The most recommended history of science books

This book has long been my go-to guide on all matters related to the relationship between science and religion. Its beauty is that it takes a cool, clear-headed look at the history of a subject that frequently stimulates more heat than light.

It’s now over thirty years old but has aged extremely well–certainly better than I have! I still find it illuminating on episode after episode. The connections are subtle and complex; Brooke never allows us to settle for comfortable simplicity. 

Koalas are one of Australia’s most loved and most well-recognized animals, and yet it’s surprising how little is known about them.  They feature prominently in Australian Indigenous stories, and yet were rarely used for clothing or artwork. When Europeans first arrived, it took them over 10 years before they even noticed these strange animals living in the trees above them and they have continued to bemuse scientists ever since. Ann Moyal, one of Australia’s most eminent historians of science, tackles the story of how we know what we do about koalas in an intriguing story about our patchy history with the koala, from neglect and exploitation and near extinction, to protection and international fame as the poster-child for Australian conservation.

This fascinating book reflects on the development of Darwin’s thinking as he was developing his theory of Sexual Selection. Superbly detailed and well crafted this book provides astonishing insights into how Darwin was thinking and how he fleshed out sexual selection theory. The book is not just important for understanding Darwin and one of his most famous ideas, it places his thinking in the context of his time. It is a long book, but worth the read.

This is a trilogy of historical fiction about, among many other things, the invention of the modern monetary system and the Scientific Revolution. Yes, it’s a heavy lift, as it’s nearly three thousand pages long, but it’s an incredible read. And if you want to get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the early days of science—both the people involved in it, as well as the ideas that they were playing with—these books are absolutely fantastic.

Here's a simple question: when did people learn exactly where babies come from?

As a historian and father of three, I'm embarrassed to say it never occurred to me to ask, despite all the times I've spent tracing the lives of people in the past and all the pre-natal visits I joined my wife for. The answer is it was shockingly recent.

Until the late nineteenth century, the only certainties were that sex sometimes led to pregnancy, that women had a monthly cycle that was somehow involved, and that men contributed a fluid "seed."

Everyone knows that ultrasounds are a relatively recent invention, but I realized that what separates us from the past is not simply that we can see our babies in the womb, while before, people couldn't. It's also that we know how the babies got there in the first place.

I find this book outstanding for its various rare and extraordinary features: its expert coverage of the cleverly termed subject of ‘information overload’ in historical and modern contexts, the information explosion of Renaissance Europe, and the information revolution of our own time. 

It contains engaging accounts of knowledge collection and management in the comparative context of experiences from premodern Chinese, Byzantine, Islamic, and European cultures; fascinating illustrations capturing the book’s rich content;  and a wealth of primary and secondary sources, manuscripts and printed works, further enhanced by a comprehensive Index.

But above all, it is the book’s historically sensitive perspective that makes it literally ‘outstanding’: one not identifying a single factor, whether a technology, an institution, or cultural tradition, in explaining the nature and fate of our common heritage of knowledge transmission. 

While not really a kid’s book, Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a fully illustrated graphic novel about a journey through time to visit the historical figures in quantum physics. At each location, the protagonist learns about the quantum world straight from the scientists themselves—fun! The language is a bit complex and so you may have to read it together. It may seem weird to “read” a graphic novel to a child, but I promise it works!

I find this book valuable for its humanized approach to the history of science and its emphasis on the human response to major conceptual developments.

The book is rich with instructive and inviting treatments of major developments within the astronomical traditions in particular, from critical episodes within Greek, Babylonian, medieval, and early modern traditions, to decisive moments leading to what it termed the "Copernican Revolution."

Despite a limited coverage of pre-Copernican developments, the book’s stories around humans adopting and abandoning scientific concepts and models have wider impacts than any specific case, on our understanding of how knowledge develops and transforms. 

The discovery of insulin in early 1922 was a medical milestone that has since saved countless lives–my own included. Until this moment, a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes was a certain death sentence. But as diabetes clinician and historian of medicine, Chris Feudtner points out, the success of insulin has distorted historical accounts of diabetes by marginalising the experience of the patient in favour of narratives that focus on the development of medical technology to treat them. And Feudtner’s diagnosis is confined not just to diabetes but to the history of medicine in general. Following a personal epiphany that patients have an existence beyond X-rays and blood tests, Feudtner set out to address this problem by writing a history of diabetes as told from the perspective of patients. He does so magnificently and offers important insights about our relationship with technology that extend well beyond the treatment of diabetes.

What I love about this book is the way it challenges the taken-for-granted thought that ‘truth’ is easily discovered. With compelling examples from the past, Shapin works through the ways in which scientific knowledge is made–the struggles that its practitioners have to engage in to construct and consolidate credibility.

What the author reveals is that trust is as fundamental in science as it is in everyday life. A revolutionary thought: who do we trust, and why?