Most influential science book in my life....

Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. It shows how the different parts of the scientific method work, it's subject matter couldn't be more accessible (irregular vs regular nouns & verbs), it connects many disparate themes of cog sci & linguistics, and the writing is fluent and enjoyable.

but it changes all the time!!
i guess, Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker in showing organic models are the strongest and most pervasive, and Maynard-Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games.
Penrose, i am only half-way thru.

ooops! laypeople--strike my former.
matt ridley, nature via nuture and the red queen.

look razib, no links!

look razib, no links!

bless you!

For me, the most influential science book I read wasn't actually a science book per se but rather an evangelical one about the scientific method and the joys to be found in science. T'was Sagan's as well but I'm referring to "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark".

I can't absolutely guarantee you that this was THE most influential science book I read but as I read your post this one sprang to mind as the science oriented book that most inspired and delighted me in revelling in the pleasures of science. In fact, it's one of the very few books I've ever read from cover to cover. (Which I delight in saying for its self-depricating sound but which should be taken strictly literaly without any implied ignorance or lack of time spent reading.)

In fact, I was so impressed by the book that I even bought it for friends, bought the rest of Sagan's books (and read very very of them fully) and read the book all over again.

mnuez

Cosmos, (which I was inspired to read after seeing the PBS series in its first run). That broke the mental shackles of fundamentalism that had placed on me by my private Christian elementary school. The next biggest influence on me was Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach when I was in high school.

Steven Weinberg's Gravitation and Cosmology

I had been trying to figure out General Relativity.

I had read through Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's huge tome Gravitation and although I had been greatly impressed by its elegance, I still didn't "get it".

And then I read Weinberg's Chapter 6, where he describes mathematically, how using curvature and General Covariance alone, you could represent both Newton's laws of motion and gravity - Essentially the whole of classical physics. And suddenly I saw it: Non-Euclidean geometry was all. He goes on in Chapter 7 to derive the Einstein Field Equations, but by then I was already "sold".

It was better than sex! Perhaps an hour of pure Samadhi. And I saw that the human mind was even more beautiful than the galaxies. And I saw that Einstein was the greatest human mind that had ever lived, for he had completed Newton's program. And for the first time, I saw that science was Truth.

It was a vision that has stayed with me the rest of my life, so far.

I have spoken to many other physics people. A few of them have told me that GR was also a turning point for them. I think it may be the most beautiful scientific theory ever created by the human mind. So although I give the credit to Steven Weinberg for his clear and simple explanation, perhaps the real credit belongs to Albert Einstein himself.

Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague". It was mentioned in passing by my Infectious Disease instructor; I read it, and nothing has been the same since. I retired from the military, and have spent the last ten years studying Public Health. I'm now working towards a PhD in Epidemiology.

Ditto.