Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the cosmos for non-scientists.
A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawking
A landmark volume in science writing by one of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking’s book explores such profound questions as: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? Does time always flow forward? Is the universe unending—or are there boundaries? Are there other dimensions in space? What will happen when it all ends? Told in language we all can understand, A Brief History of Time plunges into the exotic realms of black holes and quarks, of antimatter and arrows of time, of the big bang and a bigger God —where the possibilities are wondrous and unexpected. With exciting images and profound imagination, Stephen Hawking brings us closer to the ultimate secrets at the very heart of creation.
A Briefer History of Time
by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow
Stephen Hawking’s worldwide bestseller A Brief History of Time remains a landmark volume in scientific writing. But for years readers have asked for a more accessible formulation of its key concepts—the nature of space and time, the role of God in creation, and the history and future of the universe. A Briefer History of Time is Professor Hawking’s response. Although “briefer,” this book is much more than a mere explanation of Hawking’s earlier work. A Briefer History of Time both clarifies and expands on the great subjects of the original, and records the latest developments in the field—from string theory to the search for a unified theory of all the forces of physics.
The First Three Minutes
by Steven Weinberg
When people hear about the Big Bang, they’re tempted to think of an explosion, something that happened once-upon-a-time somewhere in space. That’s not what we mean. This classic book about the Big Bang and the first three minutes of our universe tells the real story of the quark-gluon plasma that existed “back then.” Weinberg writes at the beginning that he was a particle physicist, not a cosmologist, but that he couldn’t resist writing the book because, “What could be more interesting than the problem of Genesis?”
The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny in the Universe
by Michio Kaku
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku considers the future of civilization in space.
Human Universe
by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen
With a broad historical sweep, Human Universe gives an up-to-date description of modern particle physics and cosmology that’s “as simple as it could possibly be, but not simpler”, goes a saying commonly attributed to Einstein. The book rests on the juxtaposition of two notions. First, that the universe doesn’t seem to care about the fact that we are here—in that sense, we are insignificant. At the same time, this is the only known place where beings like us exist; therefore, we are special. The book plays with the juxtaposition all the way through. It’s up-to-date and almost soulful.
Large Hadron Collider Pop-up Book: Voyage to the Heart of Matter
by Anton Radevsky and Emma Sanders
This book is enormous fun. Anyone can read it. The scale of it is astonishing. It’s a bit of a paradox that the smallest structures in the universe have to be examined by enormous detectors that are the size of a 10-story building. This is the evolution of the universe and how we went from a hot Big Bang to the structure of the universe that we have now. This is a few hundredths of a few thousandths of a second after the Big Bang. What we’re looking for is how the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider relate to the conditions of the early universe. How can we explain the formation of hydrogen and helium in the early universe? This book is a beautiful but accurate overview of the biggest physics experiment in the world.
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
by Adam Higginbotham
Most students at Nobles weren’t even twinkles in their parents’ hearts when reactor #4 exploded at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986. It was a devastating nuclear accident that many say supplied the spark, so to speak, for the collapse of the Soviet Union, which occurred five years later. This review (from The New York Times) will get you started. Don’t stop!
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
by Richard A. Muller
Energy, global warming, terrorism and counter-terrorism, nukes, internet, satellites, remote sensing, ICBMs and ABMs, DVDs and HDTVs -- economic and political issues increasingly have a strong high tech content. Misjudge the science, make a wrong decision. Yet many of our leaders never studied physics, and do not understand science and technology. Physics is the liberal arts of high tech. Is science too hard for world leaders to learn? No. An analogous example: Charlemagne was only half literate. He could read but not write. Writing was a skill considered too tough even for world leaders, just as physics is today. And yet, most of the world is literate. Many children learn to read before kindergarten. We can, and must achieve the same level with scientific literacy, especially for our leaders. Can physics be taught without math? Of course. Math is a tool for computation. But it’s not the essence of physics. We often cajole our advanced students, "Think physics, not math!" You can understand and compose music without studying music theory; you also can understand light without knowing Maxwell\'s equations. Try it! You’ll like it!
The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
Amazing feats of science and human achievement are often presented simply as ‘what happened’ without looking at the actual personalities involved. This book takes you from the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager up to the start of the Apollo program. It’s everything that happened before the moon landings. It’s what you can do if you have a mindset completely detached from worrying about your own safety, not caring about whether your spouse will be widowed and your children left without a parent. It’s a mindset of absolute bravery combined with an essentially unlimited budget to satisfy what was then a political agenda. It gives you a really good sense of what it is really like to be in a rocket being fired up, and the physical strain the body goes through under extreme accelerations. But we have transcripts of the actual radio communications with mission control about what these guys went through. They had monitors strapped to their entire bodies at the time and they were measuring everything. They were measuring magnetic field strength, and altitude, and pressure and acceleration—all these things. How extraordinary is it that people could actually do this, and that they actually wanted to? They wanted to put themselves on top of a bomb that was then lit up.
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
by Richard Feynman
This book contains the six easiest chapters from Richard P. Feynman's landmark work, Lectures on Physics—specifically designed for the general, non-scientist reader—with the actual recordings of the late, great physicist delivering the lectures on which the chapters are based.
Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life
by Helen Czerski
Our home on Earth is messy, mutable, and full of humdrum things that we touch and modify without much thought. But these familiar surroundings are just the place to look if you’re interested in what makes the universe tick. Helen Czerski provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects and occurrences, like popcorn popping, coffee stains, and fridge magnets, to big ideas like climate change, the energy crisis, or innovative medical testing. She guides us through the principles of gases, gravity, size, and time. Along the way, she provides answers to vexing questions: How does water travel from the roots of a redwood tree to its crown? How do ducks keep their feet warm when walking on ice? Why does milk, when added to tea, look like billowing storm clouds? In an engaging voice at once warm and witty, Czerski shares her stunning breadth of knowledge to lift the veil of familiarity from the ordinary. You may never look at your toaster the same way.
Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation
by Timothy Jorgenson
Radiation is energy on the move – through free space or through matter, it’s little packets of energy moving through things. You can’t see it, smell it, or taste it. You know it’s there, but it’s like a spirit. That makes it fearsome. People associate it with atomic bombs and cancer – both fearsome things! There’s ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation. Sandwiched in the middle is visible light. Ionizing radiation rips electrons off atoms, which damages DNA, sending us on a cascade of events towards cancer. Non-ionizing radiation — cell phone rays and radio waves — doesn’t have the energy to do that. In Strange Glow, Jorgenson works to rearrange fears around radiation. Some of the things people fear most are really not a public health problem. Other risks are underappreciated by the public, such as nuclear terrorism. After reading the book, the hope is that your fears will line up closer to reality.
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
by Randall Munroe
Charming and wildly clever, this book was written by Munroe as a sort of joke. He’s this extraordinarily talented, clever cartoonist with a background in robotics, but the book is about how to explain things using the simplest terms one possibly can. He limits himself to the “first ten-hundred most commonly used words” in the English language. How would you describe helium without using the word ‘helium’? The book is both clever and screamingly funny all the way through. So many people will try and sound clever by using lots of fancy words, but this is the exact opposite. It is being clever by using the most straightforward language you possibly can, without sacrificing accuracy. It’s beautifully drawn and beautifully written.
Thunderstruck
by Erik Larson
A crime story and a technical story, Thunderstruck is set just before the First World War. Larson combines a true-life murder mystery—a London doctor named Harvey Crippen murders his wife and buries her body in the basement—with the development of radio by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. Larson weaves technical information about radio waves into the story of Marconi, an extraordinary inventor who grabbed the potential for wireless communication and left physicists in the dust, eventually winning a Nobel Prize.
Underwater Dreams
"Underwater Dreams", written and directed by Mary Mazzio, and narrated by Michael Peña, is the story of how the sons of undocumented Mexican immigrants built an underwater robot from Home Depot parts—and defeated engineering powerhouse MIT in the process.
The Imitation Game
During the winter of 1952, British authorities entered the home of mathematician, cryptanalyst and war hero Alan Turing to investigate a reported burglary. Instead, they ended up arresting Turing himself on charges of 'gross indecency', an accusation that would lead to his devastating conviction for the criminal offense of homosexuality. Little did officials know, they were incriminating the pioneer of modern-day computing. Famously leading a motley group of scholars, linguists, chess champions and intelligence officers, Turing was credited with cracking the “unbreakable” codes of Germany's World War II Enigma machine. An intense and haunting portrayal of a brilliant, complicated man, This movie follows a genius who, under nail-biting pressure, helped to shorten the war and save thousands of lives.
The Theory of Everything
The extraordinary story of one of the world’s greatest minds, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who falls deeply in love with fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde. Once a healthy, active young man, Hawking received an earth-shattering diagnosis at 21 years of age. With Jane fighting tirelessly by his side, Stephen embarks on his most ambitious scientific work, studying the very thing he now has precious little of – time. Together, they defy impossible odds, breaking new ground in medicine and science, and achieving more than they could ever have dreamed.
Interstellar
In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand, a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send a former NASA pilot and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's new home. Is the physics behind it valid? Get started by reading this Scientific American article by renowned astrophysicist Kip Thorne. Then, keep going! You’ll be glad you did!
StarTalk is a podcast on space, science, and popular culture hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, with various comic and celebrity co-hosts and frequent guests from the worlds of science and entertainment.
And from Inside the Perimeter, here are 17 Physics Podcasts to Stretch Your Brain.
The PBS docuseries Makers: Women in Space traces the history of women pioneers in the U.S space program.
