Books like Newton's Principia for the common reader by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Stephen Hawking explains the fundamental physics of the universe—space, time, cosmology, black holes, and the Big Bang—in clear, accessible language.

Explains the vision of the universe behind string theory, including new dimensions, black holes, and mysterious phenomena in the cosmos.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos traces the history of science and the universe’s evolution, from ancient philosophers to modern discoveries, and explores the quest to understand life beyond Earth.

In *Lost in Math*, Sabine Hossenfelder critiques the blind faith in elegance that has stalled progress in physics, urging a return to empirical reality.

The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 1962-63 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. These lectures represent a useful record of his viewpoints and some of his insights into gravity and its application to cosmology, superstars, wormholes, and gravitational waves at that particular time. The lectures also contain a number of fascinating digressions and asides on the foundations of physics and other issues. . Characteristically, Feynman took an untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the Principle of Equivalence.

The Birth of a New Physics traces humanity’s quest from the 16th century to modern times for a comprehensive theory of the moving universe.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.