Relevant excerpts from the texts recommended in The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, along with links to available ebook versions of all texts.
[previously published as The Story of Science]
The Beginnings
The Hippocratic Corpus (c. 420 BC)
Plato, Timaeus (c. 360 BC)
Aristotle, Physics (c. 330 BC)
Aristotle, History of Animals (c. 330 BC)
Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner” (c. 250 BC)
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (c. 60 BC)
Ptolemy, Almagest (c. 150 AD)
Nicolaus Copernicus, Commentariolus (1514) and On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543)
The Birth of the Method
Francis Bacon, Novum organum (1620)
William Harvey, De motu cordis (1628)
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (1661)
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687/1713/1726)
Reading the Earth
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History: General and Particular (1749-1788)
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1785)
Georges Cuvier, “Preliminary Discourse” (1812)
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830)
Arthur Holmes, The Age of the Earth (1913)
Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915)
Walter Alvarez, T. rex and the Crater of Doom (1997)
Reading Life (With Special Reference to Us)
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809)
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
Gregor Mendel, Experiments in Plant Hybridization (1865)
Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)
E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (1978)
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
Reading the Cosmos (Reality)
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916)
Max Planck, “The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory” (1922)
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (1944)
[Edwin Hubble, The Realms of the Nebulae (1937)]
Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (1950)
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977)
James Gleick, Chaos (1987)