Scientists, writers and the Archbishop of Canterbury reveal their favourite science books

Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist, University of Surrey
I have given this some thought and it is a toss-up between two books.

The first is Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained. As a physicist I enjoy reading about something I do not know much about. Dennett's book really opened up a whole new world for me. His rational, mechanistic and reductionist view of consciousness and how it manifests itself was a revelation. It is most likely not the whole answer, particularly in the light of research over the past decade or so in AI, cognitive studies and neuroscience. But I found it incredibly convincing and enlightening.

The second is Roger Penrose's Shadows of the mind. This was Penrose's first popular science book and sparked worldwide interest linking many ideas in quantum mechanics, the nature of time, artificial intelligence and the root of consciousness. I did not, and do not, agree with Penrose's main thesis on the quantum origins of consciousness in the brain. But there was so much more to this book, on non-computability, the meaning of quantum mechanics and its connection to other fields of physics that it profoundly affected my thinking.

If I had to choose, I would go for Dennett though.

Philip Ball, author
I'd like to suggest two candidates. The first is a widely recognized classic: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form, first published in 1917 and then in revised and expanded form in 1942 (that version is available as a Dover reprint, 1992). Not all of the science in this book is accurate, and some is wrong. Much of it has been superseded, and in fact Thompson was writing well ahead of his time, before the tools and concepts were really developed to tackle many of the problems he considered. All the same, it is a great book. For one thing, it challenges the notion, still apparent today, that somehow biology escapes the constraints that apply to the rest of the physical world: Thompson was refuting the tendency in his time to explain all biological form with the black box of Darwinism. It shows the value of taking a synthetic view that cuts across scientific disciplines. In short, it provides nothing less than a new way of looking at the natural world. And it is written beautifully and with stunning erudition.

The second is barely known: Norbert Wiener's Invention (written in the 1950s but not published until 1994 by MIT Press). Wiener is best known for cybernetics, but here he makes an elegant case for the importance of the often overlooked creative strand of science evident in the process of invention. He explains how invention can be, and has been, nurtured, and what can go wrong in an intellectual climate to suppress it. To my mind, this book shows why the claim that science is somehow different from technology is not just wrong but pernicious.

Susan Blackmore, psychologist, writer and broadcaster
I tried to think up something original or quirky but in the end I have to say my favourite is The Selfish Gene. It taught me, in beautiful language, the simplicity and power of Darwin's dangerous idea - "the best idea anybody ever had" and inspired all my subsequent work on memes.

David Deutsch, physicist, University of Oxford
I'm afraid I find it impossible to choose between Gödel, Escher, Bach and The Selfish Gene. Both are examples of perfection in popular science writing: they deal with issues that are deep and important, but subtle enough that they are usually only discussed by specialists, and they make them accessible to the general reader through the authors' superlative writing skill and total command of their subjects.

K Eric Drexler, nanotechnology pioneer, researcher and author
Mathematics, Form and Function by Saunders Mac Lane. Written by a pioneer of category theory, which links parallel structures across all areas of mathematics, this book provides a survey and integration of mathematics as a whole. It both shows the roots of mathematics in concrete human experience and explores the content of fields at the heights of abstraction, emphasizing their surprising connections. This is a book to be skimmed, then read, then revisited and studied.

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford
Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology is a book I was recommended by teacher at school to read when I was 12 or 13. It was a revelation. It brought alive what mathematics is really about. It was like hearing real music for the first time after practising scales and arpeggios for years. I think everyone has a sense of what the chemist, physicist or biologist is investigating in their laboratories but giving someone access to the mathematician's lab is a much tougher job. Hardy shows that mathematics is as much a creative art as a useful science and that really appealed to someone who loved music as much as numbers. He gives two proofs in the book: they are simple but rapier-like in their logic. Being exposed to the power of this logical language to prove things with 100% certainty was very empowering to an adolescent whose world was constantly shifting.

As an adult it is a book I love and hate because it comes with a very mixed message. Anyone who wants to emulate Hardy and bring the subject alive for others lives under the spectre of the opening sentence of the book:
“It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.”
I have spent my adult life trying to prove Hardy wrong: that it is possible to create new mathematics alongside providing access for others to this magical world.

Richard Fortey, senior paleontologist, Natural History Museum
I would like to nominate Oliver Sacks' book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. Sacks manages to explain much about how the human brain works, but in a way which is absolutely gripping as literature. He avoids the pitfalls of becoming too precious - everything is perfectly judged. He also has the prize for the most intriguing title - out Goulding Gould!

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution
How to Build a Time Machine, by Paul Davies. Hugely original in terms of format. It looks easy – like a picture book – but introduces you to lots of difficult concepts.

Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics, University College London
To me one obvious winner - Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. No other book so conveys the excitement of doing science, getting results and having a wonderful time, all at the same time. And, as well as a great science book, it's one of the best travel books ever written, with more adventures on a single page than most modern writers manage to squeeze into a chapter, or an entire book.

Marek Kohn, author
Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon. ‘”The mists rise up out of the Bog. There she is, full, spherickal ... the last time I shall see her as a Material Being ... when next appearing, she will have resum'd her Deity.” Maskelyne will edit this out, which is why Mason leaves it in his Field Report.’ Thus Pynchon imagines the eighteenth-century astronomer Charles Mason observing a Transit of Venus: subtle phrasing, prose that sustains lasting pleasure, mischief, irony and wit; powerfully imparting a sense of science in a world still haunted and occult, and reminding the reader of all that is absent from conventional science writing.

Tim Lott, author
My favourite science book is The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. It really opened my eyes to a huge number of ways in the way the general public and the media misperceive the nature of human nature, out of a misplaced need for control over the human personality. Pinker's remarkable book re-establishes inborn human nature as being at the heart of the personality, and does it without in any way handing the baton over to determinism, or ignoring the importance of environmental factors. I have read and re-read this book, and it has changed the way I think not only about the human mind, but how society allows it wishes to impinge on its ability to judge matters of science on the evidence available. A brave, groundbreaking victory for both common sense and free speech, The Blank Slate forces us to look at many of the deepest assumptions that our society holds and makes us start to radically revise them.

Mark Miodownik, lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, King’s College London submitted a list that included The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
My main problem, I have come to realise, is that I read The Selfish Gene and Day of the Triffids too early and so became both paranoid and solipsistic at far too tender an age. While other children were laughing heartily at Terry Pratchett's bonkers prose or smiling tenderly at A Wrinkle in Time, I was pondering the implications of A Brief History of Time and trying to understand why the publishers ever went ahead with it. When I finally got round to reading the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I was a shocked and serious teenager, and I found the book so much funnier and cleverer than any other book I had read that I wore my dressing gown to school for a week, and would frequently burst into hysterical laughter at the mere mention of the word 'petunia'.

Toby Murcott, science writer
My book would be Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. Richard Feynman gives the best insight into genius that I have ever read. He constantly baffles and amazes people by doing the obvious. His particular genius is to see the world with childlike eyes, ignore his beliefs and prejudices and just take problems at face value.

Vivienne Parry, writer and broadcaster
My favourite science book by a mile is The Voyage of the Beagle. It sits by my bed and I often dip into it. In fact I've just had to replace it for the 3rd time as it has been loved to death and fallen apart. It's a book written by an enthusiast who noted everything around him, plants, animals, rocks and people. It works as a terrific travel book, as a riveting insight into the scientific journey of one of the world's great scientists and as a great read. What more could you want?

Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology, Havard University
Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 1960. A masterpiece by a humane Dr. Strangelove, recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. This book introduced dozens of mind-blowing ideas on culture, emotion, conflict, cooperation, communication, and social life, whose full implications we are only beginning to explore. It is packed with wit and insight, and uses mathematical game theory judiciously. Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Robert Frank's Passions within Reason, both excellent bestsellers, were based on Schelling's ideas.

Matt Ridley, author
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I still recall a sense of slight bewilderment when I read the newly published book as a first-term undergraduate at Oxford. Was this chap’s theory right or not? Until now my teachers had helpfully divided the world of science into right and wrong ideas. But here, I suddenly realised, I was going to have to make up my own mind. The handrails had gone. Dawkins’s sentences had such rhythm, his words had such precision and his thoughts had such order that his book was tasty literature as well as nourishing argument.

Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On, 1984. Challenges all sorts of assumptions about mind and body, and sketches a very exciting concept of the body itself as ‘taking shape’ in mind and imagination.

Heinz Wolff, former Head of the European Manned Space Commission
My entry for the best science book ever is of course a very personal choice. The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, published first in 1926, did more to inspire me into science and medicine, than anything else I have read since. It has been republished quite frequently and can be bought readily in various formats from Amazon.