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A few more good pop physics books: Maxwell - Matter and motion. Written by THE Maxwell, what more do you need to know? long out of copy-write and available on

A few more good pop physics books: Maxwell - Matter and motion. Written by THE Maxwell, what more do you need to know? long out of copy-write and available on the web for free Born - The restless universe. discusses atomic theory and describes some of the more down to earth parts of quantum theory, especially how the theory explains quantitative properties of atoms and the periodic table. Einstein & Infeld - The evolution of physics. pseudo-Historical exposition taking us from the mechanical universe to fields to quanta, and from Galilean relativity to Einstein relativity. Reichenbach - the philosophy of space and time. technically philosophy of science, not pop science, from the logical positivist school of the Vienna circle. very readable discussion of abstract mathematical geometry and various relativity principles, if you don't mind skipping some of the more bloviating bits. Pask - Magnificent Principia. Fantastic overview of Newton's Magnum Opus, although it doesn't give enough historical context to what newton was building on. Assumes some knowledge of calculus.

dboreham 8y ago
Hmm...I think I have (somewhere) a copy of that Born book, signed by Born, courtesy of my Dad who I suppose must have run into him in Edinburgh in the 50's.
abecedarius 8y ago
A bit more on the Maxwell book: it's a real textbook rather than "pop physics" in the usual sense, but written for people with only a high-school level of math (algebra and geometry). Wonderful explanations -- for one, iirc, the derivation of Kepler's conic-section law which Feynman later rediscovered and presented in "The Motion of Planets Around the Sun" -- although the prose style is rather stuffy and Victorian, and Feynman has him beat there.
- earthicus 8y ago
  Are you sure we're thinking of the same book? The one i'm referring to [1] uses basic algebra (fractions, exponents, variables), only a couple of times in the entire exposition if i remember correctly. Its precisely what I would think of as good, non-fake popular physics. Edit: On second thought, I suppose this really isn't "popular physics in the usual sense" as you described it, so we probably are referring to the same text! https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.151311/page/n7 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.151311/page/n7
  - abecedarius 8y ago
    Yes, that's the one.

dboreham 8y ago

Hmm...I think I have (somewhere) a copy of that Born book, signed by Born, courtesy of my Dad who I suppose must have run into him in Edinburgh in the 50's.

abecedarius 8y ago

A bit more on the Maxwell book: it's a real textbook rather than "pop physics" in the usual sense, but written for people with only a high-school level of math (algebra and geometry). Wonderful explanations -- for one, iirc, the derivation of Kepler's conic-section law which Feynman later rediscovered and presented in "The Motion of Planets Around the Sun" -- although the prose style is rather stuffy and Victorian, and Feynman has him beat there.

earthicus 8y ago
Are you sure we're thinking of the same book? The one i'm referring to [1] uses basic algebra (fractions, exponents, variables), only a couple of times in the entire exposition if i remember correctly. Its precisely what I would think of as good, non-fake popular physics. Edit: On second thought, I suppose this really isn't "popular physics in the usual sense" as you described it, so we probably are referring to the same text! https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.151311/page/n7 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.151311/page/n7
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Yes, that's the one.