This is an idiosyncratic list of suggested readings for students interested in physics.
Among the suggested readings are books by Richard Feynman. Some of my colleagues in the Physics & Astronomy Department are critical of this:
“Feynman is not an ideal physicist to be foregrounding given his documented problematic attitudes and conduct towards women.”
Feynman’s problematic attitudes and conduct towards women are described and documented in
I have discussed this with my students in Physics 123 (in Fall 2020). Many of the students assured me that they consider ideas separate from persons, that they want to hear interesting ideas about what physics is and how to do physics even if the people who expressed the ideas were not good people (by the standards of most of us). They want both to hear the ideas and to learn about the people, good and bad, who expressed them.
So I suggest that you read Feynman’s autobiographical books mentioned below and also read the two articles cited above which describe aspects of his character and behavior not presented in the autobiographies.
I recommend avoiding the popular physics books by Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Fritjof Capra, and the like. This genre of popular physics conflates speculative theorizing with real world physics. Speculation is a crucial activity in physics. The problem is the marketing of speculative theories before they are verified by experiment. Grandiose speculation about physics can be seductive, especially to beginning students. An unfortunate effect of the marketing is to encourage students who are interested in physics to be credulous, to believe in the speculations before there is evidence for them. Credulity is not a useful trait for a physicist. Physicists need to think critically.
Beginning students need a firm grounding in the ethos of physics — that physics is reliable knowledge of the real world based on experiment. The reliability of physics is verified by predicting things that actually work in the real world. One way to absorb this ethos is to read the history of the past successes of physics in describing the real world.
Most of these readings can be found in the Rutgers Library or at archive.org. I give links to electronic copies when I have them. The links are on the authors’ names below.
I strongly recommend that every physics and engineering student read these two short stories by Isaac Asimov.
The language is old fashioned, but the ideas are more relevant now than ever. Some of the science fiction writers of the 1950’s and 1960’s saw what was going to happen with amazing prescience.
One way to see the scope of physics is to look at the known physical universe on a log scale, in powers of 10.
The earliest version of this idea (that I know of) was a 1957 children’s book, Cosmic View, by Kees Boeke, a Dutch schoolteacher.
Boeke’s Cosmic View was made into a film by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977.
The best general books I know about the historical origins of the physical sciences are two books by the philosopher/historians Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield. They portray the amazing intellectual journey that led to modern physics.
These books are not light reading. They might best be read after studying physics for a few years.
Abraham Pais was a successful theoretical elementary particle physicist during the great period of discoveries 1945–1970. He was a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. In the 1970’s Pais turned to writing the history of physics. He wrote biographies of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two of the heroes of modern theoretical physics. The biographies are informed by Pais’ deep knowledge of the intellectual issues that Einstein and Bohr wrestled with. Pais’ Inward Bound is a history of the discovery of the physical structure of matter, again informed by his deep understanding of the physics. All three books are very readable.
Quantum: The Magazine of Math and Science was the English translation/sister magazine of the Russian magazine Kvant. It covered math and physics for beginning students. It has many interesting articles by mathematicians and physicists.
This is a very readable biography of Werner Heisenberg, the first discoverer of quantum mechanics. Especially fascinating is the relationship between Bohr and Heisenberg, and the mysterious way Heisenberg turned Bohr’s intuitions into a precise and wonderfully successful theory of physics.
Riveting accounts of the interactions of physicists, politicians, and the military during World War II and the Cold War. It is important to understand that physics gives us power over the physical world that can be used constructively or destructively.
A history of the invention and development of the transistor. This can be read as another cautionary tale of the destructive power of physics. The transistor led eventually to the iPhone and Facebook and the downfall of civilization.
A history of Bell Labs, the great corporate research lab of the twentieth century. The transistor was invented there. The cosmic background radiation was detected there. Information theory and Unix were also invented there.
Richard P. Feynman was a theoretical physicist during World War II and in the decades after. He made crucial contributions to quantum mechanics and to the quantum field theory that describes the elementary particles. Everything he wrote is fun to read, both popular physics and professional physics.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics are the best introductory physics books. Feynman originally gave his lectures to undergraduates as a first course in physics. Nowadays, physics students usually read them in graduate school.
Before becoming interested in nutrition issues, Gary Taubes wrote two penetrating books about the community of physical scientists. Nobel Dreams is about the triumphant detection of the weak vector bosons at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva. Bad Science is about the disgraceful marketing within the physical science community of unverified claims of desktop fusion.
Coming of Age in the Milky Way is a readable general history of physical science. It owes a lot to the Toulmin & Goodfield books (see above).
A history of particle physics up to the triumph of the Standard Model in the mid-1970’s.