2025 World Book Day — A Popular Science Reading List
In April, as the living world begins to grow again, we celebrated the 30th World Book Day. Books are beacons for exploring the unknown. A-kun’s call for popular science recommendations brought in a wealth of excellent titles. Here is the reading list our community built together.
Stephen Hawking
Written in accessible language, this book introduces frontier ideas about the origin of the universe and humanity’s fate. From black holes and the Big Bang to time travel, Hawking’s vivid prose leads readers through the mysteries of a vast and astonishing cosmos. It can inspire both newcomers to science and readers who already have some background knowledge. More than a source of scientific facts, it awakens curiosity, encourages exploration, and asks us to consider humanity’s place and meaning in the universe. It is an exceptionally rewarding work of popular science.
Tsung-Dao Lee
This book explains the central physical concepts of symmetry and asymmetry in plain language, then extends them into art, literature, and Eastern thought. It proposes that “symmetry reveals the beauty of the universe, while asymmetry generates its reality.” Symmetry is presented as a fundamental law of nature, and broken symmetry as a key to cosmic evolution and the origin of life.
The book introduces basic ideas in high-energy particle physics, examines the importance of accelerators in scientific discovery, explains how theoretical and experimental physics support one another, and looks toward future research on the vacuum.
Cao Tianyuan
Cao Tianyuan retells the turbulent century-long history of quantum theory with the narrative momentum of a martial-arts novel. Vivid metaphors such as the “war between the wave and particle natures of light” turn abstract ideas—including the Schrödinger equation and the uncertainty principle—into tangible thought experiments. The book recreates the thirty-year debate between Einstein and Bohr, follows quantum entanglement from philosophical speculation to experimental verification, and anticipates a future in which quantum computing rewrites the rules of cryptography. It interprets a Western scientific revolution through an Eastern intellectual lens, combining the depth of The Feynman Lectures on Physics with the epic sweep of Decisive Moments in History. When Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment suggests that “the present can change the past,” readers are invited to reconsider causality itself.
Jia Yang
This book not only explains the details of the Yutu 1 and 2 lunar rovers and the Zhurong Mars rover, but also tells many engaging stories from their development and even reproduces original design drawings. For anyone interested in China’s deep-space exploration, it is a rare work of official popular science.
George Gamow
The book covers fundamental mathematics, explains Einstein’s relativity and the structure of four-dimensional spacetime, and discusses humanity’s understanding of both the microscopic and macroscopic worlds.
Its author, the renowned physicist George Gamow, invites readers to examine the world through scientific logic. With prose that is elegant without losing its humor, he builds a bridge toward science.
Terence Tao
This book begins with the natural numbers and answers questions most of us overlooked as children: What is a natural number? What is addition? What is a real number? Its opening chapters require almost no background. I recommend them to anyone interested in mathematics; they can reshape your understanding of what mathematics is.
Thomas de Padova
What is “time”? How did our idea of it form, and how has it changed? Answers lead back to two rival geniuses of the seventeenth century: Newton and Leibniz. Written as a dual biography, this absorbing book organizes and compares their views of space and time. Along the way, it traces the invention and improvement of clocks and the changes those developments brought to our understanding of time itself.
DK Publishing
This authoritative botanical encyclopedia uses high-resolution photography and professional illustrations to present plant form, distribution, ecology, and evolution. It brings taxonomy and ecology together in a work that is both scientifically rigorous and visually engaging. Chapters are organized around different parts of the plant, with detailed explanations of each part’s form, structure, characteristics, and function.
Benjamin Graham & David Dodd
Coauthor Benjamin Graham has been called the father of modern security analysis, the dean of Wall Street, and the founder of value investing. His philosophy influenced Warren Buffett and many other leading investors. Since its first publication in 1934, the book has gone through many revisions, remained in print for more than eighty years, and retained its reputation as an investor’s “bible.”
The authors clearly distinguish investment from speculation, examine fixed-income securities and common stocks in depth, and offer methods for finding quality securities at attractive prices. Detailed cases and precise analysis teach readers to interpret financial statements, uncover a company’s intrinsic value, and identify undervalued assets. Whether you are a beginner building a framework of investment knowledge or a market veteran hoping to recover your original discipline, the book can light the road toward wealth guided by reason and judgment.
Edward Burkley & Melissa Burkley
Using self-determination theory (SDT) as its central framework, this book systematically traces the development of motivational psychology. It draws on intersecting research in cognition, emotion, neuroscience, and other fields to help us understand the deeper mechanisms behind behavior.
By analyzing familiar problems such as procrastination and addiction, it also provides practical guidance—including goal setting and action planning—for turning theory into everyday practice. Examples from education, business, health, and other settings show how motivation shapes personal growth and social relationships, keeping the discussion closely connected to daily life.
S. I. Hayakawa & Alan R. Hayakawa
We must maintain a critical attitude toward both other people’s words and our own. We owe it to ourselves, and to our responsibility as citizens, to avoid the traps laid by language. — Hayakawa
What is the nature of language? How does it shape our ideas and influence our decisions and judgments? How can reflecting on the language we use teach us about ourselves? What traps are hidden within it? How does language create prejudice and opposition, becoming a tool that controls thought? How can we use it well, cultivate tolerance, break through prejudice and binary thinking, and become more cooperative and rational? How can language take us out of conflict and into cooperation and civilization? Let a master of language reveal the answers one by one.
Gustave Le Bon
Published more than a century ago, this book can be regarded as a founding work of crowd psychology. It describes and analyzes group behavior and the mechanisms behind it, asking how people lose their reason in a crowd, how they can be manipulated, and what role crowds have played in history—a mainly negative one, in the author’s view. Written when industrialization was only beginning, the work inevitably has serious limitations. Even so, many of its ideas remain worth considering and still apply today.
James Trefil
Published with the authority of National Geographic, this is a classic guide to exploring the universe. The book reimagines the cosmic “atlas” from an unusual perspective. Its vivid explanations cover frontier topics from the Big Bang and black holes to dark matter, turning difficult cosmological theories into a visual experience that any reader can grasp.
From Mercury’s scorched rock to the frozen worlds of the Kuiper Belt, and from wormholes to the conjectures of string theory, the book offers both amateur astronomers and general readers a sense of scientific rigor and the overwhelming beauty of the universe. It is an encyclopedia of the heavens with both intellectual depth and visual force.
Howard Schneider
This engaging stargazing encyclopedia combines professional knowledge with a sense of fun. It can inspire both complete beginners and enthusiasts seeking a more systematic understanding.
Ten chapters build a complete body of knowledge, moving from the motion of planets in the Solar System to the myths behind the constellations, and from basic observing techniques to parameter settings for deep-sky photography. The material advances step by step, allowing beginners to get started quickly while still meeting the needs of more experienced observers. For anyone ready to begin a journey through the night sky, this is an ideal point of departure.
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