Hacker News Books

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is an imaginative (read fictional) adventure into how Einstein might have come up with his paradigm-making ideas while working as a patent clerk in Bern.. Good coast-to-coast airplane read.

The books I always fall back on giving as a gift:

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds.

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds.

Remembrance of Earth's Past by Cixin Liu
It is hard to explain how deep my love for this series is. My all time favorite science fiction but what it is is just page after page of ideas that get more and more fantastical. Can't recommend this enough

The Three Body Problem (PartI)
The Dark Forest (Part II)
Death's End (Part III)

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
and maybe
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

This reminds me of a passage from "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. It's the difference between mechanical time & body time. You can read it here: http://members.iif.hu/visontay/ponticulus/britannicus/einste... (the 24 April 1905 entry).

Slightly off-topic (as usual), but this reminds me of the book Einstein's Dreams. Different ways of thinking about time.

"The book consists of 30 chapters, each exploring one dream about time that Einstein had during this period."

The chapters are versions of the world where time has different rules. In one, the closer you get to the town square, the slower time moves. In another, people build higher and higher houses, since you age more slowly the higher you are from the surface of the Earth. And so on...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams