Please post recommendations of texts relevant in some way to science with your reasons for recommending them. Hard science, science fiction, anything goes.
Galileo's Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson). It's the most enjoyable science fiction I've read in yonks, drawing on outré notions of entanglement back and forth across space-time to concoct a yarn in which Galileo Galilei is abducted by a stranger from the Galilean moons in the distant future and press-ganged into a scheme contrived to bring about his martyrdom. Although Galileo's attempts to escape his fate drive the narrative forwards (and backwards), glorious swathes of historical and futurological texture and intrigue make for sensational production values. Inevitably, too, the life of Galileo, particularly his power relations in private and public (the daughters he had sent to a convent to save costs, the patrons whose butts he kissed) is a sobering reflection of the figure of the Scientist as it arose in early modern patriarchal society.
If you like introspective sci fi, you could try Mary Doria Russell, 'The Sparrow' and the sequel 'Children of God'. She seems to know everything there is to know about humanity. The story line is about the first interstellar voyage to Alpha Centauri and what they find there, it's a story about religion as much as about sci fi but both books I found engaging.
In science, there is a book I found engaging, 'The Trouble with physics' by Lee Smolin.
It kind of bemoans the tattered remains of string theory, that it has been around for decades but not getting anywhere. Very good history of Relativity and such. I just found a critique you might also find interesting:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0707/0707.2536.pdf
I recently got into a spat of reading sci fi again, went through the entire Radiant series of Catherine Asaro, she is one heavy duty woman for sure, Phd in physics, owns a biotech company, is a ballerina, and has written a slew of soap opera sci fi books. She posits a time 5 thousand years ago when some alien civilization for some unknown reason captured a bunch of humans from that time, transported them to another planet in our galaxy but also back in time which allowed the kidnapped people to build up a powerful interstellar civilization, they find out about Earth and the fun starts. She makes a case for a kind of electric field empathy/telepathy but with real science behind it, like using the inverse square law of EM radiation, where you have to be close to the other person to get the empathic or telepathic signals. Good read, couldn't put the books down, lots of sex🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall
=>
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%28%22john%20tyndall%22%29%20OR%20%28%22tyndall%2C%20john%22%29%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
=>
http://www.archive.org/details/lessonsinelectri00tyndiala
Lessons in electricity at the Royal Institution, 1875-6 (1895)
