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BOOKS THAT SHAPED A CENTURY OF SCIENCE |
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BOOKS THAT SHAPED A CENTURY OF SCIENCE |
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In the American Scientist, The Magazine of Sigma Xi, the Scientific
Research Society of November-December 1999 (Volume 87, No. 6), Philip and
Phylis Morrison provide their selection of key scientific works of the
twentieth century. They write: "These groups of books and their names are
our own doing. They name categories that we slowly recognized within the
motley selections. By no means sharp-edged, each denotes a center around
which friends can gather, perhaps more like a picnic than a rugby scrum.
The terms we use are not normative but descriptive, for the list itself
suggested the categories and not the other way around." Their categories
and title selections are listed in the following tables.
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BIOGRAPHIES
| Charles Darwin | Autobiography (1950) |
| G. H. Hardy | A Mathematician's Apology (1940) |
| James Watson | The Double Helix (1968) |
| Freeman Dyson | Disturbing the Universe (1979) |
| Richard feynman | Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) |
FIELD GUIDES
| William Garnett | Aerial Photographs (1994) |
| Jonathan Kingdon | East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa (1971) |
| Lynn Margulis & Karlene V. Schwartz | Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (1998, 3rd ed.) |
| Ward Ritchie Press | Photo-Atlas of the United States: A Complete Photographic Atlas of the USA Using Satellite Photography (1975) |
| Roger Tory Peterson | A Field Guide to the Birds (1934) |
| Allan Sandage | The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies (1961) |
| John S. Shelton | Geology Illustrated (1966) |
| John Steinbeck & E.F. Ricketts | Sea of Cortez (1941) |
| H. Bradley, W.A. Craigie, J.A.H. Murray & C.T. Onions, eds. | Oxford English Dictionary (1933) |
| Liberty Hyde Bailey | Hortus (1930) |
THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES - EXPLORATIONS
| Timothy Ferris | The Whole Shebang (1997) |
| George Gamow | One, Two, Three... Infinity (1947) |
| Stephen Hawking | A Brief History of Time (1988) |
| Douglas Hofstadter & Daniel Dennett | The Mind's I (1981) |
| Kenneth Hsu & William Ryan | The Mediterranean Was a Desert (1983) |
| Georges Ifrah | From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers (1985) |
| Primo Levi | The Periodic Table (1984) |
| John McPhee | Annals of the Former World (1998) |
| Carl Sagan | The Pale Blue Dot (1994) |
| Steven Weinberg | Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) |
| Herman Weyl | Symmetry (1952) |
THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES - MONOGRAPHS
| Paul Dirac | Quantum Mechanics (1930) |
| Albert Einstein | The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1902-09 (1930) |
| Benoit B. Mandelbrot | Fractals (1977) |
| Linus Pauling | Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939) |
| Bertrand Russell & Alfred North Whitehead | Principia Mathematica (1910-13, 3 vols.) |
| Cyril Smith | Search for Structure (1981) |
| John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern | Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) |
| Norbert Weiner | Cybernetics (1948) |
| R.B. Woodward & Roald Hoffmann | Conservation of Orbital Symmetry (1970) |
| Albert Einstein | The Meaning of Relativity (1922) |
| Richard Feynman | QED (1985) |
| Donald Knuth | The Art of Computer Programming (1968) |
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
| A. Pais | Inward Bound (1986) |
| John Desmond Bernal | Science in History (1954) |
| Paul de Kruif | Microbe Hunters (1926) |
| Martin Gardner | In the Name of Science (reprinted as Fads and Falacies in the Name of Science) (1952) |
| Arthur O. Lovejoy | The Great Chain of Being (1936) |
| Joseph Needham | Science and Civilization in China (1947) |
| Richard Rhodes | The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) |
| Charles Singer, E.J. Holmyard & A.R. Hall | A History of Technology (1954) |
| Tom Wolfe | The Right Stuff (1979) |
SCIENCE ITSELF EXPLAINED
| Vannevar Bush | Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) |
| Peter B. Medawar | The Art of the Soluble (1967) |
| Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) |
| C.P. Snow | The Two Cultures (1959) |
| Alfred North Whitehead | Science and the Modern World (1945) |
| Thomas Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) |
MANY-SIDED LIFE - EXPLORATIONS
| William Beebe | Jungle Days (1925) |
| Rachel Carson | Silent Spring (1962) |
| John R. Horner & Thomas Gorman | Digging Dinosaurs (1988) |
| Francois Jacob | The Possible and the Actual (1982) |
| Aldo Leopold | A Sand County Almanac (1949) |
| Barry Lopez | Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) |
| Konrad Lorenz | King Solomon's Ring (1952) |
| Jacques Monod | Chance and Necessity (1971) |
| Richard Preston | The Hot Zone (1994) |
| Lewis Thomas | The Lives of a Cell (1974) |
MANY-SIDED LIFE - MONOGRAPHS
| Adrian Forsyth & Kenneth Miyata | Tropical Nature (1984) |
| Stephen S. Morse, ed. | Emerging Viruses (1993) |
| Erwin Schrodinger | What Is Life? (1944) |
| D'Arcy Thompson | On Growth and Form (1917) |
| Vladimir Vernadskii | The Biosphere (1998; French Version, 1929) |
| Alister Clavering Hardy | The Open Sea: Its Natural History (1956-59, 2 vols.) |
| Edward O. Wilson | The Insect Societies (1971) |
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE
| Richard Dawkins | The Blind Watchmaker (1986) |
| Stephen Jay Gould | Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1977) |
| Jonathan Weiner | The Beak of the Finch (1994) |
| Richard Goldschmidt | The Material Basis of Evolution (1940) |
| Ronald Aylmer Fisher | The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930) |
| George Williams | Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (1966) |
| Howard Gruber, with Paul H. Barrett | Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (1974) |
THE NATURE AND RISE OF OUR OWN SPECIES
| Elizabeth Barber | Women's Work (1994) |
| Gregory Bateson | Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (1972) |
| Jacob Bronowski | Science and Human Values (1965) |
| Jane Goodall | In the Shadow of Man (1988) |
| R.L. Gregory | The Intelligent Eye (1970) |
| Aldous Huxley | The Doors of Perception (1954) |
| L.S.B. Leakey | Adam's Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture (1934) |
| Steven Pinker | The Language Instinct (1994) |
| Denise Schmandt-Besserat | How Writing Came About (1996) |
| George B. Schaller | The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (1963) |
| Randy Shilts | And the Band Played On (1987) |
| Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | The Phenomenon of Man (1959) |
| Lev Semenovich Vygotsky | Thought and Language (1962) |
| Charles Leonard Wooley | Discovering the Royal Tombs at Ur (1969) |
THE NATURE AND RISE OF OUR OWN SPECIES - MONOGRAPHS
| C.K. Brain | Hunter and Hunted (1981) |
| Noam Chomsky | Syntactic Structure (1957) |
| Sigmund Freud | General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920) |
| Mary Leakey & John Harris, eds. | Laetoli: A Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania (1987) |
| Richard Lee | The Kung San (1979) |
| Andre Leroi-Gourhan | Treasures of Prehistoric Art (1967) |
| Marvin Minsky | The Society of Mind (1986) |
| Peter & Iona Oppie | Children's Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Duelling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, Pretending (1969) |
| Ivan P. Pavlov | Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (1926) |
| Oskar Pfungst | Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology (1911) |
THE NATURE AND RISE OF OUR OWN SPECIES - NOVELS
| Sinclair Lewis | Arrowsmith (1925) |
| Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | Cat's Cradle (1963) |
| H.G. Wells | Tono Bungay (1908) |
| Thomas Pynchon | Gravity's Rainbow (1973) |
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