25 Greatest Science Books of All Time

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25 Greatest Science Books of All Time (Size: 265.37 MB)
 1. Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).pdf1017.27 KB
 2. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas (1974).txt0 bytes
 3. William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) - Centenary edition (2002).pdf1.7 MB
 4. Thomas S. Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) - 3rd edition (1996).pdf26.87 MB
 5. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History Of Time (1988).pdf511.87 KB
 6. Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel (1997).pdf5 MB
 7. Brian Green - The Elegant Universe (1999).pdf3.07 MB
 8. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986).txt0 bytes
 1. Charles Darwin - On The Origin of Species (1859).pdf21.86 MB
 1. Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species (1859)(1997).pdf2.07 MB
 10. George Gamow - One Two Three... Infinty (1947)(1988).pdf14.33 MB
 11. James D. Watson - The Double Helix (1968).pdf638.55 KB
 12. Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life (1944).pdf277.45 KB
 13. Carl Sagan - The Cosmic Connection (1973).pdf1.87 MB
 14. Edward O. Wilson - The Insect Societies (1971).txt0 bytes
 15. Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes - A Moderm View of the Origin of the Universe...1.76 MB
 16. Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962).pdf967.94 KB
 17. Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man (1981) - Revised edition - missing last page.pdf7.56 MB
 18. Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1985).pdf1.29 MB
 19. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark - The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1814) - Abridged by...2.66 MB
 2. Charles Darwin - Journal of Researches (aka Voyage of the Beagle) - 2nd edition (1845).pdf21.31 MB
 2. Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle (1839).pdf3.81 MB
 20. Feynman et al. - The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volumes 1 - 3 (1963).pdf60.81 MB
 21. Alfred C. Kinsey et al. - Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948).txt0 bytes
 22. Dian Fossey - Gorillas in the Mist (1983).txt0 bytes
 23. Roy Chapman Andrews - Under a Lucky Star (1943)(1945).pdf6.51 MB
 24. Robert Hooke - Micrographia (1665).pdf13.92 MB
 25. James Lovelock - Gaia - A New Look at Life on Earth (1979)(2000).pdf13.33 MB
 3. Isaac Newton - The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) - Translated by Motte...38.68 MB
 4. Galileo Galilei - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) - Translated by Drake...1.08 MB
 5. Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (1543) - Book 1 - Translated by...380.3 KB
 6. Aristotle - Physics (c. 350 BC) - Translated by Hardie and Gaye (1930).pdf386.98 KB
 7. Andreas Vesalius - On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543).txt84 bytes
 8. Albert Einstein - Relativity - The Special and General Theory (1916) - Translated by Robert W....1.59 MB
 9. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (1976) - 30th Annversary edition (2006).pdf10.18 MB
 Greatest Science Books of All Time.txt23.21 KB
 Torrent downloaded from Demonoid.com.txt47 bytes

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DISCOVER magazine's 25 Greatest Science Books of All Time

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/25-greatest-science-books
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1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie]



One of the most delightful, witty, and beautifully written of all natural histories, The Voyage of the Beagle recounts the young Darwin's 1831 to 1836 trip to South America, the Galápagos Islands, Australia, and back again to England, a journey that transformed his understanding of biology and fed the development of his ideas about evolution. Fossils spring to life on the page as Darwin describes his adventures, which include encounters with "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, an accidental meal of a rare bird in Patagonia (which was then named in Darwin's honor), and wobbly attempts to ride Galápagos tortoises.



Yet Darwin's masterwork is, undeniably, The Origin of Species, in which he introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection. Prior to its publication, the prevailing view was that each species had existed in its current form since the moment of divine creation and that humans were a privileged form of life, above and apart from nature. Darwin's theory knocked us from that pedestal. Wary of a religious backlash, he kept his ideas secret for almost two decades while bolstering them with additional observations and experiments. The result is an avalanche of detail—there seems to be no species he did not contemplate—thankfully delivered in accessible, conversational prose. A century and a half later, Darwin's paean to evolution still begs to be heard: "There is grandeur in this view of life," he wrote, that "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."



"The most important science book of all time. Darwin revolutionized our understanding of life, the relationship of humanity to all creatures in the world, and the mythological foundation of all religions." —geneticist Lee M. Silver, Princeton University



Available in black/white scans and plain text ebook. Full color scans available at Internet Archive



3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)



Dramatic is an unlikely word for a book that devotes half its pages to deconstructions of ellipses, parabolas, and tangents. Yet the cognitive power on display here can trigger chills.



Principia marks the dawn of modern physics, beginning with the familiar three laws of motion ("To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction" is the third). Later Newton explains the eccentric paths of comets, notes the similarity between sound waves and ripples on a pond, and makes his famous case that gravity guides the orbit of the moon as surely as it defines the arc of a tossed pebble. The text is dry but accessible to anyone with a high school education—an opportunity to commune with perhaps the top genius in the history of science.



"You don't have to be a Newton junkie like me to really find it gripping. I mean how amazing is it that this guy was able to figure out that the same force that lets a bird poop on your head governs the motions of planets in the heavens? That is towering genius, no?" —psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, Cornell University



b/w scans. Full color scans available at Internet Archive



4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)



Pope Urban VIII sanctioned Galileo to write a neutral treatise on Copernicus's new, sun-centered view of the solar system. Galileo responded with this cheeky conversation between three characters: a supporter of Copernicus, an educated layman, and an old-fashioned follower of Aristotle. This last one—a dull thinker named Simplicio—represented the church position, and Galileo was soon standing before the Inquisition. Galileo comes across as a masterful raconteur; his discussions of recent astronomical findings in particular evoke an electrifying sense of discovery. The last section, in which he erroneously argues that ocean tides prove Earth is in motion, is fascinatingly shoddy by comparison. Galileo, trying to deliver a fatal blow to the church's Aristotelian thinking, got tripped up by his own faith in an idea he was sure was true but couldn't prove.



"It's not only one of the most influential books in the history of the world but a wonderful read. Clear, entertaining, moving, and often hilarious, it showed early on how science writing needn't be stuffy." —cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Harvard University



5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)



Copernicus waited until he was on his deathbed to publish this volume, then prefaced it with a ring-kissing letter to Pope Paul III explaining why the work wasn't really heresy. No furor actually ensued until long after Copernicus's death, when Galileo's run-in with the church landed De Revolutionibus on the Inquisition's index of forbidden books (see #4, above). Copernicus, by arguing that Earth and the other planets move around the sun (rather than everything revolving around Earth), sparked a revolution in which scientific thought first dared to depart from religious dogma. While no longer forbidden, De Revolutionibus is hardly user-friendly. The book's title page gives fair warning: "Let no one untrained in geometry enter here."



Only Book 1 available.



6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)



By contrast, Aristotle placed Earth firmly at the center of the cosmos, and viewed the universe as a neat set of nested spheres. He also mistakenly concluded that things move differently on Earth and in the heavens. Nevertheless, Physica, Aristotle's treatise on the nature of motion, change, and time, stands out because in it he presented a systematic way of studying the natural world—one that held sway for two millennia and led to modern scientific method.



"Aristotle opened the door to the empirical sciences, in contrast to Platonism's love of pure reason. You cannot overestimate his influence on the West and the world." —bioethicist Arthur Caplan, University of Pennsylvania



7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)



In 1543, the same year that Copernicus's De Revolutionibus appeared, anatomist Andreas Vesalius published the world's first comprehensive illustrated anatomy textbook. For centuries, anatomists had dissected the human body according to instructions spelled out by ancient Greek texts. Vesalius dispensed with that dusty methodology and conducted his own dissections, reporting findings that departed from the ancients' on numerous points of anatomy. The hundreds of illustrations, many rendered in meticulous detail by students of Titian's studio, are ravishing.



Not available. Latin with English annotation available for online viewing at http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/vesalius/vesalius.html
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8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916)



Albert Einstein's theories overturned long-held notions about bodies in motion. Time and space, he showed, are not absolutes. A moving yardstick shrinks in flight; a clock mounted on that yardstick runs slow. Relativity, written for those not acquainted with the underlying math, reveals Einstein as a skillful popularizer of his ideas. To explain the special theory of relativity, Einstein invites us on board a train filled with rulers and clocks; for the more complex general theory, we career in a cosmic elevator through empty space. As Einstein warns in his preface, however, the book does demand "a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader."



9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)



In this enduring popularization of evolutionary biology, Dawkins argues that our genes do not exist to perpetuate us; instead, we are useful machines that serve to perpetuate them. This unexpected shift in perspective, a "gene's-eye view of nature," is an enjoyable ­­brainteaser for the uninitiated. So is a related notion: that altruistic behavior in animals does not evolve for "the good of the species" but is really selfishness in disguise. "Like successful Chicago gangsters," Dawkins writes, "our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world."



10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947)



Illustrating these tales with his own charming sketches, renowned Russian-born physicist Gamow covers the gamut of science from the Big Bang to the curvature of space and the amount of mysterious genetic material in our bodies (DNA had not yet been described). No one can read this book and conclude that science is dull. Who but a physicist would analyze the atomic constituents of genetic material and calculate how much all that material, if extracted from every cell in your body, would weigh? (The answer is less than two ounces.)



"Influenced my decision to become a physicist and is part of the reason I write books for the public today." —theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, Case Western Reserve University



11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (1968)



James Watson's frank, and often frankly rude, account of his role in discovering the structure of DNA infuriated nearly everyone whose name appeared in it, but it nonetheless ranks as a first-rate piece of science writing. The Double Helix takes us inside a pell-mell race whose winners were almost guaranteed fame and a Nobel Prize. Most poignant are Watson's disparaging descriptions of his encounters with DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin. Her X-ray crystallography images showed the molecule to be a helix, crucial data that Watson and his collaborator Francis Crick "borrowed" to construct their DNA model. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, losing out on the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery. Perhaps to atone, Watson noted her key contribution in the epilogue to his book.



"The telenovela of my generation of geneticists." —geneticist Mary-Claire King, University of Washington



12. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger (1944)



Long a classic among biologists, this volume describes, from the perspective of a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, how living organisms differ from inanimate objects like crystals. Schrödinger carefully outlines how the two groups obey different laws and puzzles over what the "paragon of orderliness" of living things may signify. Some editions include an autobiographical sketch, in which Schrödinger describes the conflict over teaching Darwin that raged when he was in school, as well as his own fascination with evolution.



"What Is Life? is what got Francis Crick and the other pioneers of molecular biology in the 1950s interested in the problem in the first place." —cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Harvard University



13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973)



At a time when NASA was reeling from the end of the Apollo program, Sagan reacquainted both the public and his colleagues with the majesty of the universe, starting with the oft-overlooked worlds of our own solar system. He also championed the search for extraterrestrial life and argued for the likelihood of planets around other stars two decades before they were discovered. The TV series Cosmos brought Sagan to the masses, but the adventure began here.



14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson (1971)



The patriarch of modern evolutionary biology explores the lives of everyone's favorite creepy crawlies—ants, termites, bees, and wasps—in this 500-page treatise unmatched in scope and detail by any other work on the topic (with the possible exception of his own 1990 volume, The Ants). It also lays the groundwork for his 1975 classic, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which explores the then-controversial idea that the social behavior of animals, including humans, has a deep biological basis. The book is a labor of love, infused with the author's boundless fascination for his tiny subjects. Wilson openly acknowledges the quirkiness of his obsession; the dedication reads, "For my wife Irene, who understands."



Not available.



15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977)



When Weinberg was a student, "the study of the early universe was widely regarded as not the sort of thing to which a respectable scientist would devote his time." But after World War II, radar researchers turned their instruments to the sky and helped bring creation stories out of the realm of myth and into the realm of science. Weinberg, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, offered the first authoritative, popular account of the resulting Big Bang scenario in The First Three Minutes. A 1993 afterword discusses more recent advances. Amazingly, only the description of the first fraction of a second of cosmic history has changed significantly.



16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)



When Silent Spring was first published, a chorus of critics called Carson "hysterical" and "extremist." Yet the marine biologist's meticulously documented indictment of DDT led both to a U.S. ban on the insecticide and to the birth of the modern environmental movement. Carson argues that DDT not only indiscriminately kills insects, including beneficial species like bees, but also accumulates in the fat of birds and mammals high on the food chain, thinning eggshells and causing reproductive problems. Her chilling vision of a birdless America is still haunting. "Over increasingly large areas of the United States," she writes, "spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong."



17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)



In this witty critique of bad science, Harvard scholar Stephen Jay Gould sets out to eviscerate the notion of biological determinism. For hundreds of years, Gould argues, questionable measurements of human intelligence, like skull size or IQ, have been used to justify racism, sexism, and class stratification. According to Gould, even respected sociologists and psychologists have used falsified or shaky data to support the belief that Westerners are genetically predisposed to rule the world. The book drew political and scientific criticism, especially from social scientists furious that Gould had oversimplified or demonized their work.



Final page of epilogue missing.



18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)



In these profiles of patients with unusual neurological disorders, Sacks revolutionizes the centuries-old literary tradition of presenting clinical case studies. Far from dryly reporting each case, the eminent British-born New York City neurologist writes in lively prose with the gentle affection of a country doctor on house call and a contagious sense of wonder. To him, the man with Tourette's syndrome and the woman who cannot sense her own body position are the heroes of the stories. Legions of neuroscientists now probing the mysteries of the human brain cite this book as their greatest inspiration.



19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814)



One of history's most famous tales of exploration began on May 14, 1804, when William Clark and his Corps of Discovery set off from the mouth of the Mis

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25 Greatest Science Books of All Time

All Comments

dibyajit
Great collection but wish epub format was also available :(
FerDouS_yar
Good collection
shreyam
Thanks
bobnjeff
thanks fast download
schopie62
Great collection, some I own, but some are really a great gift ! Thank you !!
scuzee
good