A Dorky Textbook Poll
A recent dorky poll on favorite science textbooks has been launched on Uncertain Principles. They had a great quote in the comments of that post:
“The problem with [The Feynman Lectures on Physics] is you read it, and you say ‘Yes! I understand this! I’m doing physics!’ And then you try to solve a problem, and you find that, well, that you’re not Feynman.”
Anyway, I thought I’d enumerate my favorites here a bit more extensively than comment space would allow.
Evolutionary Dynamics, by Martin Nowak: Great explanation of evolutionary biology. After reading this, you realize that without mathematics, any discussion of evolution becomes a series of just-so stories and hand-wavy explanations. With math, however, you can do wonderful things like look at the time scale of evolution, the effects of kin selection and group selection, effects of population size, which societal structures that allow for cooperation, the necessity of having universal grammars for human language, the development of coherent languages, the evolutionary effects of newly introduced language structures, the natural development of cancer, the evolution of parasites and destructive pathogens, the etiology of HIV, and so on. This kind of course seems necessary for a well-rounded scientist, and I don’t know why, 80 years after the modern evolutionary synthesis promoted by Fisher, Wright, and Haldane, that this kind of mathematical teaching isn’t a requirement for all biologists. Sure, it’s not necessarily pertinent to the day-to-day research that goes on in many biology labs, but it’s necessary for the same reason that basic physics needs to be taught for chemistry and biology research. It’s about the fundamental laws of nature, and any scientist without at least some exposure to this kind of course is sorely lacking.
Thermal Physics, by Kittel and Kroemer: A great introductory statistical thermodynamics book. The derivations are simple, the applications and examples are numerous, and the exercises are challenging, but interesting. There’s a lot to be praised about their early introduction of simple ideas with powerful results, such as the partition function. Still, a caveat: at times, the content can be a bit confusingly organized, in that certain fundamental topics are scattered in many different places, de-emphasizing their importance. This may be more salient to me because I hadn’t taken a formal classical thermodynamics course beforehand, so I didn’t know about such important things as the Maxwell relations, which are only briefly mentioned in passing on one page of this book.
ANSI Common Lisp, by Paul Graham: I haven’t finished it yet (not even close), but so far, it’s a very readable introduction to Lisp, which is a pretty neat programming language. It’s normally pretty hard to learn, because you have to think differently when you want to program in it (as opposed to, say, C or C++), and it’s a bit difficult to pick up at first. This book makes it a lot less painful, and gives good exercises for the reader.
Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, Bender and Orszag: This is a wonderful mathematics textbook on how to do approximate analysis of dynamical systems. A good mix of hard and easy topics. Very useful, too.
A Genetic Switch by Mark Ptashne: This textbook is a very nice overview of one marvelous biological system, the lysis repressor switch of bacteriophage lambda. It’s a great, very short book with lots of pictures and diagrams, and very understandable. A bacteriophage is simply a virus that attacks bacteria, and many of them often have a system in which the virus is latent in the bacterium until some stimulus (often UV damage of the bacterial DNA) triggers it to start reproducing “lytically” (i.e. until the bacterium bursts). Biology had to solve a difficult engineering problem, which was to make the switch quick and sensitive to the stimuli you want, but robust enough that it wouldn’t accidentally be triggered. This book details in a very easy and colloquial fashion how evolution has solved this problem in the case of phage lambda. It’s fascinating to see how each additional layer of complexity on the genetic switch serves to fix a slight problem, to tweak the system and make it just a bit more efficient. The only problem is that at times, the book assumes a bit of molecular biology knowledge that the intended audience (intro high school and undergraduates) may not have.
