6 books
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about 150 pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that gets you: A black hole isn’t…
Oliver Morton
Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once. How it formed and why that mattered for life here. What Apollo actually was as a political project and what it felt like. The geology…
Mary Doria Russell
A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…
Craig Childs
Eighty percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way from home. Childs goes looking for what’s left of the actual night — sleeping out in the desert without a light, tracking how animals use darkness, sitting with astronomers and with…
Anil Ananthaswamy
Recommended by a friend of a friend who’s a working physicist. One experiment, two hundred years. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still…
Benjamín Labatut
Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches…
