A wonderfully readable account of scientific development over the past
five hundred years, focusing on the lives and achievements of individual
scientists, by the bestselling author of In Search of Schrödinger's
Cat
In this ambitious new book, John Gribbin tells the stories of the people
who have made science, and of the times in which they lived and worked.
He begins with Copernicus, during the Renaissance, when science replaced
mysticism as a means of explaining the workings of the world, and he
continues through the centuries, creating an unbroken genealogy of not
only the greatest but also the more obscure names of Western science, a
dot-to-dot line linking amateur to genius, and accidental discovery to
brilliant deduction.
By focusing on the scientists themselves, Gribbin has written an
anecdotal narrative enlivened with stories of personal drama, success
and failure. A bestselling science writer with an international
reputation, Gribbin is among the few authors who could even attempt a
work of this magnitude. Praised as "a sequence of witty,
information-packed tales" and "a terrific read" by The Times upon its
recent British publication, The Scientists breathes new life into such
venerable icons as Galileo, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Linus
Pauling, as well as lesser lights whose stories have been undeservedly
neglected. Filled with pioneers, visionaries, eccentrics and madmen,
this is the history of science as it has never been told before.