books that many of us liked

I was asked if I could think up a list of books that “every physicist would read…” So I tried to do that and passed it by a colleague who’s an over-thinker like me and this is what we came up with. I hope it helps. The ordering is only stream-of-consciousness.

About physics

• Weinberg’s First Three Minutes
• anything by Abraham Pais
• Masks of the Universe by Harrison
• Dreams of a Final Theory by Weinberg
• The Ascent of Man by Bronowski
• The Second Creation by by Crease and Mann
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun by Rhodes
• The God Particle by Lederman
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson
• Boltzmann’s Atom by Lindley
• Great Ideas in Physics by Lightman
• E=mc^2 by Bodanis
• World Within the World by Barrow
• Books by Greene…they are fun, but deceptive – he’s much too enamored of speculative science and makes it sound like it’s agreed upon
• One Two Three Infinity by Gamow
• Mister Tompkins in Paperback by Gamow
• Powers of Ten by Eames/Morrison
• The Quest for Absolute Zero by Mendelssohn
• character of physical law by Feynman
• Inner Space, Outer Space by Lederman and Schramm

Physics texts

• Feynman Lectures
• Quantum Mechanics by Dirac
• Advanced Quantum Mechanics by Sakurai
• Spacetime Physics by Wheeler
• General Relativity by Weinberg
• Series of advanced books by Greiner
• Theoretical Minimum by Susskind …series
• A Journey Into Gravity and Spacetime by Wheeler
• QED by Feynman
• Quantum Mechanics by Bohm
• An Introduction to Statistical Physics by Pointon
• any of the Landau and Lifshitz books everyone owns one or more of them