Первая сотня
Всегда интересно, когда кто-то берет на себя смелость разбить на ранги. Вот источник, в нем сказано о первой сотне лучших научных книг ХХ века
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-books-that-shaped-a-century-of-science

100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science
Philip, Phylis Morrison:

Biography
Charles Darwin, Autobiography (1950)
G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)
James Watson, The Double Helix (1968)
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979)
Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Field Guides
William Garnett, Aerial Photographs (1994)
Jonathan Kingdon, East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa (1971)
Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (1998, 3rd ed.)
Ward Ritchie Press, Photo-Atlas of the United States: A Complete Photographic Atlas of the USA Using Satellite Photography (1975)
Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds (1934)
Allan Sandage, The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies (1961)
John S. Shelton, Geology Illustrated (1966)
John Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez (1941)
H. Bradley, W. A. Craigie, J. A. H. Murray and C. T. Onions (eds.),
Oxford English Dictionary (1933)
Liberty Hyde Bailey, Hortus (1930)

The Physical Sciences
The Ferris book is a comprehensive, up-to-date look at cosmology, the science of the whole shebang. Hawking's personal account, done years back, became the unrivalled science bestseller. Weinberg places theoretical physics in a personal, candid and literary context not found elsewhere. Weyl's masterpiece of simplicity uses a brief, beautiful set of images to outline a profound mathematical idea. The entire list is most rewarding.
The second, more technical list contains the Einstein volume with all the original papers of his magical year, 1905. The Russell-Whitehead volumes are a monument of their epoch too, hard going (and since Godel, even inconclusive). Cyril Smith's essays on materials in technology and in art are unforgettable.

Explorations
Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang (1997)
George Gamow, One, Two, Three? Infinity (1947)
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988)
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, The Mind's I (1981)
Kenneth Hsu and William Ryan, The Mediterranean Was a Desert (1983)
Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers (1985)
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1984)
John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (1998)
Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot (1994)
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1992)
Herman Weyl, Symmetry (1952)

Monographs
Paul Dirac, Quantum Mechanics (1930)
Albert Einstein, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1902–09 (1930)
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Fractals (1977)
Linus Pauling, Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939)
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead,
Principia Mathematica (1910–13, 3 vols.)
Cyril Smith, Search For Structure (1981)
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944)
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics (1948)
R. B. Woodward and Roald Hoffmann, Conservation of Orbital Symmetry (1970)
Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (1922)
Richard Feynman, QED (1985)
Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming (1968)

History of Science
A. Pais, Inward Bound (1986)
John Desmond Bernal, Science in History (1954)
Paul de Kruif, Microbe Hunters (1926)
Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science (reprinted as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science) (1952)
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936)
Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (1947)
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard and A. R. Hall,
A History of Technology (1954)
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979)

Science Itself Examined
Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (1945)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Peter B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble (1967)
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959)
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1945)

Many-Sided Life
Jacob and Monod, long colleagues in Paris, offer two brief assessments of molecular biology. Before them came Schrodinger, life as the work of a protean crystal—realized by the double helix. Here too are the jeweled plankton and fish of the seas, the calls of birds, the ecology of countryside, ice and jungle, viral threats, dinosaur finds, all cells—many-sided life viewed many ways.

Explorations
William Beebe, Jungle Days (1925)
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
John R. Horner and James Gorman, Digging Dinosaurs (1988)
Francois Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (1982)
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986)
Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring (1952)
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (1971)
Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (1994)
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (1974)

Monographs
The Evolution of Life Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata, Tropical Nature (1984)
Stephen S. Morse (ed.), Emerging Viruses (1993)
Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life? (1944)
D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917)
Vladimir Vernadskii, The Biosphere (1998; French version, 1929)
Alister Clavering Hardy, The Open Sea: Its Natural History (1956–59, 2 vols.)
Edward O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (1971)

The Evolution of Life
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1977)
Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch (1994)
Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (1940)
Ronald Aylmer Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)
George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (1966)
Howard Gruber, with Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (1974)

The Nature and Rise of Our Own Species
Explorations
Elizabeth Barber, Women's Work (1994)
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (1972)
Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1965)
Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (1988)
R. L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye (1970)
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
L. S. B. Leakey, Adam's Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture (1934)
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994)
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (1996)
George B. Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (1963)
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (1987)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959)
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Thought and Language (1962)
Charles Leonard Wooley, Discovering the Royal Tombs at Ur (1969)

Monographs
C. K. Brain, Hunter and Hunted (1981)
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structure (1957)
Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920)
Mary Leakey; Laetoli: A Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania (1987)
Richard Lee, The Kung San (1979)
Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art (1967)
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1986)
Peter and Iona Oppie, Children's Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Duelling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, Pretending (1969)
Ivan P. Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (1926)
Oskar Pfungst, Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology (1911)

в художественной литературе вкус автора таков:
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle (1963)
H. G. Wells, Tono Bungay (1908)
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

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конечно, не по всем темам, вовсе не по всем наукам. Но ведь можно дополнить? Тут ведь что приятно - не литература, не только о вкусах речь. Цена деления - в целый век, "лучшие книги ХХ века" - наверное, не для того, чтобы вспоминать точные годы публикаций, а чтобы ощутить масштаб. Не за последние 10-30 лет, а вон как. Чтобы самые лучшие выделить.

А? Кажется, это было бы очень интересно.