Ascience book is a work ofnonfiction, usually written by ascientist,researcher, orprofessor likeStephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time), or sometimes by a non-scientist such asBill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything). Usually these books are written for a wide audience presumed to have a general education rather than a specifically scientific training, as opposed to the very narrow audience that ascientific paper would have, and are therefore referred to aspopular science. As such, they require considerable talent on the part of the author to sufficientlyexplain difficult topics to people who are totally new to the subject, and a good blend ofstorytelling andtechnical writing. In the UK, theRoyal Society Prizes for Science Books are considered to be the most prestigious awards for science writing.[1] In the US, theNational Book Awards briefly had a category for science writing in the 1960s, but now they just have the broad categories of fiction and nonfiction.
There are many disciplines that are well explained to lay people through science books. A few examples includeCarl Sagan onastronomy,Jared Diamond ongeography,Stephen Jay Gould andRichard Dawkins onevolutionary biology,David Eagleman onneuroscience,Donald Norman onusability andcognitive psychology,Steven Pinker,Noam Chomsky, andRobert Ornstein onlinguistics andcognitive science,Donald Johanson andRobert Ardrey onpaleoanthropology, andDesmond Morris onzoology andanthropology, andFulvio Melia onblack holes.
The roots of popular science writing can be traced back to the didactic poetry of Greek and Roman antiquity.[2] During theAge of Enlightenment, many books were written that spread the new science to both experts and the educated public,[3] butMary Somerville'sOn the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (first edition 1834) was arguably the first book in the modern genre of popular science.[4]