Physics

It is, after all, my profession...

Turbulence

Fay Ajezenbverg-Selove, A Matter of Choices [Autobio. of a nuclear physicist, who happens to be the first woman to have gotten a Ph. D. in physics from Wisconsin.]
K. C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations [Recently republished as First You Build a Cloud]
The Feynman Lectures on Physics [I'm not sure it's possible to actually learn physics from them, but for elegance they can't be beat. There is no need to recommend his memoirs, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think, as discerning readers such as yourself read them long ago. The Character of Physical Law is also very fine.]
David Griffiths [The best physics textbooks I have ever seen.]
- Introduction to Electrodynamics
- Introduction to Elementary Particles
- Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
Ian D. Lawrie, A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics [Review: Bon Voyage!]
Philip and Phylis Morrison
- The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know
- and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero [The film is not to be missed, either.]
Tony Rothman
- Science à la Mode [The original title was supposed to be ...And the Bandwagon Rolled On --- it's a collection of essays, very sharp but mathematically undemanding, against some recent follies and fads in physics. The essay on entropy, in particular, repays attention.]
- A Physicist on Madison Avenue [The title essay, about trying to bring elementary statistical hygenie to the marketing policy of Scientific American, is priceless.]
Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science [Really about physics. Rather incredibly for a philosopher, Toulmin succeeds very well in understanding and explaining how physicists think, by focusing in great detail on geometrical optics --- a shrewd choice, since it's mathematically about the most accessible part of physics.]
Trefil, From Atoms to Quarks
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory
Wilczek and Devine, Longing for the Harmonies [There's a certain style of thinking about physical problems that theoretical physicists acquire --- a fondness for symmetries and invariants --- and this book does a marvellous job of conveying the feel of this style without any explicit math. (I imagine it would help to be familiar with algebra.)]

Walter Appel, Mathematics for Physics and Physicists [blurb]
David Edgar Cartwright, Tides: A Scientific History [Blurb]
Hendrik B. G. Casimir, Haphazard Reality: Half a Century of Science
Sidney Coleman, Aspects of Symmetry
Alan Cook, Observational Foundations of Physics
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
Xavier Gr´cia, Miguel C. Munoz-Lecanda, Narciso Roman-Roy, "On some aspects of the geometry of differential equations in physics", math-ph/0402030
Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace
Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America
Yvete Kosmann-Schwarzbach, The Noether Theorems: Invariance and Conservation Laws in the 20th Century
David Lynch and William Livingston, Color and Light in Nature
Marcel Minnaert, The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air
Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, Gravitation
Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought
Philip Morrison, Nothing Is Too Wonderful To Be True
Emmy Noether, "Invariant Variation Problems", physics/0503066 [Original (1918) paper where she proved Noether's Theorems, translated by M. A. Tavel, put online by Frank Y. Wang.]
Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800--1940
Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, An Autobiography and Other Recollections ed. Katherine Haramundanis [Blurb]
Peixoto and Oort, Physics of Climate
Mario Rabinowitz, "Do the Laws of Nature and Physics Agree About What is Allowed and Forbidden?" physics/0104001
Emilio Serge, Mind Always in Motion
Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner, A Life in Physics [Review by Danny Yee]
R. F. Streater, Lost Causes in and beyond Physics [Blurb; presumably based on this.]
Frank Wilczek, "Fermi and the Elucidation of Matter," physics/0112077

Notebooks

Physics