25 Greatest Science Books of All Time

This is one of the 748 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Discover Magazine staff presents the essential reading list for anyone interested in science.

This list was originally published in 2006 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
1788	The Voyage of the Beagle	Charles Darwin	1839	British	English
180	On the Origin of Species	Charles Darwin	1859	British	English
1015	Principia Mathematica	Isaac Newton	1687	British	Latin
863	Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems	Galileo	1632	Italian	Italian
2025	On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres	Nicolaus Copernicus	1543	Polish	Latin
1449	Corpus Aristotelicum	Aristotle	-322	Greek	Greek
4283	On the Fabric of the Human Body	Andreas Vesalius	1543	Belgian	Latin
315	Relativity	Albert Einstein	1916	German	German
2300	The Selfish Gene	Richard Dawkins	1976	British	English
2357	One Two Three . . . Infinity	George Gamow	1947	American	English
301	The Double Helix	James D. Watson	1968	American	English
3279	What Is Life?	Erwin Schrödinger	1944	Austrian	English
7032	The Cosmic Connection	Carl Sagan	1973	American	English
6926	The Insect Societies	E. O. Wilson	1971	American	English
4969	The First Three Minutes	Steven Weinberg	1977	American	English
162	Silent Spring	Rachel Carson	1962	American	English
2661	The Mismeasure of Man	Stephen Jay Gould	1981	American	English
1981	The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat	Oliver Sacks	1985	British	English
2293	Journals	Meriwether Lewis, William Clark	1804	American	English
1276	The Feynman Lectures on Physics	Richard P. Feynman	1963	American	English
944	Sexual Behavior in the Human Male	Alfred C. Kinsey	1948	American	English
6601	Gorillas In The Mist	Dian Fossey	1983	American	English
6203	Under A Lucky Star	Roy Chapman Andrews	1943	American	English
4636	Micrographia	Robert Hooke	1665	British	English
4803	Gaia	James Lovelock	1979	British	English