skopia
Gamow carries a reader from counting to infinity, from atoms to the expanding universe, drawing every illustration himself. The psychologist Steven Pinker traces his science writing to reading this as a boy.
Sagan moves from the Big Bang to the Library of Alexandria to the carbon in your body, forged inside dying stars. No science book written in English had ever sold so well.
Why does a pane of glass reflect some of the light striking it? Feynman answers with arrows on paper and not one equation, handing quantum electrodynamics whole to readers who never took physics.
Working nights in a Massachusetts basement, a crew of young engineers races to build a new computer in a year, and Kidder catches every argument. Nobody had made engineering a literary subject.