It goes without saying that the development of our understanding of the nature of matter has a long and illustrious history, and enough has been written on the subject to fill whole libraries. The following is a selection of the books that I have found most helpful not only in writing Mass but also in helping to clarify the historical development and many of the basic principles of the science involved. I heartily recommend them to readers in search of further enlightenment. Titles marked with an asterisk are more suitable for readers with a scientific background.
Anthologies
French, A.P. and Kennedy, P.J. (eds), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1985.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), Albert Einstein. Philosopher-scientist, The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 1, Harper & Row, New York, 1959 (first published 1949).
*Wheeler, John Archibald and Zurek, Wojciech Hubert (eds), Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983.
Biographies
Bernstein, Jeremy, Quantum Profiles, Princeton University Press, 1991.
Cassidy, David C., Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg, W.H. Freeman, New York, 1992.
Dyson, Freeman, Disturbing the Universe, Basic Books, New York, 1979.
*Enz, Charles P., No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Farmelo, Graham, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, Faber and Faber, London, 2009.
Feynman, Richard P., ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’, Unwin, London, 1985.
Gleick, James, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, Little, Brown & Co., London, 1992.
Gleick, James, Isaac Newton, Harper Perennial, London, 2004.
Heilbron, J.L., The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Shuster, New York, 2007.
Johnson, George, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics, Vintage, London, 2001.
*Kragh, Helge, Dirac: A Scientific Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Mehra, Jagdish, The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Oxford University Press, 1994.
Moore, Walter, Schrödinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
*Pais, Abraham, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1982.
*Pais, Abraham, Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991.
Peat, F. David, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1997.
Wheeler, John Archibald, with Ford, Kenneth, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1998.
Cosmology
Goldsmith, Donald, The Runaway Universe: The Race to Find the Future of the Cosmos, Perseus Publishing, New York, 2000.
Guth, Alan H., The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins, Vintage, London, 1998.
Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Press, London, 1988.
Kirshner, Robert P., The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Cosmos, Princeton University Press, 2002.
Kragh, Helge, Masters of the Universe: Conversations with Cosmologists of the Past, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Krauss, Lawrence M., A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, Simon & Schuster, London, 2012.
*Nussabaumer, Harry and Bieri, Lydia, Discovering the Expanding Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Ostriker, Jeremiah P. and Mitton, Simon, Heart of Darkness: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe, Princeton University Press, 2013.
Overbye, Dennis, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Quest for the Secret of the Universe, Picador, London, 1993.
Panek, Richard, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, Oneworld, Oxford, 2011.
Rees, Martin, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe, Phoenix, London, 2000.
Singh, Simon, Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It, Harper Perennial, London, 2005.
Weinberg, Steven, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, Basic Books, New York, 1977.
*Weinberg, Steven, Cosmology, Oxford University Press, 2008.
General
Crease, Robert P., A Brief Guide to the Great Equations: The Hunt for Cosmic Beauty in Numbers, Robinson, London, 2009.
Farmelo, Graham (ed.), It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, Granta Books, London, 2002.
Feynman, Richard, The Character of Physical Law, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1967.
*Feynman, Richard P., Leighton, Robert B., and Sands, Matthew, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1965.
Greenblatt, Stephen, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, Vintage, London, 2012.
*Kennedy, Robert E., A Student’s Guide to Einstein’s Major Papers, Oxford University Press, 2012.
Kragh, Helge, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Rovelli, Carlo, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Allen Lane, London, 2015.
*Stachel, John (ed.), Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics, Princeton University Press, 2005.
History and Philosophy
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. John H. McMahon, Prometheus Books, New York, 1991.
*Buchwald, Jed Z., The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Cartwright, Nancy, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford University Press, 1983.
Chalmers, A.F., What is This Thing Called Science?, 3rd edn, Hackett, IN, 1999.
*Chalmers, Alan, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone: How Science Suceeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms, Springer, London, 2011.
Clark, Michael, Paradoxes from A to Z. Routledge, London, 2002.
Cushing, James T., Philosophical Concepts in Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
d’Espagnat, Bernard, Reality and the Physicist, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F.E. Sutcliffe, Penguin, London, 1968.
Fara, Patricia, Science: A Four Thousand Year History, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Feyerabend, Paul, Farewell to Reason, Verso, London, 1987.
Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method, 3rd edn, Verso, London, 1993.
Gardner, Sebastian, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, Routledge, Abingdon, 1999.
Gillies, Donald, Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993.
Greenaway, Frank, John Dalton and the Atom, Heinemann, London, 1966.
Hacking, Ian, Representing and Intervening, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
*Hermann, Armin, The Genesis of Quantum Theory (1899–1913), trans. Claude W. Nash, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971.
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Penguin, London, 1969.
*Jammer, Max, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: The Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in Historical Perspective, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1974.
*Jammer, Max, Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Jardine, Lisa, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London, Harper Collins, London, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1988.
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Philosophical Writings, trans. Mary Morris and G.H.R. Parkinson, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1973.
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R.E. Latham, Penguin Books, London (first published 1951).
Nola, Robert and Sankey, Howard, Theories of Scientific Method, Acumen, Durham, 2007.
Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin, London. 1971.
Popper, Karl R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1959.
Psillos, Stathis, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth, Routledge, London, 1999.
Psillos, Stathis and Curd, Martin (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, Routledge, London, 2010.
Sambursky, Samuel, The Physical World of the Greeks, 2nd edn, Routledge, London, 1960.
Schacht, Richard, Classical Modern Philosophers: Descartes to Kant, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984.
*Tomonaga, Sin-itiro, The Story of Spin, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Van Fraasen, Bas C., The Scientific Image, Oxford University Press, 1980.
Wilson, Catherine, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Quantum Theory
Aczel, Amir D., Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, 2003.
Baggott, Jim, Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Baggott, Jim, The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments, Oxford University Press, 2011.
*Bell, J.S., Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Beller, Mara, Quantum Dialogue. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Bohn, David, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984.
Davies, P.C.W. and Brown, J.R. (eds), The Ghost in the Atom, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
*d’Espagnat, Bernard, Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, 2nd edn, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1976.
Feynman, Richard P., QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Penguin, London, 1985.
Fine, Arthur, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
*French, A.P. and Taylor, E.F., An Introduction to Quantum Physics, Van Nostrand Reinhold, Wokingham, 1978.
Gamow, George, Thirty Years that Shook Physics, Dover Publications, New York, 1966.
Gribbin, John, Schrödinger’s Kittens, Phoenix, London, 1996.
Heisenberg, Werner, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, trans. Carl Eckart and F.C. Hoyt, Dover, New York, 1949.
Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, Penguin, London, 1989 (first published 1958).
*Kuhn, Thomas, S., Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894–1912, Oxford University Press, 1978.
Kumar, Manjit, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality, Icon Books, London, 2008.
Lindley, David, Where Does the Weirdness Go? Why Quantum Mechanics is Strange, but Not as Strange as You Think, BasicBooks, New York, 1996.
Mehra, Jagdish, Einstein, Physics and Reality, World Scientific, London, 1999.
Orzel, Chad, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, Oneworld, London, 2010.
Popper, Karl R., Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, Unwin Hyman, London, 1982.
Rae, Alastair, Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality?, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
*Rae, Alastair I.M., Quantum Mechanics, 2nd edn, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1986.
*Schweber, Silvan S., QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga, Princeton University Press, 1994.
*Waerden, B.L. van der, Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Dover, New York, 1968.
*Zee, A., Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Princeton University Press, 2003.
Particle Physics
Baggott, Jim, Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’, Oxford University Press, 2012.
Carroll, Sean, The Particle at the End of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World, Oneworld, London, 2012.
Close, Frank, Antimatter, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Close, Frank, The Infinity Puzzle: How the Quest to Understand Quantum Field Theory Led to Extraordinary Science, High Politics, and the World’s Most Expensive Experiment, Oxford University Press, 2011.
*Crease, Robert P. and Mann, Charles C., The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics, Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Gell-Mann, Murray, The Quark and the Jaguar, Little, Brown & Co., London, 1994.
Halpern, Paul, Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Somerset, NJ, 2009.
*Hoddeson, Lillian, Brown, Laurie, Riordan, Michael, and Dresden, Max, The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Lederman, Leon (with Dick Teresi), The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, Bantam Press, London, 1993.
Nambu, Yoichiro, Quarks, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 1981.
Pais, Abraham, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Riordan, Michael, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics, Simon & Shuster, New York, 1987.
Sample, Ian, Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle, Virgin Books, London, 2010.
t’ Hooft, Gerard, In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Veltman, Martinus, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics, World Scientific, London, 2003.
Weinberg, Steven, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, Vintage, London, 1993.