"Understanding God's grand design using the knowledge we have so far is one of the best intellectual journeys a young person can enjoy. A childlike curiosity is essential to break assumptions and ask simple questions that have unbelievable answers. Bid for a hand-picked collection of books that connect our understanding of the limitlessness of our universe to how we split an atom, and the universal thread that ties them all together--Math. The books come with a two-hour coffee and conversation with Subbu about these books that hopefully will stimulate middle-schoolers to retain their curiosity of the unknown.

List of books:

The Canon by Natalie Angier - From the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of Woman, a playful, passionate guide to the science all around us. The Canon is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what is actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, and what our liver cells do when we eat a caramel.

Strange Matters by Tom Siegfried - Twentieth-century physics was a long, strange trip indeed. Stranger still is what might lie ahead. In this startling book, science writer Tom Siegfried takes us into a weird world of quark nuggets, selectrons, quintessence, and quantum cosmology and introduces us to some of the most imaginative ideas being batted about by scientists today.

Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Bringing together more than forty of Tyson's favorite essays: Death by Black Hole? explores a myriad of cosmic topics, from what it would be like to be inside a black hole to the movie industry's feeble efforts to get its night skies right.

The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart - Re-creating the frustrations, excitements, and obsessions of 1932, the "miracle year" of British physics, Brian Cathcart reveals in rich detail the astonishing story behind the splitting of the atom. The most celebrated scientific experiment of its time, it would lead to one of mankind's most devastating inventions--the atomic bomb.

The Pleasure of finding things out by Richard Feynman - A magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman--from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life-in-science, a life like no other.

Cats Paws and Catapults by Steven Vogel - Full of ideas and well-explained principles that will bring new understanding of everyday things to both scientists and non-scientists alike,

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos - John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds.