Classic Books of Science? 451
half_cocked_jack writes "What are the classic books of science from throughout history? I'm currently reading On the Origin of Species on my Kindle 2, and it's sparked an interest in digging up some of the classic books of science. I'm looking for books from the ancient and medieval worlds and books from the golden ages of scientific discovery. Books like: Galileo's The Starry Messenger; Newton's Principia; Copernicus's On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres; and Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle. I know that I can likely find these books in a format I can use on my Kindle (found a few on Gutenberg already), but what I need is a checklist of these books to guide my reading. Suggestions?"
Learning or Collecting? (Score:4, Insightful)
If your goal is to learn the subject material, I wouldn't bother with most - equivalents from the 20th century may likely be better.
Don't forget Euclid's Elements. I also think there were some groundbreaking math books from the Arab era, but don't know if you can find them on the Internet - or whether there are translations available.
Ancient Engineers (Score:3, Insightful)
Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague De Camp
Absolutely not what you've asked for - but a possibly invaluable essay that I expect would be quite useful to guide your understanding during your quest.
Nerd Fest Pending... (Score:2, Insightful)
Asking a question like that on Slashdot will inevitably lead to:
1. A flame war over which book/scientist is the most important
2. An outpouring of obscure references as every nerd tries to out-nerd the other with more and more obscure references
Re:One Resource (Score:5, Insightful)
My sentiment on this has nothing to do with muslims. The idea that educated Europeans thought the Earth was flat is a myth made up by certain 19th Century writers and popularized by people who were trying to show that Christianity is anti-science.
Re:Future Classic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Double Helix (Score:3, Insightful)
Well there's the fact that EVERY SINGLE MOTHERFUCKING STORY on biology gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong." It got old real, real fast.
Re:Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (Score:3, Insightful)
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
That, of course, assumes that economics deserves to be treated as science.
Re:Learning or Collecting? (Score:4, Insightful)
If your goal is to learn the subject material, I wouldn't bother with most - equivalents from the 20th century may likely be better.
Important question there. Keep in mind that notation and scientific writing style have changed significantly over the years.
Re:Two more (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear God. You compare "A brief history of time" to "Principia" and "On the Origin of Species"???
"A brief history of time" is an excellent read, however it is a "popular science" book that contains the minimum possible amount of physics and math. For, say, lawyers or doctors I guess it is as "scientific" as they can go with physics, but that in no way can make it a "classic book of science". I considered it a light (and very amusing) read when I was 14 when, in contrast, Newton's proofs were still a challenge to read much later.
Re:One Resource (Score:2, Insightful)
Great ideas like these great discoveries are only notable if someone does something with it. The Middle East did very little, if anything, with these discoveries, hence... Sorry about bursting the bubble.
Re:Learning or Collecting? (Score:5, Insightful)
That and seminal works are often overhyped. Don't get me wrong - they may have made a great impact, but they're usually indicative of the beginning of a new field, and it may have taken decades/centuries for the field to figure itself out. Only then is it presented in a better manner for learning.
Take calculus. Limits weren't put on a firm rigorous basis till people like Bolzano, Weierstrauss and Cauchy over a hundred years after Newton. And general integration theory didn't come around until the late 19th century and early 20th.
Of course, there are always exceptions...
affectation (Score:3, Insightful)
My advice would be not to make an affectation of reading original works. Here [nytimes.com] is a good article that discusses this "Great Books" paradigm, and points out how poorly it fits in the sciences especially.
One example you gave was Newton's Principia. Well, I'm a physicist, and I've read most of the Principia. I would not recommend it to anyone. First off, it's all written in the language of Euclidean geometry, merely because most of Newton's audience wasn't familiar with algebra, and certainly not with calculus, which had only been published a few years before the Principia came out. Today, the way to approach the subject is to read a treatment that uses modern math that you're familiar with. If you know calculus and analytic geometry, you can read a two-page proof [lightandmatter.com] of the elliptical orbit law, a result that took Newton the bulk of his entire book to prove because of the mathematical tools to which he limited himself.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. I think the first 1/3 of Euclid's Elements is still something that everyone interested in mathematics should read.
Re:One Resource (Score:5, Insightful)
In 200 years people will boggle that we believed that most people in the late middle ages thought the Earth was flat.
Here, let me fix that for you:
If we don't get rid of the fundie influence on education, in 200 years people will believe that most people living in the twentieth century were living in the middle ages. With the dinosaurs. And some dude named Flintstone.
Re:One Resource (Score:4, Insightful)
The "slight bulges" (your #4) fails for a similar reason - ships have to climb UP a bulge, which takes energy, so either they're going from higher to lower when they start (so no need for wind or rowers) or they're going from lower to higher (so the return doesn't need wind or rowers), so it fails based on simple obsedrvation - you aren't going "downhill" in either direction.
Copernican Heresy (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh... Galileo? OK, he wasn't burned, but he was imprisoned and forced to recant.
Re:One Resource (Score:3, Insightful)
The multiple religious crusades perpetrated on them during their most intellectually productive centuries might have had a little something to do with that.
here are some (Score:3, Insightful)
euler - introductio in analysisin infinitorum -- brilliant work of euler from 1748 containing many striking results. english translation available.
bernhard riemann - on the number of primes less than a given magnitude -- riemann's one paper (~15 pages) on number theory, which introduced his famous zeta function (english version available in riemann's zeta function by edwards, a book dedicated to the very rich subtext of this terse paper)
shannon - a mathematical theory of communication [att.com] -- seminal paper founding information theory
schrodinger -- find yourself a decent exposition of the analysis of the hydrogen atom using schrodinger wave mechanics. learn where all that junk they taught you in high school chemistry actually comes from!
Feynman Lectures on Physics -- comprehensive account from the man who knew physics as well as anyone.
ahlfors - complex analysis -- best text i know of on this subject in mathematics that shows up in the most surprising places in the sciences.
landau & lifschitz - course on theoretical physics -- 10 volumes on modern physics from classical mechanics to electrodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, fluids, etc. from nobel prize winner lev landau.
Fourier Analysis - t w korner -- intro to fourier analysis with many applications (after all, applications are the whole point of fourier analysis) from your basic heat equation stuff to calculating the age of the earth and other interesting things.
i think that in compiling this list, you will find two things to be true:
1. increasingly (in the last century, for example), important work is not (initially) published in books, but in papers.
2. trying to read the original works is fun for about 5 minutes. if you really want to learn, modern expositions in textbooks tend to be far better than the originals.
Dirac (Score:1, Insightful)
Paul Dirac's 'Principles of Quantum Mechanics'
the most elegant, profound and laconic (in the Spartan sense) exposition of quantum mechanics ever written
Re:One Resource (Score:2, Insightful)
And you would replace the fundie influence with a scientism that says humans are nothing but collections of atoms. That all religion is self-delusion and inarguably bad. That science is the only domain of knowledge.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
Well, until someone can prove that one or more gods actually exist (and it's not like they haven't had LOTS of time to produce at least SOME proof), self-delusion seems to be a good contender for "best explanation", though others, such as fraud and greed, also work.
And yes, last I heard, people did believe that humans are collections of atoms, and science certainly has a better record of imparting knowledge than religion. We don't buy the "4 corners of the earth", Jacobs' "magic" for getting goats to breed favourably, or the "woman was created out of man's rib" stories, or that a murderer motivated by lust for another mans' wife (King David with the hots for Basheba) is "a man after god's heart" - because if god existed, that would be contemptible, criminal behaviour. So the bible fails at teaching both science and ethics. As a tool for keeping the masses in line wrt "droit de seigneur" [snopes.com], slavery, kings as rulers, etc.
Speaking of slaves, the story that Jesus went into the temple to overturn the tables of the moneychangers shows religion is more concerned with the trade in money than with the trade in human lives, condemning one when it doesn't reap the rewards ("don't give your money to sacrifices, tithe it to the church"), but openly condoning the other ("Were you called while a slave? Do not worry about it; but if you are able also to become free, rather do that.") Freedom is optional.
Then again, religion IS enslavement.
Re:One Resource (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hawking's Compilation (Score:2, Insightful)
- Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Man, I've tried a couple of times to read this, and it just doesn't work for me.
I think I see what he's getting at - the book itself is a fugue. But when I try to read it I attempt to hold in my mind what that guy is freaking talking about, except he doesn't make a point, he just moves on to something else. It's like listening to Cliff Claven. After a couple hundred pages I'm like 'this guy is going in circles, not getting anywhere'. Each sentence makes sense, but they don't point in any coherent direction.
I can see how it's good, if that fugue thing is right, but it also kinda sucks.
end rant
Re:One Resource (Score:3, Insightful)
I responded in a failed effort to stop the Slashdot groupthink from asserting itself,
Show ANY proof that there is a god. ANY god. We've had thousands of them throughout history, so it's not like there isn't enough subject material. Otherwise, you're guilty of religious group-think with no basis whatsoever in fact. Get the mote out of your eye first, hmmm?
Come on, just ONE shred of hard, testable evidence that god - any god - exists. Or admit that what you believe is only that - a shared belief with no basis in fact. You know, group-think.
You claim:
Knowledge is only useful as it is applied, meaning that there is a great deal more to existence than knowledge; namely, experience
Information can exist without being useful. This is a retread of the worn-out "utilitarian argument for god" - that there must be more to life, and therefore god must exist. Why? Life doesn't have to have any intrinsic meaning. Does the life of an ant, or a swine flu particle, have any intrinsic meaning that "proves" the existence of an ant god, or a swine flu god? Or that they have the same god you have?
God is a cruel joke that we, as humans, have played on each other for a looong time. There's more to existance then blindly following an imaginary god - there's doing what I want to do, without other people trying to impose their superstitions, devoid of any proof, on me. Fortunately, atheism is the fastest-growing "belief" - hopefully, one day, religion will be held in the same contempt as smoking - something you don't do in polite company, that you admit is an irrational urge, and that you really need to give up for your own good, so you can focus your energy on other things.
Really, god is just a bad habit, and people should just "butt out." And if they can't, they should at least "butt out" of other people's lives, trying to impose their amoral religious beliefs in a phony god, sin, and condemnation, on others. Either that, or expect more push-back from those who see it as rude, superstitious, and phony.
So, got proof?