I have aspired to write a book as influential to others as this book was to me. I read it in ninth grade, and it did what Gamow, a nuclear physicist, designed it to do: It transformed the physics of the universe into an intellectual playground of delight. From then on, studying to become a scientist was no longer a task but a celebration.
A reminder that space is dangerous — not only because of what we know can kill us, but especially because of all that we have yet to learn can kill us.
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A reminder of what can happen when what passes as science is conducted in a landscape of social, political, and cultural bias. Gould was a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, and in his seminal 1981 book he provided a history of biological determinism — the idea that the social and economic standing of different groups of people is rooted in hereditary, inborn distinctions — and then marshaled the evidence to definitively refute it.
This is Galileo's 1610 report on what he saw when he first looked through a telescope — and a reminder that the universe brims with undiscovered truths that lie in plain sight before us.
Dawkins is a longtime friend, and a tireless defender of the real story of how we all got here. This 1986 book is a reminder that the laws of evolution and natural selection, given billions of years, have no trouble generating stupefying complexity among life-forms on Earth.
— Astrophysicist and television host Neil deGrasse Tyson is the author of 10 books, including StarTalk, a new companion volume to his podcast and cable show of the same name. The National Geographic series has just begun its third season.
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