I’m a sucker for playful science books written by people who understand the material in a deep way, books with a visual perspective on a field, and papers with ‘Principles of’ in the abstract or title (I am aware of this as a bias, and friends tease me about it, I do love them though!).

Open source guides to building cool science tools

Open Source Raman Spectrometer - www.open-raman.org

This seems pretty cool - build a light sheet microscope - andrewgyork.github.io/high_na_single_objective_lightsheet

• It’s also easier to build microscopes than you might think! Lots of friends just build their own in academia, I am super jealous and want to do this one day. Or a telescope

I think this lab (Manu Prakash) is cool, they built a foldscope which seems worth checking out!

MIT J-Lab course overview - a bunch of the classic experiments, all for your consumption! My dream is to go through this with friends. Separately, building cloud chambers is hard because the alcohol dissolves whatever adhesive you’re using to hold the felt up - but that’s solvable.

This is $1k, but oh my gosh is it ever one of the coolest things I have gotten my hands on, took my breath away to use it - nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion

Beautiful science books (or ones I’m hungering after)

Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Field_Theory_in_a_Nutshell

Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amatuer - www.amazon.com/Quantum-Field-Theory-Gifted-Amateur/dp/019969933X

Road to Reality by Roger Penrose - https://archive.org/details/RoadToRealityRobertPenrose - I keep finishing and restarting this, really want to make it more of the way through, also wrote part of a children’s book about it with a friend

Obviously this is one of the most beautiful books ever, even though I have absolutely no idea how it works or what it means - press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691203706/visual-differential-geometry-and-forms

https://academic.oup.com/book/45765?login=false - and also a Visual Guide to Complex Analysis

https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Group-Theory-Problem-Book/dp/088385757X - and also Visual Group Theory, I mean you can kind of tell at this point what I’m a sucker for

(might want to check out)

"Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" - Einstein

"A First Course in General Relativity" - Schutz