what are some sci approved books?

>>8782723
Carl Sagan - Cosmos

Anything by Sagan really.

Feynman in a lecture recommends Huxley's Brave New World, as an illustration of new social problems to arise with new biological knowledge.

There is a great fiction 90s book, written by a physicist, titled Einstein's Dreams.

The physicist who discovered the quark, got the spelling "quark" from Finnegans Wake ("three quarks for muster Mark").

Physics students also tend to love Tolkien.

Landau&Lifshitz

Tbh you try some non-popsci if you don't want to be a low brow pleb. If you can't be bothered with math, try some biology, neuroscience, or cognitive science (even in these subjects, a lot of the interesting stuff requires math). If you do like math, then you can also study physics, chemistry, and most interestingly theoretical computer science (which actually ties in a lot with philosophy and has nothing to do with programming and other boring shit). However, the trippiest and most interesting shit is pure math.

Stuff like Stephen Hawking and pretty much any of those shitty books they sell at regular bookstores are simplistic and aren't really science at all.

>>8782723
Why do pseuds love pop-sci so much? Is it because it's a very noncommittal way to appear smart? Especially with space - is it because a lot of space-related knowledge is really just memorizing things other people discovered/proved? The best science book(s) that aren't just textbooks are probably the Feynman Lectures on Physics, imo.

>>8784467
> Is it because it's a very noncommittal way to appear smart?
Yes. The I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE pseuds are the people who drop out after failing calc 1, and stick to their pop sci

Oh come on people pop science books by guys like Hawking, Sagan, Tyson etc. are better than nothing.

>>8784485
Like reading book reviews on Dostoevsky and Joyce (perhaps so as to appear well read before your peers) is better than nothing.

>>8784485
no they arent

they make the level of argument worse because now redditors think they know things, when previously theyd shut the fuck up

also they create an easy route to feeling smart so people never actually try to learn a field properly, they make people dumber overall

>>8784505
Do you actually believe this or are you just trying to sound contrarian?

>>8784521
No, reading popsci is retarded. Perhaps better than nothing, but the type of people that read popsci don't even realize that it's just popsci, they genuinely believe it's science, and they look down on people who are into popular/mainstream culture.

Popsci is a step up from YA fiction and supermarket paperbacks. It's the intellectual equivalent of artificial sweetener masquerading as high end organic honey.

>>8784485
There is really nothing good about pop-sci writers. They almost universally assume scientific realism so as to impress the normans and present watered down reified abstractions as literally true without any of the corresponding mathematical or conceptual background that makes an explanation like that possible. It's pretty embarrassing. Seeing as you like it so much it would appear you're one of those people who think they're actually learning """science""" when they read about le black science man

>>8782723 (OP)

I don't fully agree with the absolute condemnation of popsci texts which has (somewhat) derailed this thread, but I do have partial and important agreements with the view, and I can appreciate where the Absolute Condemers are coming from.

It is true that if you want "/sci/ approved books", then you are actually asking for textbooks, which are heavy, dense pieces of non-fiction, usually requiring months/weeks of close study. The /lit/ board, although literature does refer to texts in general, is culturally geared towards fiction, prose narratives, "squishy" texts, and so on. It has a certain allergy to discussing hard non-fiction of whatever literal type (texts about planes, automobiles, technology, hard science, that type of thing), because these are not "literary" texts, whatever that adjective meant when I used it just now. And this despite the fact that discussing /books/ of any type is 100% within the board's rules/purview. It is also true that if you're not actually doing textbooks/applying what you learn to problems of your own, then you're not "doing" the /sci/ approved material, which entails doing exercises of your own, testing what you've read/learned against reality in some way. Math, for example, despite having an artistic character about which jokes can be made, is in many cases capable of being tested against reality in some way, and it is in this respect that it shares a scientific character with the "hard physical sciences" of physics and chemistry, and why mathematics properly belongs to the sciences, as opposed to the arts. I even appreciate the point being made that popsci makes the discourse /worse/, for those who are arguing that point. But this is where I part company with them, and start to disagree with them somewhat, even fully understanding both sides of the discussion.

cont.

>>8784846

>>8784602

At least this guy very grudgingly finally correctly admits (presumably contradicting himself somewhat, assuming >>8784505 is the same person) that popsci has a certain value, even if marginal. And I think that it does in the sense that I would rather live in a society where people have a basal cultural/rote understanding of what is actually the case (or our best scientific understanding of such), even if they (the bottom-half of the population intelligence-wise, say) don't actually have the critical thinking capacity to deeply question old/form new paradigms, etc, or to understand /why/ things are the way they are, as far as the smarter half are able to tell. I would much rather live in a USA where about a quarter of the people on the street can actually at least identify a quark as some kind of subatomic particle, even if they can't tell you anything else about it, than to live in a Haiti/etc, take your pick. I think that this illustrates one element of what one should value in a society, and with a perfectly valid and legitimate racist intimation packed in to drive the point home, though admittedly it's a bit beside the point.

The resentment against popsci is partially correct, but also partially cultural elitism which can be found on any 4chan board which values elitism to some extent. The just-made comparison to YA literature perfectly illustrates the conceit. Remember that Hawking and Einstein (Relativity) are in fact great physicists who have tried their hand at popsci. Perhaps some of the value of the genre is in actual competent people trying their hand at simple exposition of what they know.

I heard The Road to Reality is the only sci-approved popsci book.

In short, OP's prompt strongly suggests by its context that he was asking for light reading about science, which is why everyone is jumping all over him, for the reasons that have been explained in various ways.

And yet it's also not true that /lit/ is incapable of large-scale reading/writing projects, which deserves special mention. Not to stroke anyone off, but FWIW /lit/ and /sci/ actually are two of the smartest boards on this Thai teen chat session, and large chunks of their respective userbases are in fact aware of this (inverse Dunning/Kruger? hm). There's a five-ten percent here who have actually read Capital, or large chunks of the Summa, or Ulysses with annotatoin etc. Likewise /sci/ has a usually-quiet ten percent who have actually completed a tertiary degree / know what a scheme is / actually work as engineers and enjoy fulfilling lives with their homosexual life partners.

So the point is not that /lit/ is incapable of long-attention-span projects, it's just that the board, spurred by OP's prompt, is not seen as actually wanting to engage in a hard science text, most of the time. Or else they would have gone into the sciences to begin with rather than funposting about whatever Bottom's Dream is, this month.