# Those who love Science, Astronomy, and Philosophy-I need your help!



## Hawkeye (Feb 19, 2007)

How's that for random topic of the day? haha

ANYWAY-

Long story short- a good friend of mine and I decided hey we are getting very bored with many of our topics. We have a little group and it's about five or six of us where we all get together- talk about stuff that interest us and we usually have little topics. It's kind of like a book club etc. 

Anyway- for the past few years we all have brought our topics to the table and discussed them extensively. And so far the topics have been like: Religion, Theology, Politics, and we have dabbled in some sciences but not a whole lot.

So as you all know I'm a star trek fanatic and my best friend started watching it to and she said " hey you know- since we all are bored to tears with these topics do you think we should try to go into sciences, history etc?

Well we have dabbled in history as well and I said ya know that sounds great because I've been reading a briefer history in time by steven hawking and i LOVE IT so let's ask them if they would like to do this. 

Well lo and behold we eased into star trek and soon we were talking about it and physics but the problem is we aren't very knowledgeable in the topics. We know them very briefly. 

SO if anyone has any suggestions on good philosophers, good books on astronomy, good books on physics, chemistry, history etc that would be a great help 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





Thanks everybody!


----------



## Beauty Mark (Feb 19, 2007)

What kind of books are you looking for? I can name my favorite text books to you, but they are very dense even with a physics background. If you want to just understand physics, Spark Notes is surprisingly good and it was free online, last time I checked. 

Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell I found easy to read, but I was also a physics major. I think Richard Feynman's written some general public stuff. He's also written some great books that have nothing to really do with science but are about his life (he worked on the Manhattan Project and was a Nobel Laureate for something in quantum.) I'm a huge fan of his; he's pretty funny in his writings.

Feynman's Rainbow is a book about Richard Feynman towards the end of his life. It is written by a physics PhD who ended up writing for Star Trek. It has little to do with science exactly, but it was very interesting to see the life of a scientist and his thoughts.

I don't 100% remember what it was about, but the novel, Einstein's Dreams, was very good and it was written by an MIT physics prof.


----------



## Hawkeye (Feb 20, 2007)

Hey BeautyMark!

Honestly, I'm looking for anything that can enhance my knowledge.


----------



## lemurian (Feb 20, 2007)

Time: A Traveler's Guide by Clifford Pickover is a favorite of mine -- easy to read, full of information and explanations on modern physics to help you along and references to Chopin and philosophy, too 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




  I'm also a big Star Trek fan and I think you'll love this book!

Have you also been watching the History channel the past couple days?  There have been Star Trek related specials galore!  All week long, I think...


----------



## Hawkeye (Feb 20, 2007)

Thanks Lemurian!
A FELLOW TREKKIE! *dances* 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 Excellent I will check that book out. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




I just saw one tonight- and it was "How William Shatner Changed the World" and then I had to change it to watch MASH. I did not realize it was a week long thing though-and I missed it the past few days! 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




It's interesting when you watch stuff like that on the History Channel just how much something like this show- that was cancelled after 3 seasons really did change the world if by nothing else-the ideas and the imagination.


----------



## Beauty Mark (Feb 20, 2007)

The books I listed, except the Hawking, won't necessarily enhance your science knowledge, but Feynman's Rainbow is interesting, if only because you get a taste of what the life of a post-doc is like at a prestigious school (Cal-Tech is up there with MIT in certain aspects of physics). You understand the people behind who's making the decisions, which I find interesting.

The Feynman books about his personal life are funny and do touch upon some science, but the stories I remember most are the funny ones, like how Feynman worked on physics in a strip club (didn't engage anything lewd with them) or picked locks during the Manhattan Project and did it with ease.

This is one of the Feynman books I was talking about. I haven't read them, but I hear very positive things on them. It explains physics conceptually.

Dr. Hawking also co-wrote a book called The Physics of Star Trek. He and someone else breaks down the topics of physics in the context of Star Trek, if I understand it correctly. I personally haven't read it, but I've heard it's good.

Nature.com has great science articles and they generally break things down pretty well. They're general contemporary science, so you can find articles on anything really.


----------



## Beauty Mark (Feb 20, 2007)

Here's a book I plan on reading, but I don't know if it'll be easy to read. It looks really interesting, though: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next


----------



## daisydeadpetals (Feb 20, 2007)

Check out "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson.  It really gives a nice overview of well, nearly everything (The Big Bang, major chemistry discoveries, etc.  - fun stuff!!) and is written for non scientists. I could name lots of chemistry, quantum mechanics and physics books too but most are quite dense like Beauty Mark said and while I thoroughly enjoy them (I'm a chemist), most people probably wouldn't  =)  Let us know what you decide on!


----------



## Hawkeye (Feb 21, 2007)

Thanks Beautymark and Daisydeadpetals 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




I would like some more info on the really dense stuff- because (though I cannot speak for my little group I can speak for myself and I know they are as crazy as I am 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 ) I love to learn about as much as I can about anything and everything. 

Just to give you an example of how insane I am- When the Iraqi war broke out- I had this insane interest in the Middle Eastern History. So for about 2 years I read absolutely nothing but the different varying opinions, thoughts, histories, beliefs, religions in that area. Then the religions in that area sparked a new interest-the religions. So there I learned as much as I could about every religion out there (that I knew of) and then spoke with people who "preached" those faiths and then I kept cross referencing etc. 

It's really crazy but that's just how we are. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 So the Dense stuff really will not phase us.

I know one of my friends has already started on a book- it's a green text book called Quantum Physics. She seems to enjoy that. I picked up a Feynams Rainbow that Beautymark suggested and I'm just starting that. I finished my Stephen Hawking book.

Believe it or not- I will probably buy all of these books or give the list to my group and we will all share the books.

Like I told you all before- we sound nuts to most people 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 and we probably are!


----------



## Beauty Mark (Feb 21, 2007)

Well, when I said dense, I was thinking more along the lines of heavy equation work text books, and they generally require Calc I-II and linear algebra knowledge. If you want to start out with a text book, I'd recommend Halliday, Resnick, and Walker's intro. It's a great book for looking up physics info.

Because it's a considerably expensive book, even used, I'd secondly recommend checking out MIT's OpenCourseware stuff (I think that's what it's called). MIT has all the course materials up for allegedly all of their classes. I haven't looked it up, but I'm guessing it's thorough.

These aren't books, but you can read a lot about the research being done at national labs by going to their websites. I forgot what gov page it is, but look up "physics national laboratories United States" and they should come up.

Again, these aren't books and they're going to be dense, but if you're up to it, you can read old papers by the famous scientists if you look them up online. It's better if you have access to an academic database, but I believe you can find them pretty easily online through Google. It's really amazing to read the historic papers and to see how smart people were and yet what they didn't know that we take for granted. I'm almost 100% sure you can find the Einstein papers. I've read ones by Fermi before. I'd personally recommend looking at the papers after you look at a basic text, because to me, it was most interesting how Fermi what they believed that isn't true and yet they managed to figure out something revolutionary. I think you find most of them under Google Scholar or whatever it's called.


----------



## Hawkeye (Feb 22, 2007)

Beautymark- that is really really exciting stuff. I owe ya big time for this. I looked up on the website you gave above and that was fascinating. I've also looked up on the NASA site (someone else PM'd me with that) and this is getting more and more exciting the deeper I go into this. 

Man I'm a nerd. LOL


----------



## Tom88 (Jan 4, 2016)

Uoooo!Good books on astronomy, that's music to my ears!Have you found them? (sorry to be late in this thread!)


----------

