r/askscience · 2020
Top books in r/askscience during 2020
Ranked by mentions in r/askscience threads dated 2020. Useful for spotting what r/askscience was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 The Double Helix
James D. Watson
The story behind the story of DNA: Watson and Crick's race to the double helix, including the part where they used Rosalind Franklin's data without her knowledge.
#2 What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe takes absurd physics questions — what if a baseball traveled at 90% the speed of light? — and answers them with actual math.
#3 Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Neil Shubin
A paleontologist finds a fish fossil in the Arctic and uses it to trace the evolutionary origin of your hands, ears, and hernias.
#4 A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking explains black holes, the Big Bang, and the edge of time to people who never took a physics class.
#5 A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson traces how scientists figured out the age of the Earth, the size of the atom, and nearly everything else — told through the humans who got it wrong first.
#6 On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Darwin lays out natural selection with no genes, no genetics lab, and enough observational evidence to strand every subsequent counter-argument.
#7 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee traces cancer from ancient papyrus to targeted therapy, framing it as a 4,000-year war medicine is still losing on some fronts.