6 books
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about one hundred fifty pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that got me: A black…
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 was as a political project, the geology of a dead world and what…
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. You know the experiment. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still builds…
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…
