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But Carl Sagan documentaires were *a must* when I was a kid.

Oh, and Isaac Asimov's non-SF books are great too (the book about Physics and the one about Maths are great).

In related news, Cosmo whines about the lack of great intellectual thinkers.

What many people don't know is that in addition to being a great bongo player, Richard Feynman was also quite an accomplished physicist.

It's true!

Isn't this subjective with the term "best read". I can tell you right now that I'm not even moderatly interested in the majority of those books. I could name a few fantasy books I'd say would say most certainly beats many of those on that list but because of my own tastes.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking I actually found to be a great read if they need suggestions on science literature. Again, who considers science a "good read"? Not most people I would say.

"EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture."

A professor once gave me a book called The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Pleasures-Engineering-Thomas-Dunne/dp/0312141041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214425954&sr=8-1), which began with a discussion of engineers as romantic, heroic figures to the people of the late 19th century. This is still true to some extent in some places like France. Right now in the US we're in an anti-intellectual upswing, but that doesn't mean we won't have another golden age of cultural interest in science.

Uh. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the twits and twats that read Entertainment Weekly simply aren't the same people that would read anything by Kaku or Sagan or Dawkins or anything else that would make them use that three pound enigma in their skulls.

I, for example, don't know any of the current videos on MTV or BET. I'm just not in that demographic.

Everyone was interested in it. The Space Race was still ongoing, magazines like Popular Science proliferated, and we Cub Scout and Boy Scout kids worked hard on our radio and electricity or bridge-building experiments. We all wanted to be scientists when we grew up.

Now, everyone wants to be "in entertainment." Even the most well-known "scientists" are really CELEBRITIES more than anything else; they're famous for being famous. Instead of the staid, sober "Mr. Wizard," [mrwizardstudios.com] you have "Bill Nye the Science Guy" [billnye.com] from about a decade ago, or the new Sid The Science Kid [muppetnewsflash.com]. It's all about fun and flash and, well, "celebrity," entertainment.

We used to be "entertained" by the IDEAS behind what we were learning. We had imagination enough to extrapolate ideas like "hey, if I can make this model rocket fly up to 500 feet, maybe one day I can make one that goes the the Moon or Mars!"

Now, it's all about what someone else is doing, for our entertainment, on TV. Don't need "hands-on," we can just watch someone else do "Science" that really just looks like an entertaining video game.

Perhaps if we could get the kids back to doing REAL science - after all, when you're eight years old the same experiments that the scientists of three hundred years ago were performing for the first time are certainly NEWS to you! - instead of just seeking to entertain them, they might start to take it seriously.

And that would be reflected in what we are reading and talking about as well.

First I'd have to possibly put Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time on there. It was pretty popular, and really good at explaining the comments to a mass audience.

Second, I just don't think popular culture is fertile ground for intellectual inquiry along the lines of hard science. Some popular mass-circulation magazines and newspapers used to have math and science sections of interest to general readership. You'll find nothing like that in People, Us, or USA Today.

Third, I think scientists have gone somewhat at odds with the general population in the past few decades as well. This is still largely a religious nation, but many books by the most prominent scientists now spend most of their time not only questioning things like religious belief and cherished cultural traditions, but mocking them outright as well. Richard Dawkins all but calls religious people idiots in his books. That's kind of a hard sell when nearly 90 percent of your population believes in a God of some kind.

What was that line from that movie... Contact? Palmer Joss's line?

Our job was to select someone to speak for everybody. And I just couldn't in good conscience vote for a person who doesn't believe in God. Someone who honestly thinks the other ninety five percent of us suffer from some form of mass delusion.

Just possibly, making the argument to most of the population that their beliefs are nothing but twaddle probably doesn't do wonders for book sales.

"Entertainment Weekly too shallow to pay attention to science, blames scientific community"

What about the compilations of Gould's essays for "Natural History" magazine? My two favorites are "The Panda's Thumb" and "Bully for Brontosaurus".

GÃdel, Escher, Bach has enough science in it (particularly cognition and neurology) to qualify as a "science book" (whatever that's supposed to mean).

Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in metacognition.

I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything [wikipedia.org] by Bill Bryson [wikipedia.org]. It is more of a history of science book. If you want to know something like how it is that we know the age of the earth and all the prior theories and how they were concocted then this is the kind of book for you. It is a very entertaining read as he often takes side tracks into the personalities behind the discoveries.

If their demographic is twenty- and thirty-something people who want to read about movie stars and their lives, which is what Entertainment Weekly publishes (they gave me a free subscription, which now clogs my recycle bin, unread) they're pretty unlikely to enjoy books that aren't about movie stars.

Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is a fabulous read. One or two chapters each on astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, you name it. There's a reason it was a bestseller: it is accessible to people who don't know an integral from an interval.

There are scads of excelent science books out there: Sagan, Asimov, Zukav, Hofstatder. But if you want to read about Mel B's nose job, you're probably not going to rate them highly.

In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.

Science Weekly's list of "The 100 Best Reads" includes not one single piece of popular culture fluff. Nor does it only go back 25 years, which is about how long people with no other useful purpose have been making money by turning information about entertainment (as opposed to entertainment itself) into a money making venture.

When EW's history goes back far enough and has enough quality material listed that they can claim to have their equivalent to Principia Mathematia, then they'll have something significant to say about their own field. And they will probably still have no background from which to judge science literature.

I read an entertaining and educational science book once a week whether I need to or not. Anyone wanting some suggestions along these lines, go read Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" on MSNBC and look up the archives of his Used Book Of The Month Club. Those who already read such things should keep an eye out for his next request for suggestions, and submit one. If it gets used, you get a prize -- usually another good science book he'd recently reviewed or otherwise acquired.

The God Particle [amazon.com] by Leon Ledderman is one of my favourite Physics books. It offers an incredibly accessible introduction to particle physics for the non science oriented while at the same time provides a fascinating look (for the science oriented) into the history of particle physics by someone involved in several of the key discoveries of the last 50 years.

EW's list is almost entirely light fiction. Except for a few memoirs, there aren't any non-fiction books, let alone science books. I've enjoyed several of the books on the list, but it might be better titled "100 classic beach books".

I'm not sure if the EW article changed since the Slashdot article was posted, but it doesn't look like EW made any remark about the lack o f science books. I think that was just the submitter's editorial comment.

Gravity, George Gamow
Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow
Birth of a New Physics, I Bernard Cohen

The nice thing about these is that they don't pander or sensationalize the way much of what passes for current science writing does.

As far as more recent work goes, I found "Subtle is the Lord", an Einstein biography by Abraham Pais to be quite good.

The two Richard Rhodes bomb books are genius.
The first one tells the story of 20th century physics and the rise of the Nazis. The second one ends with the Cuban Missle Crisis. Both are white knuckle history with the physics moving from ceiling wax to Mike.