100 Greatest Books, The Freedom Skool's 2016 List (a working list)

1– Nikola Tesla. The Inventions, Researches, and Writing of Nikola Tesla. “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all previous centuries of its existence.” ~Nikola Tesla

2- Heywood, J. B. Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1988. ISBN: 9780070286375.

3- Stephen Hawking: A Briefer History of Time

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2014/07/24/a-briefer-history-of-time/a-briefer-history-of-time.pdf

4- Morin, David. Introduction to Classical Mechanics with Problems and Solutions.

5– Euclid of Alexanderia: Elements http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/toc.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_Elements

The Elements; The Elements is still considered a masterpiece in the application of logic to mathematics. In historical context, it has proven enormously influential in many areas of science. Scientists Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Sir Isaac Newton were all influenced by the Elements, and applied their knowledge of it to their work. Mathematicians and philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes,Baruch Spinoza, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell, have attempted to create their own foundational "Elements" for their respective disciplines, by adopting the axiomatized deductive structures that Euclid's work introduced. The austere beauty of Euclidean geometry has been seen by many in western culture as a glimpse of an otherworldly system of perfection and certainty. Abraham Lincoln kept a copy of Euclid in his saddlebag, and studied it late at night by lamplight; he related that he said to himself, "You never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father's house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight".[17] Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in her sonnet "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare", "O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized!". Einstein recalled a copy of the Elements and a magnetic compass as two gifts that had a great influence on him as a boy, referring to the Euclid as the "holy little geometry book"

6- Stephen J. Halliday and Resnick. Magnetism: A Very Short Introduction (2012). https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/best-books-on-electromagnetism-electricity-and-magnetism.818544/ Also check out:

Kipp, Arthur. Fundamentals of Electricity and Magnetism. (1962). Also check out:

Lorrain, Paul. Electromagnetism: Principles and Applications. (1979).

Horowitz, Paul, and Hill, Winfield. The Art of Electronics, 2^nd Edition; Cambridge University. 1994. http://iate.oac.uncor.edu/~manuel/libros/ElectroMagnetism/The%20Art%20of%20Electronics%20-%20Horowitz%20&%20Hill.pdf

7- Sean Carroll. The Particle at the End of the Universe (Higgs Boson).

- Cohen, Don. Calculus by and for Young People. Try also: Differential Calculus; https://www.khanacademy.org/math/differential-calculus and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus

- Curie, Marie. Radioactive Substances

- Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct

- Primo Levi: The Periodic Table

Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)

- Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality. Another physicist and philosopher (there seems to be a trend here), Manjit Kumar

- Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Space Chronicles. The history of how we got humans to space, and the challenges of continuing to do so. Also see Death by Black Hole.

- Steven Weinberg. “Dreams of a Final Theory”

- Roman, Steven. Introduction to Linear Algebra with Applications.

-Stewart, Ian. In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World. There’s no reason to fear math. From Pythagoras to Newton, it’s changed history a number of times.

-Blum, Deborah. The Poisoner's Handbook.

- Isaac Newton: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/newton/section6.rhtml

Dramatic is an unlikely word for a book that devotes half its pages to deconstructions of ellipses, parabolas, and tangents. Yet the cognitive power on display here can trigger chills. Principia marks the dawn of modern physics, beginning with the familiar three laws of motion (“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction” is the third). Later Newton explains the eccentric paths of comets, notes the similarity between sound waves and ripples on a pond, and makes his famous case that gravity guides the orbit of the moon as surely as it defines the arc of a tossed pebble. The text is dry but accessible to anyone with a high school education—an opportunity to commune with perhaps the top genius in the history of science. “You don't have to be a Newton junkie like me to really find it gripping. I mean how amazing is it that this guy was able to figure out that the same force that lets a bird poop on your head governs the motions of planets in the heavens? That is towering genius, no?” —psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, Cornell University http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/25-greatest-science-books

The Radio Amateurs Handbook. 1936. http://www.tubebooks.org/books/arrl_1936.pdf

Radio Communications in the Digital Age. http://rf.harris.com/media/Radio%20Comms%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age%20-%201_tcm26-12947.pdf

Bundell and Bundell. Concepts in Thermal Physics.

Rabaey, Chandrakasan, and Nikolic. Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective, 2^nd Edition;

Roger Penrose: The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics

Kip S. Thorne: Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

Saunders Mac Lane: Mathematics, Form and Function is a survey of the whole of mathematics, including its origins and deep structure, by the American mathematician

Albert Einstein: Relativity: The Special and General Theory http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1630 Relativity: While not exactly the easiest read for non-physicists, without Albert Einstein’s findings the modern world as understood today simply would not exist.

-Thomas Huxley: On a Piece of Chalk (1868) Great website to read the whole 33 pages: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/huxley/thomas_henry/piece-of-chalk/index.html http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE8/Chalk.html

Carter, Howard. The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen (1977)

Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994)

Von Neumann, John and Morgenstern, Oskar. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). Princeton University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Games_and_Economic_Behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The touching, human story behind HeLa, the first immortal human cell line. Amazon’s book of the year for 2012, it’s just damn near perfect. There’s so much humanity behind science, good and bad, and this book unlocks it so well.

Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. From the Big Bang to now, Bill Bryson just couldn’t stop asking why. These are his tales of discovery, filled the science and humor underlying, well, everything. This was recommended more than any other book when I asked my readers. 

Macaulay, David. The Way Things Work. This book needs no introduction to those of us of a certain age. I wore this book out when I was a kid. I don’t know for sure, but it probably has a lot to do with why I became a scientist.

Ernst Mayr This Is Biology

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)

Mythbusters Science Fair Book

-Goodall, Jane. 50 Years at Gombe.

– Voltaire: Philosophical Letters, or Letters on England (1733);

http://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/666/Voltaire_0060-19p2_EBk_v6.0.pdf

file:///C:/Users/Johnathan/Downloads/Letters-on-England-de-Voltaire.pdf

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ufhatch/pages/02-TeachingResources/ClioElectric/1-Electronic%20Texts/Voltaire%20-%20Newton%20&%20Gravitational%20Attraction.pdf

From the “Chancellor Bacon” chapter: “It is not long since the ridiculous and threadbare question was agitated in a celebrated assembly; who was the greatest man, Cæsar or Alexander, Tamerlane or Cromwell? Somebody said that it must undoubtedly be Sir Isaac Newton. This man was certainly in the right; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven the advantage of a superior genius, with the talent of applying it for the interest of the possessor and of mankind, a man like Newton—and such a one is hardly to be met with in ten centuries—is surely by much the greatest; and those statesmen and conquerors which no age has ever been without, are commonly but so many illustrious villains. It is the man who sways our minds by the prevalence of reason and the native force of truth, not they who reduce mankind to a state of slavery by brutish force and downright violence; the man who by the vigor of his mind, is able to penetrate into the hidden secrets of nature, and whose capacious soul can contain the vast frame of the universe, not those who lay nature waste, and desolate the face of the earth, that claims our reverence and admiration.”

Newton. Optics

Plait, Phil. Death From the Skies. The world will end one day. Here’s a book to separate the science from the conspiracies.

Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Impossible.

Jeans, James. The Mysterious Universe (1930)

Green, Brian. The Elegant Universe. Superstring theory, general relativity and quantum mechanics converge into one resource that brings some of the basic physics findings to general audiences.

Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral. A history of the dawn of the computing age, something that we take so completely for granted now.

How to Build a House: http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-House

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

McManaman, Yelena. “Moebius Noodles: Adventurous math for the playground crowd”

10 - The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) George Gamow

Gamow, George. One Two Three . . . Infinity (1947); Illustrating these tales with his own charming sketches, renowned Russian-born physicist Gamow covers the gamut of science from the Big Bang to the curvature of space and the amount of mysterious genetic material in our bodies (DNA had not yet been described). No one can read this book and conclude that science is dull. Who but a physicist would analyze the atomic constituents of genetic material and calculate how much all that material, if extracted from every cell in your body, would weigh? (The answer is less than two ounces.)

12- Mitchell, Colin. 200 Transistor Circuits, A Free Ebook

Coyne. Transistors (109 pages). http://www.tubebooks.org/books/coyne_transistors.pdf

Written in Stone - Brian Switek: The evolution of life and the evolution of paleontology. Fossils are so much more than dusty shapes of dead stuff. It’s life’s history written … in stone, I guess.

5- Electrical Engineering. Tamilnadu Textbook Corporation. 2010. http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/books/11/stdxi-voc-ema-em-1.pdf

The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean: The human history of every element on the periodic table.

Wonderful Life With the Elements - Bunpei Yorifuji: Every time I look at this masterfully illustrated, cartoon collection of the periodic table, I smile so much. My favorite chemistry cartoons ever.

Anthony Downs. “An Economic Theory of Democracy” applies the Hotelling firm location model to the political process.

Chemistry; Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements. A chemist and doctor of science turned full-time writer, John Emsley

Konrad Lorenz. King Solomon's Ring is a zoological book for the general audience, written by the Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz in 1949

6- Robert Hooke. Micrographia (1665) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrographia

19. Letters from the Field, 1925-1975 by Margaret Mead

Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses, Microcosm and Parasite Rex. Carl Zimmer writes about the Earth’s smallest organisms so that we can better understand the diversity of life (and near-life), but really, he’s just trying to scare us. 

Spillover - David Quammen: New diseases are popping up all over the place. Many of them, like ebola, AIDS and swine flu, come to us via animals. This book is sort of terrifying. The pigs and monkeys will kill us all.

The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee: A masterful telling of the history, science, and medicine surrounding that most treacherous set of human diseases: Cancer.

Zoobiquity - Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers: An evolutionary and medical exploration into the connections between animal and human health. Full of “huh?!” moments.

Harnessed and The Vision Revolution - Mark Changizi: Changizi is one of the top evolutionary neuroscientists of our time. His investigations into such seemingly essential and core human functions as music, language and vision give us an idea not only where some of our behaviors originated, but how they enhanced our evolution.

6 - Michael Faraday: Experimental Researches in Electricity http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/Rarebook_treasures/QC503F211839_PDF/QC503F211839v2.pdf

Dictionaire;

Philosophical Dictionary 1764

Rousseau; Discourse on Inequality; Social Contract 1762

Steel: Bessemer Process;

The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963)

Blood Work, by Holly Tucker (Ian McEwan)

Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide: Anyone driven to teach themselves the basics of physics can appreciate this textbook by Karl F. Kuhn’s goals and exercises.

Montiesque Spirit of the Law

discovery of carbon dioxide (fixed air) by the chemist Joseph Black

the argument for deep time by the geologist James Hutton

the invention of the steam engine by James Watt

The experiments of Lavoisier were used to create the first modern chemical plants

Émilie du Châtelet

Adam Smith

Simon Winchester. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (about volcano exploding, and how the world works)

8 - Isaac Newton: The System of the World – “to learn that the universe is a knowable place.” ~ND Tyson http://www.archive.org/stream/newtonspmathema00newtrich/newtonspmathema00newtrich_djvu.txt

Coming of Age in Samoa, by Margaret Mead Genre: Science Fiction

Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology

The Technology of Orgasm, by Rachel Maines (Ian McEwan)

77 - Transistor (a thing)

12 - Integrated Circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit

Hubble, Edwin. The Realm of the Nebulae (1935).

Galileo Galilei - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632); "... having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and with God's help will in the future believe all that is held, preached and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church ... I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre of the world and moves and that I must not hold, defend or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally and in writing the said false doctrine ..." ~some oath, Galileo may have said, or signed. Galileo not only disobeyed the orders of the Roman Inquisition when he argued in his Dialogo that it is the Sun and not the Earth that is at rest, he wrote the Dialogo in Italian rather than in the Latin of scholars, using little mathematics, so that it could be read and understood by any literate Italian. His countrymen were not unappreciative; by the time the church had suppressed the book, it had sold out.

Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species (1859); One of the most delightful, witty, and beautifully written of all natural histories, The Voyage of the Beagle recounts the young Darwin's 1831 to 1836 trip to South America, the Galápagos Islands, Australia, and back again to England, a journey that transformed his understanding of biology and fed the development of his ideas about evolution. Fossils spring to life on the page as Darwin describes his adventures, which include encounters with "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, an accidental meal of a rare bird in Patagonia (which was then named in Darwin's honor), and wobbly attempts to ride Galápagos tortoises. Charles Darwin The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (ed Ekman); The Origin of the Species: Readers willing to maneuver Darwin’s dry Victorian prose will be met with some of the most influential and controversial scientific writings ever published. A must-read for anyone hoping to study biology in any depth.

The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, Voyage of the Beagle, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

The Inflationary Universe (1997) Alan Guth

The Whole Shebang (1997) Timothy Ferris

Hiding in the Mirror (2005) Lawrence Krauss

The Medea Hypothesis, by Peter Ward (Ian McEwan)

Warped Passages (2005) Lisa Randall

The Elegant Universe (1999) Brian Greene

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948)

Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943) [founder of the Velociraptor]

Leonard Susskind: The Black Hole War

11 – Facebook.com (a website)

Collapse, by Jared Diamond (Ian McEwan)

Cosmos, by Carl Sagan (Ian McEwan)

- Nicolaus Copernicus - De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) (1543): "Let no one untrained in geometry enter here." This book started the Scientific Revolution.

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (1976) http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/have-you-heard-of-the-great-forgetting/ The Selfish Gene should be introducted with “The Great Forgetting”. Richard Dawkins's book also introduced the term "meme" as a unit of human cultural evolution, making him responsible for a good 70% of what's currently wrong with the internet.

David Bodanis: E=MC2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

Dan Ariely: The Upside of Irrationality

1491, by Charles C. Mann (Ian McEwan)

Silent World: The late, great Jacques Cousteau tantalized the imaginations of children and adults alike as he explored the world’s oceans and the delicate interplay between the animals, plants and their big blue environment.

Wonderful Life: In this classic work of natural history, Stephen Jay Gould takes readers on a journey to the Burgess Shale for a valuable lesson on some of the oldest fossils in the world.

Birds of America: When John James Audubon first made his legendary avian paintings available to the masses, he never realized that centuries later people would still praise his talent and ability to make biology an accessible science.

David Deutsch The Fabric of Reality

Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene

Six Easy Pieces: This compilation of six lectures by Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman breaks complex physics concepts down into language that almost anyone can understand.

The Cosmic Landscape: Perhaps a little more advanced than some of the other books on this list, The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskinddelves into string theory and its role in all corners of the universe.

Galileo Galilei Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

Hyperspace: Even individuals with a tenuous grasp of physics still understand and appreciate the theories behind multiple and parallel universes, and this book by Michio Kaku explains how the concepts work in clear enough language.

The Age of Entanglement: Louisa Gilder writes of the personalities and experimentalists what shaped quantum physics as it is understood and practiced today.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters: This beautiful book draws parallels between dance, mysticism, culture and of course physics, presenting audiences with a provocative, philosophical read without any complex mathematics.

The Five Ages of the Universe: Read about the history of the universe starting with the Big Bang and twisting and turning through until forever.

Edge of the Universe: Explore the cosmic horizon and beyond this this book that accessible for experts and amateurs alike.

The Theoretical Minimum: Learn about Physics 101 with a DIY twist in The Theoretical Minimum, a book that can help you make up for not delving deeper into physics while you were in school.

Antonio Damasio The Feeling of What Happens

James D. Watson. The Double Helix (1968)

Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs and Steel

Isaac’s Storm: In 1900, one of the deadliest hurricanes in history struck Galveston, Texas. Erik Larson’s work of creative nonfiction obtained widespread attention and accolades for bringing history and earth science to a broad audience.

How to Cool the Planet: This Geoengineering book takes a look at what might happen if, in a climate emergency, we had to suddenly cool the planet in a hurry.

Matt Ridley Nature Via Nurture

Silent Spring: Readers desiring to learn as much as they can about environmental science should add Silent Spring to their essential reading lists. Rachel Carson was one of the most important voices in the burgeoning green movement, and her clarion call to understand and protect the environment continues to ring true.

EO Wilson The Diversity of Life

Future Shock, by Alvin (and Heidi) Toffler

To Explain the World is published by Allen Lane.

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring; Apocalyptic Fiction

John McPhee. Encounters with the Archdruid

E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation: Einstein’s iconic equation on the relationship between mass and energy boasts an incredible story and history, recounted here by David Bodanis. The writer certainly does not skimp on exploring how the earth-shattering finding interacted with the work of other physicists as well.

63 - Smartphone (a thing)

73 - mp3s (a thing)

5 - Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300 “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”

Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom

8 - John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment,_Interest_and_Money

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ http://cas.umkc.edu/economics/people/facultypages/kregel/courses/econ645/winter2011/generaltheory.pdf

14 - Salman Khan: Khan's Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/

103 - Google News (a thing)

Comenius, John. The Way of Light.

How to Make a Chair and Desk

How Water Delivery and Sewage Systems work

Information Technology Websites

How to make bread

How to Weld

Robotics

how to make silk

how to cut pecan trees splice together, different varieties

how to make sugar

how marijuana is made

how tobacco is made

Hacker's Manual

-All about torrents!

Gunpowder

telescope