Reddit mentions of The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

In Search Of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin is a very readable physics and quantum physics history sketch. Might be slightly dated now, although I can't think of anything directly contradicted by recent work. Then again, I'm not actually a physicist :)

The Quark and the Jaguar is quite a bit more complicated, but still quite accessible to the layperson and has a lot of interesting stuff.

Slightly less sciency, more maths/logic/computation is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology is pretty much what the title says, although there's an awful lot about fruit-flies too. Quite a good review of the history of biological experimentation, especially genetics.

H2O: A Biography of Water from a previous editor of Nature, covers water across a variety of fields. The second half of the book is mostly a rant about cold fusion and homoeopathy though, from what I recall, but the first half makes up for it.

Most general-audience things by Richard Feynman are well worth the read. He's got some great physics lectures, and his autobiography (Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?) is fun, but more for the anecdotes than the science.

Those are off the top of my head. If its something in a particular field, I might have some other ideas I'm currently forgetting.

PHYSICS!

I kid, I kid
Feynman is one of a kind really, i have never really found someone who is like him murry
Murry Gell-Mann is good though

>What did he do that makes him so important?

Well, that's what he did - he's famous for being a communicator and popularizer of science, through his books, tv shows, etc. He's good at it, and science needs those folks as well.

He's not famous for his research. He's only got 13 peer-reviewed papers, which isn't that much in that period of time (a PhD thesis would typically be 4-5). None of them are famously significant either. That doesn't mean he's a bad scientist by any means - there are only so many hours in the day, he's got a family and a life, so obviously you wouldn't expect much time to be left over for research between the TV shows, books, public appearances and administrative duties for the Hayden planetarium. But strictly in terms of research, any Nobel laureate would be a more important scientist within their field.

There are great scientists who are also great popularizers: Feynman, Einstein, Hawking, Bohr. But there are equally great ones who are relatively obscure since they never wrote any popular-scientific stuff. Dirac, for instance. Or Gell-Mann, who tried but didn't have much success.

It's hardly surprising; ordinary people don't read research papers, and wouldn't have the background knowledge to gauge their importance anyway. So what else would they have to judge them on, other than how often they're seen and mentioned?