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Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

Very disappointed with (pop-)science books these days. They're basically science history books. The formula is something like 60% (How it all started filler) + 5 % (An essay-worth of original relevant content + 35% (personal stories about conferences and papers).

Looking through some of them on the amazon preview, these seem to be in the same league. Meh.

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History of science isn't "filler" -- you can't understand a scientific field today and the questions it is asking without understanding how it developed. A historical perspective is also useful because many students and early researchers get caught up in the issue of rival camps favoring Theory A or Theory B. History teaches us that more often than not, the reason for rival camps isn't that one theory is right and the other wrong, but that the experimental data isn't completely explained by either existing theory and that a new theory will come along that will cover both sets of cases.

Let me give you an example. Every pop-sci book I pick up about quantum mechanics is at least 30% the Bohr–Einstein debates and 'spooky action'. Getting tired of reading the same stories about Claude Shannon whenever I pick up a book which touches Information theory and of course, Newton's quirks every time I read a book which touches on gravity. It's boring, tedious and quite frankly irrelevant. If I want to read a book about the history and evolution of a particular branch of science, that's fine. But whenever I start reading a quantum mechanics book and it starts off with 'It was a sunny day in Athens and Epicurus was pondering..' oh.. fuck off.

I agree with you. Practitioners not knowing the history of their fields is a problem. In grad school, we learned the canon of managerial theory over the past century. Knowing the tradeoffs between different schools of thought makes me a better manager.

This is how I feel about most "science" writing. I thought I was the only one.

May I recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Modern-Science-Writing-Landm...

Each chapter is basically that 5% "of original relevant content" on a different subject. So the whole book is "all killer no filler"!

Are there any science books (pop or not) you could recommend that don’t into this pattern?

Atom Land is pretty good, though there are some problems with the analogy. If you use it with the internet as a supplement and are a bit forgiving regarding bad analogies (as with PG essays), it's great.

The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies.

It does cover a history of SETI, but goes into a lot of the theory that is generally beyond a bit of what I've seen discussed before in popsci. I thought I knew the subject very well, but learned a lot of new things.

Some books I enjoyed in the past years:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34272565-life-3-0

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19395553-our-mathematica...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28116739-other-minds

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30555486-to-be-a-machine

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7972148-proofiness

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25817279-door-to-door

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23013953-gut

Thank you for sharing — the gut bacterial and two math books (proof ones and universal theory) caught my eye.

Other Minds, about cephalopods, is written by a philosopher, not a biologist or neuroscientist, so take it with a grain of salt[1]. I would also recommend _Octopus_ by Anderson, Mather, and Wood, who are actual biologists.

[1] Specifically, cephalopods are very intelligent compared to other invertebrates, but that's it. It's interesting because they represent a parallel evolution of greater intelligence outside the vertebrates, and because what they can do with that intelligence is greatly enhanced by their physical capabilities. Give a fish a human brain and it will have trouble twisting a lid open.

i highly recommend looking at the used market for the out of print but plentiful scientific american library series.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/scientific-american-libra...

the books are heavily illustrated, don’t shy away from the real stuff, but are still the most readable scientific publishing i have seen. whoever was the editor or manager of the series is a genius of publishing. john wheeler, julian schwinger, steven weinberg, peter atkins, and more can be found as authors. i am personally trying to collect them all.

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