascinated by novel forms of matter — relates his indefatigable decades-long quest for an ‘impossible’ material, the quasicrystal, with Holmesian intensity…This is a book offering a real sense of the collaborative, generous-minded aspect of doing science.“ Read more...