Compelling stories of scientific breakthroughs and the great minds
behind them
Some of the most significant breakthroughs in science don't receive
widespread recognition until decades later, sometimes after their
author's death. Nobel Prize-winner Max Planck, whose black-body
radiation law established the discipline of quantum mechanics, stated
this as what has become known as Planck's Principle, commonly summarized
as "Science progresses one funeral at a time." In other words, for some
truly groundbreaking discoveries, a new consensus builds only when
proponents of the old consensus die off. Breakthrough discoveries
require a paradigm shift, and it takes time and new minds for the new
paradigm to be adopted.
In Innovators, Donald Kirsch tells the stories of sixteen visionary
scientists who suffered this fate, some now famous like Max Planck
himself, Galileo, and Gregor Mendel, and some less well known. Among
them are Barbara McClintock who, working with Indian corn, discovered
transposons, as known as jumping genes, which provide a major mechanism
driving biological evolution; Rachel Carson, catalyst for the
environmental movement; and Roger Revelle, the climatologist whose
findings were the first to be described by the term "global warming."
The breakthroughs cover fields from biology to medicine to physics and
earth sciences and include the discovery of prions, life-changing
treatments such as drugs for high blood pressure, ulcers, and organ
transplantation; the process of continental drift; and our understanding
of how molecules form matter.
