The Oxford book of modern science writing

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James Jeans, from The mysterious universe

Martin Rees, from Just six numbers

Peter Atkins, from Creation revisited

Helena Cronin, from The ant and the peacock

R.A. Fisher, from The genetical theory of natural selection

Theodosius Dobzhansky, from Mankind evolving

G.C. Williams, from Adaptation and natural selection

Francis Crick, from Life itself

Matt Ridley, from Genome

'Theoretical biology in the third millennium' / Sydney Brenner

Steve Jones, from The language of the genes

J.B.S. Haldane, from 'On being the right size'

Mark Ridley, from The explanation of organic diversity

'The importance of the nervous system in the evolution of animal flight' / John Maynard Smith

Fred Hoyle, from Man in the universe

D'Arcy Thompson, from On growth and form

G.G. Simpson, from The meaning of evolution

Richard Fortey, from Trilobite!

Colin Blakemore, from The mind machine

Richard Gregory, from Mirrors in mind

'One self : a meditation on the unity of consciousness' / Nicholas Humphrey

Steven Pinker, from The language instinct, and How the mind works

Jared Diamond, from The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

David Lack, from The life of the robin

Niko Tinbergen, from Curious naturalists

Robert Trivers, from Social evolution

Alister Hardy, from The open sea

Rachel Carson, from The sea around us

Loren Eiseley, from 'How flowers changed the world'

Edward O. Wilson, from The diversity of life

Arthur Eddington, from The expanding universe

C.P. Snow, from the foreword to G.H. Hardy's A mathematician's apology

Freeman Dyson, from Disturbing the universe

J. Robert Oppenheimer, from 'War and the nations'

'A passion for crystals' / Max F. Perutz

'Said Ryle to Hoyle' / Barbara and George Gamow

'Cancer's a funny thing' / J.B.S. Haldane

Jacob Bronowski, from The identity of man

Peter Medawar, from 'Science and literature', 'Darwin's illness', 'The phenomenon of man', the postscript to 'Lucky Jim', and 'D'Arcy Thompson and growth and form'

Jonathan Kingdon, from Self-made man

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, from Origins reconsidered

Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, from Lucy

'Worm for a century, and all seasons' / Stephen Jay Gould

John Tyler Bonner, from Life cycles

Oliver Sacks, from Uncle Tungsten

'Seven wonders' / Lewis Thomas

James Watson, from Avoid boring people

Francis Crick, from What mad pursuit

Lewis Wolpert, from The unnatural nature of science

Julian Huxley, from Essays of a biologist

'Religion and science' / Albert Einstein

Carl Sagan, from The demon-haunted world

Richard Feynman, from The character of physical law

Erwin Schrödinger, from What is life?

Daniel Dennett, from Darwin's dangerous idea, and Consciousness explained

Ernst Mayr, from The growth of biological thought

Garrett Hardin, from 'The tragedy of the commons'

W.D. Hamilton, from Geometry for the selfish herd, and Narrow roads of geneland

Per Bak, from How nature works

The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game 'life' / Martin Gardner

Lancelot Hogben, from Mathematics for the million

Ian Stewart, from The miraculous jar

Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, from The mathematical theory of communication

Alan Turing, from Computing machinery and intelligence

Albert Einstein, from 'What is the theory of relativity?'

George Gamow, from Mr. Tompkins

Paul Davies, from The Goldilocks enigma

Russell Stannard, from The time and space of Uncle Albert

Brian Greene, from The elegant universe

Stephen Hawking, from A brief history of time

S. Chandrasekhar, from Truth and beauty

G.H. Hardy, from A Mathematician's apology

Steven Weinberg, from Dreams of a final theory

Lee Smolin, from The life of the cosmos

Roger Penrose, from The emperor's new mind

Douglas Hofstadter, from Gödel, Escher, Bach : the eternal golden braid

John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford, from Geons, black holes, and quantum foam

David Deutsch, from The fabric of reality

Primo Levi, from The periodic table

Richard Fortey, from Life : an unauthorized biography

George Gaylord Simpson, from The meaning of evolution

Loren Eiseley, from Little men and flying saucers

Carl Sagan, from Pale blue dot