Science

Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos, by Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale University Press, 2016. Observation Not Theory A detailed history of cosmology during the 20th century. The emphasis is on observational astronomy rather than theory. Individuals who deserve to be better known: Fritz Zwicky Walter Baade George Smoot Kent Ford Veera Rubin Henrietta Swan Leavitt John Mather

The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms  by Marcus Chown, Vintage (Rand), 2000.

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe  by Lee Smolin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.  Determinism:   Pierre-Simon Laplace: with total knowledge of the present, one can project the future of the universe Block Universe:   The author objects to the theory called the “block universe”, where the future is set in stone by the initial conditions and completely deterministic laws of physics. Block universe: the whole universe is a timeless mathemati

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics  by Ruth Lewin Sime, University of California Press, 1996.  Female, Jewish Physicist This is a biography of an Austrian, Jewish, female nuclear physicist, who, with Otto Hahn, discovered nuclear fission. Meitner worked in Berlin at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. She was an experimental nuclear physicist. She bombarded uranium atoms with neutrons. Her primary collaborator was Otto Hahn. Hahn performed the chemical isolations and chemical analyses

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World  by Edward Dolnick, HarperCollins, 2011.  Before the Age of Reason, people thought in the old ways: natural disasters, plagues and fires were punishment from God for sinning, astrology, comets were bad omens curiosity was a sin (according to St. Augustine) religious dissenters were punished inanimate matter had goals great chain of being the Bible was full of hidden meanings God control

Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler  by Thomas Hager, Crown, 2008.  Potassium Nitrate:   The Chinese combined potassium nitrate  with ground charcoal to invent gunpowder. The British East India Company found a huge supply of potassium nitrate in the mud flats of the river Ganges.  Sodium Nitrate:   A related chemical is sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is not as good for explosives as is