Science: From Matter to Cosmos

The whole of science in one volume, told by an outsider who asked scientists to explain themselves. Read first so that every later module has a place on a map you already hold.

Sagan's argument for scepticism as a civic habit, with his baloney detection kit at its centre. The book that explains why the method matters outside the laboratory.

A Columbia neuroscientist on the working truth that science is driven by good questions rather than settled answers. Short, and a corrective to the textbook picture of accumulated fact.

Six chapters lifted from the Feynman Lectures, beginning with the single sentence Feynman thought contained the most information: all things are made of atoms. The best entry into physics ever written.

The periodic table told as a set of stories, one per element, from the gallium spoon that melts in tea to the politics of the transuranics. Chemistry as history rather than as a chart to memorise.

Seventeen molecules that changed history, from the tin that may have failed Napoleon's army to the dyes, spices and polymers that built industries. Structure matters, and this book shows why.

Hundreds of physics puzzles, each answerable without equations, each exposing a piece of intuition that is usually wrong. The book to read with a pencil.

The companion volume: symmetry, vectors, and Feynman's account of special and general relativity. Harder than the first six, and worth the effort because it is where physics stops matching common sense.

From wood to coal to oil to the atom, four centuries of energy told through the people who found and fought over each source. Physics becomes economics and politics here.

Einstein's own popular account, written in 1916 for readers with school mathematics. Slower than a modern explainer and more honest, because the person explaining is the person who worked it out.

The story of quantum mechanics from Planck to Bell, told with the people in it. Still the clearest narrative history of how physicists were forced into a theory none of them liked.

Rovelli's account of Heisenberg's 1925 breakthrough on a North Sea island, and his own relational reading of what quantum theory says about reality. Short, literary, and a live position in the current debate.

William Smith, a canal surveyor, drew the first geological map of a nation in 1815 and in doing so made deep time visible. Winchester tells the story of the map and the man ruined by making it.

Plate tectonics, climate cycles and the distribution of rock explain where cities rose, which crops grew and why empires ran along particular lines. Geology as the hidden hand in history.

Reporting from the reefs, forests and caves where species are vanishing, set against the five mass extinctions in the rock record. Won the Pulitzer, and earns it by refusing both alarm and comfort.

The palaeontologist who found Tiktaalik explains why your wrist, your hiccups and your hernias are fish anatomy. The most convincing short book on evolution because the evidence is you.

Dawkins sets aside argument with religion and simply lays out the evidence for evolution: fossils, embryos, molecular clocks, and experiments in real time. The book to hand to someone who asks how we know.

Ten inventions of evolution, from the origin of life to death itself, each a chapter on how it happened and how we know. Won the Royal Society prize, and is the most demanding book in this pathway.

From Mendel's peas to gene editing, with the history of eugenics kept in view throughout and Mukherjee's own family as a case study. A long book, and the standard one.

The full biography of the crystallographer whose Photograph 51 gave Watson and Crick the double helix. Maddox corrects both the myth of the wronged victim and the erasure that produced it.

How cells with identical DNA become skin, liver and neuron, and how the environment writes on the genome without changing its sequence. The clearest general account of a field that moves fast.

A neuroscientist's short tour of perception, decision, memory and the self, written to accompany his television series. The right first book because it never pretends the brain is simpler than it is.

A history of how people have understood the brain, through each machine metaphor from hydraulics to the computer, and an argument that the current metaphor is also running out. Scholarly and readable.

Consciousness as controlled hallucination: the brain's best guess about the world and the body, constantly corrected by the senses. The leading theory of experience, explained by one of its authors.

The book of the 1980 television series, and still the finest single piece of science writing for a general reader. History, astronomy and the human situation held together by one voice.

Black holes, the arrow of time and the question of whether the universe had a beginning, in the book that sold in the millions and is famous for being started more often than finished. Read it slowly and it rewards you.

Dark matter, dark energy, exoplanets and the cosmic perspective in a book short enough to read in an evening. The update to Sagan and Hawking that the pathway needs to end in the present.