Coming of Age in the Milky Way

by Timothy Ferris

  Boodin, John. Cosmic Evolution. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Expansive extrapolation of the evolutionary hypothesis, influential in its day.

  Boorse, Henry A., and Lloyd Motz, eds. The World of the Atom. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Anthology of nontechnical papers and essays.

  Boorstin, Daniel. The Discoverers. New York: Random House, 1983. Anecdotal history of the ages of exploration.

  Born, Max. The Born-Einstein letters. New York: Walker, 1971. Documents a decades-long debate over the philosophy of quantum physics, conducted in high spirits and with great mutual respect.

  —————. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. New York: Dover, 1965,

  —————. My Life. New York: Scribner’s, 1978.

  —————. The Restless Universe, trans. Winifred M. Deans. New York: Dover, 1951. Illustrated introduction to quantum physics and field theory.

  Bowker, J. The Sense of God. London: Oxford University Press, 1973,

  Boxer, Charles R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire: 1415–1825. New York: Knopf, 1969.

  Bracewell, Ronald N. The Galactic Club. San Francisco: Freeman, 1975. Discusses interstellar probes.

  Bradshaw, M.J. A New Geology. London: English Universities, 1968.

  Braithwaite, R.B. Scientific Explanation. New York: Harper, 1960.

  Brandon, S.G.F. Time and Mankind: An Historical and Philosophical Study of Mankind’s Attitude to the Phenomena of Change. London: Hutchinson, 1951.

  Brecher, Kenneth, and Michael Fiertag, eds. Astronomy of the Ancients. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980.

  Brecht, Bertolt. Galileo, English version trans, by Charles Laughton. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

  Bridgman, Percy. The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

  Brittan, Gordon. Kant’s Theory of Science. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.

  Broad, C.D. Leibniz: An Introduction. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

  —————. Scientific Thought. Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, 1959.

  Brodetsky, S. Sir Isaac Newton. London: Methuen, 1927.

  Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

  —————. The Common Sense of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.

  —————. The Identity of Man. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1966.

  —————. Magic, Science, and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

  —————. The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

  —————. Science and Human Values. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

  —————. A Sense of the Future. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977.

  —————. The Visionary Eye. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978.

  Brooks, Daniel R., and E.O. Wiley. Evolution as Entropy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Study of the relationship between biological evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.

  Brown, Laurie M., and Lillian Hoddeson, eds. The Birth of Particle Physics. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Based on a 1980 Fermilab symposium.

  Brown, Lloyd. The Story of Maps. New York: Crown, 1979. Survey history of mapmaking.

  Bruno, Giordano. The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977.

  —————. The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Stanley Jaki. Paris: Mouton, 1975.

  Buchwald, Jed. From Maxwell to Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Semitechnical examination of British and continental approaches to electromagnetism in the late nineteenth century.

  Bucke, Richard. Cosmic Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1969.

  Buckley, Paul, and F. David Peat. A Question of Physics. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

  Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de. Selections from Natural History, General and Particular. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

  Bunbury, E.H. A History of Ancient Geography. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1959.

  Bunge, Mario. Causality and Modern Science. New York: Dover, 1979.

  Burchfield, J.D. Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. New York: Science History Publications, 1975. Study of Kelvin’s geochronological ideas and their influence.

  Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944.

  Burger, Dionys. Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1983. Expands upon Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.

  Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.

  Burnet, Thomas. Sacred Theory of the Earth. London: Centaur Press, 1965. Reprint of 1691 edition.

  Burnham, Robert, Jr. Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. New York: Dover, 1978. Compendium of astronomical information and mythological lore on the major stars and nebulae.

  Burtt, E. A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Science. New York: Doubleday, 1932.

  Bury, John Bagnell. The Idea of Progress. New York: Dover, 1960.

  Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Overview of concepts implicated in the rise of the scientific world view.

  Buttmann, Gunther. The Shadow of the Telescope, trans. B.E.J. Pagel. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. Biography of John Herschel.

  Bynum, W.F., E.J. Brown, and Roy Porter, eds. Dictionary of the History of Science. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

  Calder, Nigel. The Comet Is Coming! New York: Viking, 1980.

  —————. Einstein’s Universe. New York: Penguin, 1980.

  —————. Timescale: An Atlas of the Fourth Dimension. New York: Viking, 1983.

  —————. Violent Universe. New York: Viking, 1969. Popular survey of high-energy astrophysics.

  Cameron, A.G.W. Interstellar Communication: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life. New York: Benjamin, 1963.

  Campanella, Tommaso. The Defense of Galileo of Thomas Campanella, ed. and trans. Grant McColley. Merrick, N.Y.: Richwood, 1976. Bold statement of the case for Copernicus and Galileo, written by a Dominican friar in 1616 while imprisoned in a Neapolitan dungeon.

  Campbell, Bernard. Human Evolution: An Introduction to Man’s Adaptations. Chicago: Aldine, 1966.

  Campbell, Lewis, and William Garnett. The Life of James Clerk Maxwell. London: Macmillan, 1882. Dated but still instructive biography of Maxwell, originally published within three years of his death.

  Capek, Milic, ed. The Concepts of Space and Time. Boston: Reidel, 1976. Anthology of historical writings.

  —————. The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics. New York: Van Nostrand, 1961.

  —————. Philosophy of Space and Time. New York: Dover, 1958.

  Carnap, Rudolf. Foundations of Logic and Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.

  Carrigan, Richard A., Jr., and W. Peter Trower, eds. Particle Physics in the Cosmos. New York: Freeman, 1989.

  Carus, Paul. The Religion of Science. Chicago: Open Court, 1913.

  Caspar, Max. Kepler, trans. C. Doris Hellman. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959.

  Cassirer, Ernst. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. New York: Dover, 1953.

  —————. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

  —————. Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.

  Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan. Eddington, the Most Distinguished Astrophysicist of His Time. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Memoir of Eddington by his eminent pupil.

  —————. An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure. New York: Dover, 1967.

  Chappie, J.A.V. Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1986.

  Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de. Man’s Place in Nature. New York:
Harper, 1956, 1966.

  —————. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper, 1959.

  Cheng, David C., and Gerard K. O’Neill. Elementary Particle Physics. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979. Graduate-level textbook.

  Child, J.M. The Geometrical Lectures of Isaac Barrow. Chicago: Open Court, 1916.

  Choquet-Bruhat, Y., and T.M. Karade. On Relativity Theory. Singapore: World Scientific, 1984. Proceedings of an Arthur Eddington centenary symposium.

  Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. New York: Free Press, 1984.

  Cicero. De Fato, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Timeless critique of philosophical issues in cosmology.

  —————. The Nature of the Gods, trans. H.C.P. McGregory. London: Penguin, 1984. Translation of De Natura Deorum.

  Clagett, Marshall, ed. Critical Problems in the History of Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

  —————. The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959. Pre-Galilean dynamics.

  Clark, David H., and F. Richard Stephenson. The Historical Supernovae. New York: Pergamon, 1977. Survey of scientific study and historical records of supernovae visible from Earth with the naked eye.

  Clark, Grahame. World Prehistory: An Outline. London: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

  Clark, Ronald W. Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: World, 1971. Nontechnical biography with minimal stress on Einstein’s scientific research.

  —————. The Survival of Charles Darwin: Biography of a Man and an Idea. New York: Random House, 1984. Popular biography with an emphasis on the fortunes of Darwinism following its founder’s death.

  Clark, Stuart. Towards the Edge of the Universe: A Review of Modern Cosmology. New York: Springer, 1999.

  Clark, Thomas Henry, and C. W. Steam. Geological Evolution of North America. New York: Ronald, 1968.

  Clayton, Donald C. Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Graduate-level textbook.

  Clerke, Agnes M. A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1902.

  Cloud, Preston. Cosmos, Earth and Man. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

  Cohen, I. Bernard. Album of Science: From Leonardo to Lavoisier. New York: Scribner’s, 1980. Pictorial history of science.

  —————. The Birth of a New Physics. New York: Norton, 1985.

  —————. The Newtonian Revolution. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  —————. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.

  —————. Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light. New York: The Burndy Library, 1944.

  —————, ed. Introduction to Newton’s “Principia.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.

  —————, ed. Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958.

  Cohen, Morris, and Ernest Nagel. An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Textbook.

  —————, and I.E. Drabkin. A Source Book in Greek Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948.

  Cohen, Robert S., and Raymond J. Seeger, eds. Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher. Boston: Reidel, 1970. Collection of papers on Mach and his thought.

  Cole, K.C. The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

  Coles, Peter. Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pocket guide to cosmology.

  Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

  Columbus, Christopher. Select letters of Christopher Columbus, ed. R.H. Major. London: Hakluyt Society, 1870.

  Columbus, Ferdinand. The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, trans. Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979.

  Conant, J.B. On Understanding Science. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947.

  Conway, J.H. On Numbers and Games. New York: Academic Press, 1976. Discusses how nonbeing implies being.

  Cook, James. The Journals of Capt. James Cook, ed. J.C. Beaglehole. 4 vols. London: 1955.

  Cook, Theodore Andrea. The Curves of Life. New York: Dover, 1979. Includes illustrations of natural spirals generated by invariances.

  Cooper, Henry S.F., Jr. The Search for Life on Mars. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980. Report on the Viking mission to Mars.

  Cooper, Lane. Aristotle, Galileo, and the Tower of Pisa. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1935. Study of the opposition between Galileo and the Scholastics on the falling bodies question.

  Copernicus, Nicolaus. Complete Works, trans, and commentator, Edward Rosen, ed. Vol. 3 Pawel Czartoryski. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1985.

  —————. On the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki and trans. Edward Rosen. Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1978; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Large format, with a commentary by Rosen.

  —————. On the Revolutions, ed. and trans. A.M. Duncan. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976.

  —————.On the Revolutions, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

  —————. Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus, the Letter Against Werner, the Narratio Prima of Rheticus, ed. and trans. Edward Rosen. New York: Dover, 1959. Shorter works of Copernicus not previously translated into English.

  Cornell, James. The First Stargazers. New York: Scribner’s, 1981.

  Cornford, F.M. Plato’s Cosmology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Translation of the Timaeus, with running commentary.

  Cornwall, I.W. The World of Ancient Man. New York: New American Library, 1965.

  Craig, W.L. The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Liebniz. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

  Crease, Robert, and Charles Mann. The Second Creation. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Nontechnical history of twentieth-century unified field theory, based upon extensive interviews and a survey of the scientific literature.

  Crombie, A.C. Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science A.D. 400–1650. London: Falcon, 1952.

  Crosland, M.P., ed. The Science of Matter. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1971.

  Crowe, Michael J. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de. The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun. London: Rhodes, 1687.

  D’Abro, A. The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein. New York: Dover, 1950.

  —————. The Rise of the New Physics. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1931.

  D’Alembert, Jean. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981.

  Dampier, William Cecil. A History of Science and Its Relations with Philosophy and Religion. London: Cambridge University Press, 1949.

  —————. Readings in the Literature of Science. New York: Harper, 1959.

  Danto, Arthur, and Sidney Morgenbesser, eds. Philosophy of Science. New York: World, 1960.

  Dantzig, Tobias. Number: The language of Science. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

  Darlington, C.D. The Evolution of Man and Society. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.

  Darwin, Charles. The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

  —————. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. New York: Dover, 1955.

  —————. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. New York: Modern Library, 1936. Reprint of 1872 edition.

  —————. The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domesticat
ion. London: Murray, 1868. Expands upon the first chapters of the Origin of Species.

  —————. The Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Leonard Engel. New York: Doubleday, 1962. Reprint of the 1860 edition.

  Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia: Or the Laws of Organic Life, 4th American ed. Philadelphia: 1818. Darwin’s grandfather’s evolutionary theory.