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.

QED

The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
1985 · 192 pages

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.

★ 6.7

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

A Brief History of Time

1988 · 248 pages

Twenty-five million people bought a physics book. Hawking explains black holes, the arrow of time, and whether the universe needed a beginning, carrying the argument on almost no mathematics at all.

★ 4.8