Challenge: 50 Books discussion

Hi all .. I thought I'd introduce myself to the forum by giving my most groundbreaking book recommendations. Although I love reading great books, I only manage time for a precious few each year, so I try to make sure they really count. I particularly love books that open my eyes to a new or deeper understanding of the world around me, with my top 3 being:

" Chaos " by James Gleick,



" Complexity " by Mitchell M. Waldrop,



and most importantly " The Final Theory " by Mark McCutcheon.



Why these three?

* " Chaos " because it very accessibly brought into broad awareness key phenomena in nature, such as 'fractals', 'strange attractors', 'the butterfly effect', and all that great stuff.

* " Complexity " because it also very accessibly introduced the next range of concepts beyond "Chaos", such as 'order, intelligence and complexity emerging from random processes', 'genetic algorithms', ' artificial life', etc.

* And " The Final Theory " because, well, where do I begin? It puts all of today's science and its legacy of beliefs and theories under the microscope and shows why our science is now filled with quantum paradoxes, relativity mysteries, exotic 'dark matter', mysterious 'dark energy', etc. It shows how ideas from far simpler times, coupled with formal logical fallacies of human thought, have taken science way off track. But that's not the half of it. The book actually presents a very compelling and surprisingly simple new scientific theory in plain English that re-explains gravity, the nature of electricity, magnetism and light, atomic structure, the theories of quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, and, well, everything really! It actually claims to be the final 'Theory of Everything' (hence the name of the book), and as incredulous as I know it sounds, I have a solid science background and I couldn't really dispute it at this point.

If interested, you can check out my Squidoo lens where I discuss these great books and ideas further, with much more information, links, free chapters, etc.:

squidoo.com/important-and-influential...

Welcome Jack! Nice choices. I've added all three into my to-be-read shelf. I really enjoy science history, and exploration of concepts. These should fit in well.