Some of these books are well-known, and you will no doubt have heard of them. Others made it onto the list for exploring scientific discoveries that are less well-known but are nevertheless inspiring and mind-blowing.

I've listed them in chronological order, not in order of importance.

On the Origin of Species (1859), by Charles Darwin.
This is the book where Darwin first explained to the general public the theory of natural selection, in which species compete with each other for survival in specific environments. It remains an incredibly influential scientific treatise to this day.

Male and Female (1949), by Margaret Mead.
Mead was a celebrated anthropologist whose book Coming of Age in Samoa, based on years of research into tribal society, took the world by storm. While many of the observations she made in that book have been questioned in years since, her book Male and Female has endured the test of time. In it, she turned her anthropologist's eye to mating rituals and family networks in the United States, revealing to readers how strange their practices actually were. In particular, she made a gentle but persistent argument that perhaps we ought to question our gender roles and be less rigid about sexual relationships. Funny and well-written, the book was one of the first to use the tools of anthropology on the anthropologist's own society.

Animal Liberation (1975), by Peter Singer.
Singer is one of the most famous science ethicists in the world, and he made his first mark with this book. In it, he took the first of many radical positions about humans' place on Earth, and whether we are truly worth more than animals. He argued that an ethical society must treat animals compassionately, since they have the ability to suffer.

Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), by Douglas Hofstadter.
A book about math, meaning, complex symbols, and music, this tour-de-force is a beautifully-written classic of the science writing genre. Its intertwined tales of three influential thinkers - logician Godel, artist Escher, and composer Bach - is reminiscient of the scifi novels of Neal Stephenson.

Cosmos (1985), by Carl Sagan. The classic introduction to astrophysics, by one of the most accessible writers on the topic. Sagan was an astrophysicist himself, who worked tirelessly to secure funding for space exploration and inspire humans to search for their counterparts elsewhere in the universe.

The Selfish Gene (1990), by Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins is now primarily known as an atheist advocate, but his first big public splash came with this book, which argued that the basis for reproduction was the selfish urge to pass one's genes on. His analysis also included the urge to spread memes, or units of meaning, making the book a rather all-encompassing indictment of humans as selfish from the tiniest biological level to the broadest social one.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1995), by Laurie Garrett.
This controversial look at the spread of diseases and pandemics in a world riddled with poverty and health care deficits is both fascinating and required reading for anybody interested in zombies or plague.

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher (1995), by Richard P. Feynman.
The "easiest" (i.e., most accessible to people without degrees in the physical sciences) lectures from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. These are six lectures excerpted from his famous book Lectures on Physics, originally published in 1963. Learn about everything from atoms to quantum force.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999), by Jared Diamond.
As influential as Dawkins' Selfish Gene, Diamond's book of evolutionary anthropology looks at why some civilizations succeeded in conquering vast parts of the globe while others died out or where conquered. Compassionate and interesting, Diamond's writing is persuasive and will change the way you look at civilization forever.

The Elegant Universe (2000), by Brian Greene.
All the freakiest new physics shit, explained clearly and with good humor, in one simple book.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (2000), by Simon Singh.
A fascinating story of how different civilizations through time used math, science, and later computers to communicate across great distances, even through enemy territory, without letting their secrets out. Packed with cool information about code-cracking, ciphers, and even quantum cryptography, this is a must-read for anybody who wants to write about futuristic spies.

The Well: A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (2001), by Katie Hafner.
There are dozens of good histories of the early internet out there, but none captures the human stories behind it as well as New York Times reporter Hafner's account of one of the first online community, The Well. In many ways, The Well was doing what Facebook and MySpace later did, only in the 1980s. Technically interesting and full of gripping human drama, Hafner's book is a forgotten classic.

The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (2002), by David Barash and Judith Lipton.
Written by a psychologist and a zoologist, this is one of the most revolutionary science books to deal with mating behaviors. The authors lay out a careful, evidence-packed argument that monogamy is incredibly rare in the animal kingdom and that the human desire to cling to it as a norm may not have any basis in biological realities. Plus there are a ton of great stories about birds cheating on each other.

A User's Guide to the Brain (2002), by John Ratey.
Harvard neuroscientist Ratey uses lots of intriguing examples from everyday life to explain the complicated neurological mechanisms that allow you to do things like pay attention and access memories.

How the Universe Got Its Spots (2002), by Janna Levin.
Levin is a physicist who studies the origins of the universe, and is also a writer whose language is both clear and poetic. Something about cosmology invites poetic meditations, and Levin manages to combine somewhat melancholy explorations of her own place in the universe with complicated physics formulas to create one of the most interesting books you'll ever read.

Why Things Break (2003), by Mark Eberhart.
This isn't about how things break, but WHY things break. What is it about certain physical materials that causes them to crack, crumble, or collapse? Written by materials scientist Eberhart in an accessible, geekish-love-of-chemistry tone, this is perhaps the best introduction you'll ever get to the science that can answer the question of why bridges collapse and gaskets blow.

Evolution's Rainbow: Why Darwin Was Wrong About Sexual Selection (2004), by Joan Roughgarden.
Written as a sharp, highly-articulate rejoinder to people like Dawkins who believe that creatures reproduce for selfish reasons, Stanford evolutionary biologist Roughgarden proves that animals and people often collaborate in the process of reproduction for altruistic reasons. In the process, she answers the question of why so many animals regularly evolve homosexuality, a non-reproductive form of mating. She argues persuasively that non-reproducing animals are necessary to evolution.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising (2005), by Daniel H. Wilson.
Funny and bizarre, Wilson's book is a perfect blend of science writing and science fiction speculation — it's as if he's written a robotics guide for science fiction fans who want to know what could really, plausibly happen if robots were to revolt. Plus, there are a lot of tips for avoiding being killed by robots, which is always helpful.

Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law (2005), by Kerry MacIntosh.
MacIntosh is a law professor who has become profoundly interested in how current human rights law will affect human clones when they are born. She's done meticulous research on the topic, and demonstrated that in fact human clones will have no legal rights because they are "illegal beings." Given that so many researchers outside the U.S. are openly developing human reproductive cloning, this legal issue is likely to become serious over the next couple of decades. MacIntosh is the only person to have written about this from a purely legal point of view, and her findings are riveting.

The Science of Orgasm (2006), by Barry Komisauruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple.
One of the most coveted and talked-about forms of human pleasure, the orgasm has nevertheless suffered from a paucity of scientific study. At last, Rutgers researchers have tackled this elusive experience and written a terrific book about what actually happens to you — neurologically and chemically — when you have an orgasm. And there are even suggestions for how "orgasm chemicals" might be used in future painkillers. Nobody interested in the science of human experience should miss this book.

Robby the Robot, star of 1955 special effects blockbuster Forbidden Planet and later a main "charater" on the TV show Lost in Space, was the creation of legendary production designer Robert Kinoshita. Apparently one of his biggest inspirations for the globular humanoid bot was washing machine tubs. Kinoshita had worked on those before his career in the movies. The comparison sounds strange to us today, until you look back and see what washing machines looked like in the 1940s, when Kinoshita worked on them. This picture shows the odd similarities, with the bulbous roundness and strange silver knobs sticking out.

The HAL 9000 computer which famously refused to open the pod bay door in the 1969 movie 2001 was inspired by surveillance cameras which filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw around London as CCTVs were being put in place. Author Arthur C. Clarke, who worked with Kubrick adapting his novel for the screen, confirms that HAL was inspired by "television cameras in cities" in an interview.

Here is a rather odd reverse-inspiration. The exoskeleton that Ripley used to fight big mama alien in Aliens is frequently mentioned by the designers for exoskeletons that might be used by soldiers or disabled people. Here you can see Ripley's cool device, and the exoskeleton for soldiers it inspired.

Since the special effects designers for Machine City in Matrix: Revolutions were located in San Francisco, it's probably no surprise that they based it in part on the San Francisco skyline. Effects designer Craig Hayes said in an interview that one of the first things he and his crew did was go out on the San Francisco Bay, about 8 miles from San Francisco, to see how the city would look from a distance. That gave them a sense of how to build Machine City from Neo's point of view as he zoomed into it.

Here you can see the hot fudge sundae that became the T-1000. Director and effects maven James Cameron said that when he was first conceiving of the liquid metal Terminator, he thought a lot in terms of texture. How should it ooze? How should the reflections look? In an interview, he admitted:

I wanted the effect of the T-1000 to look like a spoon going into hot fudge; it dimples down, then flows up over and closes. That's the look I wanted. You have to work with the viscosity in order to get that look just right.

When Steven Spielberg set out to make futuristic computers for Minority Report, he didn't mess around. He went straight to a research group at MIT, called the Tangible Media Group, which thinks up next-generation interfaces. The group told him that gesture-commands would be the wave of the future, and even showed him a bunch of prototypes — some of which are now in use, several years later. You can see an early gesture-controlled prototype here, on the left. And there's Tom Cruise doing his Minority Report gesture thing on the right.

And finally, there are the eXistenZ "metaflesh game pods," created by David Cronenberg for his dizzying movie about virtual reality games that plug right into your spinal column via a creepily biological bio-port installed (oh so Cronenberg style) right above your butt. Cronenberg has said a lot about how current technology is heading towards a merging with biology. So it's no surprise that his game pods look exactly like biological rehashings of late-1990s Playstation controllers that he would have seen every day while making this movie.

Picture of Port of Oakland by John L. Polos. Picture of fudge by Ms. Info. Picture of San Francisco skyline by Mike. Image spiffing by Stephanie Fox. Additional reporting by Nivair H. Gabriel.