Classic Books of Science?

half_cocked_jack writes "What are the classic books of science from throughout history? I'm currently reading On the Origin of Species on my Kindle 2, and it's sparked an interest in digging up some of the classic books of science. I'm looking for books from the ancient and medieval worlds and books from the golden ages of scientific discovery. Books like: Galileo's The Starry Messenger; Newton's Principia; Copernicus's On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres; and Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle. I know that I can likely find these books in a format I can use on my Kindle (found a few on Gutenberg already), but what I need is a checklist of these books to guide my reading. Suggestions?"

Comments

Well, a modern classic

[OldFish]

Einstein's relativity paper is free:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5001

Physics

[clare-ents]

Einstein, The principles of relativity.

Very readable papers on special relativity, essentially the same way it's taught now in a modern physics class (at least mine was).

Feynman, QED

Smart arse replaces great big pile of maths with pretty pictures with arrows in. Excellent.

Copernicus, On the revolutions of Heavenly Spheres,

Won't tell you very much, but worth it for the sheer horror of deriving the motions of the planets as viewed from Earth without using fractions.

Feynman, Lectures

The best presentation of a decent physics course there is. May only be comprehensible to people who already have a physics degree, I never tried reading it until I already had most of one at which point I was entranced.