QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

QED +1. Legendary book, changed the way I look at the world forever.

All the books below have shaped my thought process to a significant degree. I started reading late but I'm fortunate enough to have stumbled upon these gems. "Debt: The First 5000 Years": This is truly a magnum opus. Until I read this I had taken money, economy, market etc., for granted. And I had held onto the widely accepted, but naive, view that economic systems somehow grew out of barter systems. The range of topics discussed, and the way author shows how seemingly independent concepts are intertwined, is truly astonishing. I'm on my 2nd read. "Thinking, Fast and Slow": This book made me truly appreciate the value of psychology. I didn't even know the existence of a vast domain called behavioral science until I read this book. Now I'm deliberately conscious about the decisions I take and retrace my thought process multiple times just to make sure that I haven't fallen pray to some of the cognitive biases.…

> 1. The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge - Poundstone, William Wonderful, I have never once in my life encountered another person who has read this book. I first read it as a student in the '90s and, like "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "QED", it made such an impact on me. Strangely, just yesterday I found myself recommending it to someone who is currently reading the new John Conway biography and had questions about the Game of Life.

The Design of Everyday Things. Probably the quintessential book on design, the basic premise is that if you can't figure out how a thing works, it's not your fault. Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down. About the engineering of various things, mostly buildings. Highly recommend. The Elements of Computer Systems (better known as NAND to Tetris). Describes a computer from the bottom up. A History of the Arab Peoples The Quran The Bible Space and Time in General Relativity by David Mermin Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

A few books at various levels with very high signal-to-noise ratio: Feynman's little popular science book _QED: The Strange Theory of Light & Matter_ is a gem. It's very short and non-mathematical, but still manages to get remarkably close to the truth. If you're more mathematically inclined (e.g., fluent in multivariate calculus) and know a little classical physics, the first 5 chapters of Wald's _General Relativity_ are an essentially complete introduction to the subject. Another classic is Shannon's _A Mathematical Theory of Communication_, which introduces the subject of information theory, and then solves basically all the subject's main problems. In economics, I think the record for signal to noise is probably held by Keynes _The Econonic Consequences of the Peace_, 118 pages, in which he basically forecasts the disastrous course of events from 1918 to 1939.

Oh jeeze, I have to choose? Nonfiction: QED, by Feynman. It made a large portion of quantum physics "click" for me intuitively and dispelled a bunch of popular notions about quantum physics that are just wrong. Fiction: Probably the celebrated Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, for reasons others have stated over and again, or else Ass Goblins of Auschwitz for letting me explore an author's deliciously disturbing mind.