There are many good popular books on physics topics and good biographies coming out these days. Below started as the addition to My 2012 List of recent books which I had read. Check out other lists of physics books: Goodreads.
Theoretical Minimum Series
- The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky , 2013. [Classical Mechanics version]
- Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum - Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman
- Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory: The Theoretical Minimum - Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman, 2019
- General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, Leonard Susskind and André Cabannes, 2023
Quantum Mechanics
- The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, Frank Close
- The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder
- Quantum, Manjit Kumar
- The Quantum Story, Jim Baggot
- Uncertainty, David Lindley
- Entanglement, Amir D. Aczei
- Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality - Anil Ananthaswamy
- Dance of the Photons - Anton Zellinger - Great read on quantum entanglement
- Einstein's Dice and Schrodinger's Cat - Paul Halpern
- The Quantum Moment - Crease & Goldhaber
- What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics - Adam Becker
Cosmology
- The End of Everything - Katie Mack
- How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch - Harry Cliff
- Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond: The Life of Astronomer Vera Rubin - A J Yeager
- The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars - Dava Sobel
- The Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos - Mario Livio
- 13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe and the Theory of Everything - John Gribbin
- The Cosmic Cocktail - Katherine Freese (Search for dark matter)
- The Day We Found the Universe, Marcia Bartusiak
- The 4% Universe, Richard Panek
- From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time , Sean M. Carroll
- Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose
- The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking
- The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene
- How the Universe Got its Spots, Janna Levin
- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence M. Kraus
Books for Cosmology and Astrophysics
* PHY 490
** HON 210
- * Introduction to Cosmology - B. Ryden
- * Fundamentals of Astrophysics - S. Owocki
- ** The First Three Minutes, S. Weinberg
- ** Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (P.S.), S. Singh
- ** Cosmology for the Curious - Perlov and Vilenkin
- A Brief History of Time, S. Hawking
- A Briefer History of Time, S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow
- Cosmic Origins: Science’s Long Quest to Understand How Our Universe Began - M.M. Waldrop
- Astrophysics and Cosmology: An introduction course for experimental particle physicists - RC Mugenzi
- Lectures on Astrophysics - S. Weinberg
- Cosmology (Advanced) - S. Weinberg
- Cosmology’s Century: An Inside History of Our Modern Understanding of the Universe - P.J.E. Peebles
- An Introduction to Modern Cosmology - A. Liddle
- Gravity's Fatal Attraction (Black Holes in the Universe), Begelman and Rees.
Goodreads books on History of the Universe and Earth
Relativity
- Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy - Govert Schilling and Martin Rees
- Black Hole Blues - Janna Levin - Book (April 2016) on the story of gravitational wave detection
- The Science of Interstellar - Kip Thorne (The science behind the movie)
- A Perfect Theory - Pedro Ferreira (History of General Relativity)
- Black Hole - Marcia Bartusiak
- The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, Leonard Susskind
- Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: The Story of a Gamble, Two Black Holes, and a New Age of Astronomy - M. Bartusiak
Higgs
- Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass - Frank Close, et al.
- The Particle at the End of the Universe - Sean Carroll
- Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall
- Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider - Amir Aczel
Biography
- Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics - Forbes and Mahon - (Great History about E&M and many related characters)
- The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo (about Dirac)
- Einstein, Walter Isaacson
- Einstein and the Quantum Theory - article by Pais
- Einstein and the Quantum - A Douglas Stone (concentrates on Einstein's contribution to QM)
- The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age - David N. Schwartz
- The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick
- Quantum Man - Richard Feynman, Lawrence M.Krauss (Latest about Feynman)
- The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality - Paul Halpern
- Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind, Kitty Ferguson
- Traveling to Infinity - Jane Hawking (lead to the movie, Theory of Everything)
- Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age - Nahin
- Newton and the Counterfeiter, Thomas Levensen
- Robert Oppenheimer - Ray Monk (good discussion of Oppenheimer's science)
- The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer - The Unlikely Partnership That Built the Atom Bomb - James Kunetka
- American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (About Oppenheimer)
- Half-Life The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy - Frank Close (Spy mystery)
- The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel (not physics)
- A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age - Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni
- Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius - Marc Seifer
- Alan Turing: The Enigma - Andrew Hodges (not physics, book behind the movie)
- Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History, Frank Close
Other Interesting Reads
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition - Richard Rhodes
- Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World - Amir Alexander
- The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality - Dave Goldberg
- A Short Bright Flash - Theresa Levitt (History of Fresnel Lens)
- Operation Paperclip - Annie Jacobsen (Program that brought German Scientists to US)
- Farewell to Reality - Jim Baggot
- Beyond Uncertainty - David Cassidy (Heisenberg)
- Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark
- First War of Physics - Jim Baggot (History of Atomic Bomb)
- Einstein's Cosmos - Michio Kaku
- The Character of Physical Law - Feynman
- Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
- Physics on the Fringe - Margaret Wertheim
- How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival - David Kaiser
- Area 51: Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, Annie Jacobson
- Collider, Paul Halpern
- The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodinow
- Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku
- Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, Michio Kaku
- Physics for Future Presidents, Richard Muller
Popular Books
- A Brief History of Time, S. Hawking
- A Briefer History of Time, S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow
- The Black Hole War, L. Susskind
- The Day We Found the Universe, M. Bartusiak
- Many Worlds in One, A. Vilenkin
- Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, P. J. Steinhardt and N. Turok
- Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (P.S.), S. Singh
- Dark Side of the Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Fate of the Cosmos, I. Nicolson
- The Elegant Universe or The Fabric of the Cosmos, B. Greene
- Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, M. Kaku
- Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, L. Randall
- Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe Greene
- Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe - P. Plait
List of Popular Physics Books at Goodreads.
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