“Cosmos” by Carl Sagan
I’ve been listening a lot to Muse lately, and I love how they incorporate scientific themes into their music. This got me interested to start reading more science writings, so I turned to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. In this book, he addresses our salient questions about the world we live in — its origins, our place in it, and the possibilities of life beyond Earth.
Sagan is the science teacher you probably wish you had in school. Rather than merely cramming complex theories down your throat like most teachers do, he makes them accessible and interesting. Better yet, he marvels at the world with you.
“A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking
Unlike Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which is written with poetic wonder, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is relatively (see what I did there?) more highbrow. Hawking takes a more physics-heavy approach, as he explains concepts like black holes, relativity, and quantum mechanics. I honestly don’t understand a lot of it, but I did stop for a more careful read in parts that I found particularly interesting.
Izzat Zailan 