Hackers
1984 · 659 pages
Levy found the hacker ethic among MIT students who monopolized the university's computers all night: all information should be free, mistrust authority, judge a person by the code. Silicon Valley still recites it.
★ 4.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Subtle Is the Lord
The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein
1982 · 576 pages
Einstein's physics taken as seriously as Einstein's life. Pais knew him at Princeton, could follow the mathematics, and produced the account against which every later scientific life of Einstein is measured.
★ 6.5
The Discoverers
1983 · 745 pages
The obstacle to discovery was never ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, Boorstin argues, then walks through the clock, the compass and the microscope as victories over what everyone was certain of.
★ 6.6
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
1987 · 838 pages
At a London crossing in 1933 a physicist grasps how a chain reaction could work. Rhodes follows the idea to Los Alamos and Hiroshima, making the physics clear and the human cost unbearable.
★ 7.9
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1962 · 217 pages
Science does not creep forward by adding facts, Kuhn argues. It works inside one framework until the anomalies pile up and the whole picture flips. Paradigm shift is his phrase and his idea.
★ 8.3