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Resources
Well-written books on science and scientists
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A list of well-written books. I have also added some other books that I've not read but was suggested by Twitter users. It started when I asked on Twitter which books people like for their clarity and prose.
When available, I have added links to Open Library, where you can borrow and read quite a few of them for free! Here is a helpful video by Meghan Adrian on how Open Library works and how you can borrow books there.
Nonfiction (mostly science)
Biographies
Textbooks
Suggestions from other readers
Interesting essays
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I curated this list without any specific theme. The essays are well-written, informative, and compelling; some are even moving. Chronologically ordered.
- Politics and the English Language; George Orwell; Horizon (1946).
- Orwell gives five rules for good writing and adds a sixth: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
- Meditation in a Toolshed; C. S Lewis; The Coventry Evening Telegraph (1945).
- Lewis on looking at and looking along. Thoughtful piece.
- A Nice Cup of Tea; George Orwell; Evening Standard (1946).
- "Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first." And of course, the man had one more rule "Lastly, tea…".
- Here is New York; E. B. White (1949); Reprinted in Essays of E B White (2016).
- Possibly the most famous essay on NYC—for good reasons.
- A Cautious Case for Socialism; Kenneth J. Arrow; Dissent Magazine (1978).
- Arrow offers a careful analysis of capitalism and socialism, without asking you to join a camp.
- Commencement address at St. John's College, Santa Fe; Boojums all the way through: communicating science in a prosaic age; N. David Mermin; Cambridge University Press (1990).
- On how scientific methods help us to make sense of the world.
- Principles of Effective Research; Michael A. Nielsen; Blogpost (2004).
- A wonderful guide to working scientists. Brilliant!
- Manifold Destiny; Sylvia Nasar, David Gruber; The New Yorker (2006).
- Story of an unusual mathematician, Grigory Perelman. One of the best profiles that I've read in The New Yorker.
- Birds and Frogs; Freeman Dyson; Notices of the AMS (2009).
- Dyson argues why we need both specialists and generalists in research.
- Unraveling tenure at MIT; Jessica Lin; The Tech (2010).
- The unsavory side of academia.
- Working Methods; Keith Thomas; London Review of Books (2010).
- Delightful essay on a scholar and his notes.
- The Luxury of Introspection; Raghavendra Gadagkar; Book chapter (2012).
- On how to think as an independent scientist.
- The Lesson of Grace in Teaching; Francis Su; His blog (2013)
- "Your accomplishments are NOT what make you a worthy human being. You learn this lesson by receiving GRACE: good things you didn't earn or deserve, but you're getting them anyway." Read it.
- Grandmother elephants; Eve Marder; eLife (2013).
- In Science, is it fruitful to learn from the older generation when we have access to better instruments for studying nature?
- You’re probably using the wrong dictionary; James Somers, His blog (2014).
- An ode to Webster’s 1913 dictionary
- The Art of Omission; John McPhee; The New Yorker (2015).
- Writing is emotional: it's hard to remove unnecessary sentences that you've written. McPhees shares some personal stories.
- Memories of a Bangalore Quartet; P. Balaram; IISc Connet (2017)
- Blogs as Modern Commonplace Books, and the Pleasures Thereof; Ana Ulin; Her blog (2018)
- "We humans are such collecting creatures. We love creating sets of things, hoarding what we know or what we have, maybe arranging it all carefully for display."
- The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas; Dan Rockmore; The New Yorker (2019).
- Research ideas are difficult to conceive; Rockmore tells about what works for him.
- What It Means, and Doesn’t Mean, to Get a Job in Physics; Brian Skinner; Gravity and Levity (2019)
- The title says it all.
- Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!; Brian Morton; The New York Times (2019)
- Should we read books written by imperfect humans? Morton offers a nuanced perspective.
- The I in the Internet; Jia Tolentino; CCCBLab (2020).
- A sharp essay on the ways social media affects us.
- The adversarial culture in philosophy does not serve the truth; Martin Lenz; Aeon (2020).
- Persuasively argued.
- What Is a Particle?; Natalie Wolchover; Quanta (2020).
- Wolchover has an uncanny ability to phrase difficult ideas in popular language; this essay shows that once again.
- Write because it makes you think or feel; Tom Robertoson interviews Anagha Neelakantan; the Record (2021).
- Neelakantan offers considered and practical tips on writing.
- America Is Not Ready for Omicron; Ed Yong; The Atlantic (2021).
- Ed Yong shows once again that one can write a good essay only when one deeply cares about the topic.
- The deracination of literature; Mary Gaitskill; Unheard (2022).
- Why read fiction? And does good writing matter?
- The False Promise of ChatGPT; Noam Chomsky; The New York Times (2023)
- Provocative but thoughtful, as usual from Chomsky.
- ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web; The New Yorker (2023).
- A neat and well-argued metaphor.
- On Killing Charles Dickens; Zadie Smith; The New Yorker (2023).
- Zadie Smith tries—and fails—to ignore Dickens while writing a nineteenth-century historical fiction.
- All the Carcinogens We Cannot See; Siddhartha Mukherjee; The New Yorker (2023)
- One Reason Hybrid Work Makes Employees Miserable. And how to fix it.; Cal Newport; The Atlantic (2024)
- Peregrinations of grief; Emily Polk; Aeon (2024).
- "Everybody should know what it is to have friends like these. Everybody should know what it is to be loved like this." Astonishingly beautiful and tender recollection of a friend.
- Why rabbits? Towards a better, floofier world; Noah Smith; Noahpinion (2024)
- "People often ask me: “Why rabbits?” Usually my answer is just “They’re floofy.”" Heartfelt reminiscence.
- The Tail End, What we lose when we lose a pet; Sloane Crosley; The New Yorker (2024).
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- ‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?; Phil Hoad; Guardian (2024)
- The end life of Grothendieck.
Well-written papers
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Some papers that I liked for their prose; of course, the content is great, too!
- Deserno, M. Fluid Lipid Membranes – a Primer link
- Overbeek, J. T. G.; Voorn, M. J. Phase Separation in Polyelectrolyte Solutions. Theory of Complex Coacervation. Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology 1957, 49 (S1), 7–26. link.
- Luttinger, J. M. An Exactly Soluble Model of a Many‐Fermion System. Journal of Mathematical Physics 1963, 4 (9), 1154–1162. link.
- Mandelbrot, B. How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. Science 1967, 156 (3775), 636–638. link.
- Bialek, W. Physical Limits to Sensation and Perception. Annu. Rev. Biophys. Biophys. Chem. 1987, 16 (1), 455–478. link.
- Binder, K. Theory of First-Order Phase Transitions. Rep. Prog. Phys. 1987, 50 (7), 783. link.
- Thurston, W. P. On Proof and Progress in Mathematics. arXiv March 31, 1994. link.
- Efron, B.; Halloran, E.; Holmes, S. Bootstrap Confidence Levels for Phylogenetic Trees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1996, 93 (23), 13429–13429. link.
- Neidhardt, F. C. Bacterial Growth: Constant Obsession with dN/Dt. J Bacteriol 1999, 181 (24), 7405–7408. link.
- Everaers, R.; Sukumaran, S. K.; Grest, G. S.; Svaneborg, C.; Sivasubramanian, A.; Kremer, K. Rheology and Microscopic Topology of Entangled Polymeric Liquids. Science 2004, 303 (5659), 823–826. link.
- Marder, E. Grandmother Elephants. eLife 2013, 2, e01140. link.
- Guven, J.; Manrique, G. Arresting the Collapse of a Catenary Arch. arXiv:1710.03433 [cond-mat, physics:physics] 2017.
- França, T. F. A.; Monserrat, J. M. Writing Papers to Be Memorable, Even When They Are Not Really Read. BioEssays 2019, 41 (5), 1900035. link.
- Galstyan, V.; Phillips, R. Allostery and Kinetic Proofreading. J. Phys. Chem. B 2019, 123 (51), 10990–11002. link.
- Jia, X.; Lynch, A.; Huang, Y.; Danielson, M.; Lang’at, I.; Milder, A.; Ruby, A. E.; Wang, H.; Friedler, S. A.; Norquist, A. J.; Schrier, J. Anthropogenic Biases in Chemical Reaction Data Hinder Exploratory Inorganic Synthesis. Nature 2019, 573 (7773), 251–255. link.
- Tanaka, H.; Tong, H.; Shi, R.; Russo, J. Revealing Key Structural Features Hidden in Liquids and Glasses. Nat Rev Phys 2019, 1 (5), 333–348. link.
- Cohen, A. E.; Shi, Z. Do Cell Membranes Flow Like Honey or Jiggle Like Jello? BioEssays 2020, 42 (1), 1900142. link.
- Fjelland, R. Why General Artificial Intelligence Will Not Be Realized. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 2020, 7 (1), 10. link.
- Foley, S.; Deserno, M. Stabilizing Leaflet Asymmetry under Differential Stress in a Highly Coarse-Grained Lipid Membrane Model. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2020, 16 (11), 7195–7206. link.
- Sing, C. E.; Perry, S. L. Recent Progress in the Science of Complex Coacervation. Soft Matter 2020, 16 (12), 2885–2914. link.
- Deshpande, N. S.; Furbish, D. J.; Arratia, P. E.; Jerolmack, D. J. The Perpetual Fragility of Creeping Hillslopes. Nat Commun 2021, 12 (1), 3909. link.
- van de Schoot, R.; Depaoli, S.; King, R.; Kramer, B.; Märtens, K.; Tadesse, M. G.; Vannucci, M.; Gelman, A.; Veen, D.; Willemsen, J.; Yau, C. Bayesian Statistics and Modelling. Nat Rev Methods Primers 2021, 1 (1), 1–26. link.
- Braberg, H.; Echeverria, I.; Kaake, R. M.; Sali, A.; Krogan, N. J. From Systems to Structure — Using Genetic Data to Model Protein Structures. Nat Rev Genet 2022, 23 (6), 342–354. link.
- Greener, Joe G., Shaun M. Kandathil, Lewis Moffat, and David T. Jones. “A Guide to Machine Learning for Biologists.” Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 23, no. 1 (January 2022): 40–55. link.
- Cubuk, J.; Soranno, A. Macromolecular Crowding and Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: A Polymer Physics Perspective. ChemSystemsChem 2022. link.
- Ghosh, A.; Radhakrishnan, J.; Chaikin, P. M.; Levine, D.; Ghosh, S. Coupled Dynamical Phase Transitions in Driven Disk Packings. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2022, 129 (18), 188002. link. I liked how concise and informative the abstract is!
- Bauer, M.; Bialek, W. Information Bottleneck in Molecular Sensing. PRX Life 2023, 1 (2), 023005. link.
- Park, J. J.; Lu, Y.-K.; Jamison, A. O.; Tscherbul, T. V.; Ketterle, W. A Feshbach Resonance in Collisions between Triplet Ground-State Molecules. Nature 2023, 614 (7946), 54–58. link. Another precise and well-written abstract!
- Powers, A. S.; Pham, V.; Burger, W. A. C.; Thompson, G.; Laloudakis, Y.; Sexton, P. M.; Paul, S. M.; Christopoulos, A.; Thal, D. M.; Felder, C. C.; Valant, C.; Dror, R. O. Structural Basis of Efficacy-Driven Ligand Selectivity at GPCRs. Nat Chem Biol 2023, 1–10. link.
- Jo, M. H.; Meneses, P.; Yang, O.; Carcamo, C. C.; Pangeni, S.; Ha, T. Determination of Single-Molecule Loading Rate during Mechanotransduction in Cell Adhesion. Science 2024, 383 (6689), 1374–1379. link
Short stories
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- Becoming them; James Wood; The New Yorker (2013)
- What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?; Arthur Krystal; The New Yorker (2022)
Blogs
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A list of blogs, mostly academic, that I follow. I've learned a lot from them over the years. I am grateful to the authors.
Curated sources
Websites that link to articles published elsewhere. The links often come with brief commentaries, and the curation quality is very high.
Free books
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Free books from generous authors.
Biology
English usage
Philosophy/Classics
Physics
Programming
Statistics
Machine Learning
Mathematics
Visualization
General
In case you didn't know, Zotero 7 (beta version) includes native readers for HTML and Epub files! One issue I've always had with epub books is a lack of suitable software for reading them on computers (yes, I know about Calibre). Zotero 7 elegantly solved the problem.
YouTube playlists
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A curated list of academic courses and lectures that I found on YouTube–I enjoyed learning from them.
Academic guide
Academicians
I think adding videos on scientists to this list makes sense.
- A series where Rob Phillips is interviewed by David Zierler for the Caltech Heritage project. Inspiring and bold!
- A playlist with an extended interview of an intriguing academic: Freeman Dyson.
Biophysics
Computer science
Philosophy
Quantum mechanics
Statistical mechanics
Statistics and Machine learning
Writing
Mathematics
Visualization
Seeing
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visualizing ideas and objects
Physics
observing physics through experiments and computers
Maths
Tools
how to create good visualizations
Books on quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics
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Statistical mechanics
- Feynman's "Statistical Mechanics" is a good book—but the beginning is spectacular. He puts the partition function in the place it deserves.
- Kerson Huang's "Statistical Mechanics" is broad and concise. I especially loved the chapter on the general properties of the partition function for its discussion on the zeroes of the partition function and phase transition.
- On the field-theoretic formulation of critical phenomena, the best book, in my opinion, is Mehran Kardar's "Statistical Physics of Fields." The chapters on the perturbative renormalization group of \(\phi^4\) theories are superb.
- I should mention that if you're actually trying to calculate higher-order Feynman diagrams, Kleinert and Schulte-Frohlinde's "Critical Properties of \(\phi^4\)-Theories" is the reference you need.
- Also, in this connection, I found a neat discussion on mean field theories (particularly \(\phi^6\) theory related to tricritical points) in Nishimori and Ortiz's "Elements of Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena."
- R. Swendsen's "An Introduction to Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics" is a great book and, unusually, starts with detailed discussions on entropy. (The book has slightly unwieldy, verbose notations, but I think explicit notations help.)
- Ryogo Kubo's statistical mechanics books are some of the most didactic books I've ever read. Very much recommended.
- I read Onsager's solution of the 2D Ising model during masters (along with its complete solution!). It's not easy, but if you really need to know about exactly solvable models, I think the best resource is Rodney Baxter's "Exactly Solved Models in Statistical Mechanics."
- For numerical approaches in stat mech, I liked D. J. Tildesley and M.P. Allen's "Computer Simulation of Liquids" most for its clean, accessible discussions (for instance, check the discussion on ensembles in MD simulations.)
- A book that I read only a bit—but was thoroughly impressed by its depth—is Richard Tolman's "The Principles of Statistical Mechanics." Have to read it sometime in the future…
- Dalvit, Frastai, and Lawrie's "Problems on Statistical Mechanics" is excellent (more so because it comes with solutions!) Check it if you want to know, for example, under which conditions bosons with a \(p^s\) dispersion relation in \(d\)-dimensions will form a condensate…
- Finally, on nonequilibrium stat mech, I liked reading Pavel Krapivsky, Sidney Redner, and Eli Ben-Naim's "Kinetic View of Statistical Physics." The chapters on aggregation, fragmentation, and adsorption are particularly good.
Quantum mechanics
- For me, the best graduate-level QM book is Sakurai's "Modern Quantum Mechanics." Precise and concise. (And the exercises are very carefully designed.)
- I like to think John Townsend's excellent "A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics" as an easier version of Sakurai's book.
- Griffiths's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" is a good undergrad-level QM textbook. The chapter on solutions to time-independent Schrödinger equation is neat. (Though, for learning the formalism I prefer Sakurai's book.)
- Another undergrad-level QM book I liked is Stephen Gasiorowicz's "Quantum Physics." It's at the level of Griffiths's and comes with many detailed examples. Though not as popular, it does provide a solid introduction.
- "Practical quantum mechanics" by Siegfried Flügge teaches QM through problem-solving. It's not easy, but by solving its problems, you can learn a lot and gain confidence.
- I love R. Shankar's graduate-level "Principles of Quantum Mechanics." The chapters on rotational invariance, addition of angular momenta, scattering theory, and path integral are particularly good.
- I would like to mention that for the path integral formalism of QM, the first few chapters of Ashok Das's "Field Theory: A Path Integral Approach" provide a pedagogic introduction.
- Only recently, I started reading about the foundations of QM. It's a great subject—until you want to publish. 😀 So far, I liked two books. The first one is "Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" by Travis Norsen. Very accessible (though I found it slightly opinionated)
- The second one is "Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods" by Asher Peres. I've bought it recently and read only a bit. It goes deep into QM and is easily the most difficult of all the books I mentioned. Very rewarding, though.
Useful Software
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Nifty and free software
For MacBook
- Amphetamine keeps your MacBook awake, which can be useful during presentations, for example.
- AppCleaner helps to cleanly uninstall an app.
- Rectangle moves and resizes windows.
- Duplicate File Finder Remover finds (and removes) duplicate files.
- OmniDiskSweeper finds and helps delete large files.
- If you want to use Webster's 1913 unabridged dictionary as your MacBook's Dictionary, here is how to do it. And this is why you should use Webster's 1913. Also, if you aren't doing so already, start using Mac's 3-finger tap to find the meaning and synonyms of any word!
Addons for Mozilla Firefox
- uBlock Origin is an essential ad blocker. If you're adventurous, it even lets you disable all javascript on a website and remove ad banners or similar elements (Twitter's trending box, for example).
- Privacy Badger is not an ad-blocker, but it does something very clever.
- The Zotero connector allows you to add papers to your Zotero Library. It can also automatically redirect journal webpages through an institutional proxy, allowing you to download papers with your institutional credentials.
- Return YouTube dislikes brings back a useful feature.
- Single-file is a neat add-on that can download a webpage with everything, including figures, in a single HTML file. Very useful if you want to locally archive, for example, a blog post or a Twitter thread.
- Tabliss sets the new tab page.
- Tranquility Reader converts any webpage with an article to a simple one with only the article's text and core images so that you can read it without 1000 flashy things annoying you.
- Feedbro helps to get articles from any website that provides an RSS feed (blogs, journals, magazines…). A good alternative to Feedly.
- Gesturefy is such a neat add-on! It lets you do several things, like going back to the previous webpage, only with gestures of your mouse.
- You open a webpage like Cosma Shalizi's (check it!) and find hundreds of links. Which one is active and which one is dead? Link analyzer does that job for you with one click.
- Hide Youtube-Shorts removes YouTube shorts from its homepage, subscriptions page, and search results. It can also hide the "Shorts" tab. Good riddance!
- Control Panel for Twitter can edit/remove/add elements of Twitter homepage to create a much better user interface.
Interesting webpages
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Chemistry
Funny
Miscellaneous
Nifty tools
Physics
Programming
Guides on Research
Guides on Writing
Food
Philosophy