The Scientists: An Epic of Discovery

This is a lovely book that takes you through the story of scientific discovery, showing you that big breakthroughs are often a culmination of many other's effort too. My children love reading about the various scientists as well.

Recent years have seen the publication of a number of `coffee table' books on science. The term is sometimes taken to imply derision, but I don't share that view; within their limitations, they have their place. This one is a collection of mini-biographies of great scientists from ancient times to the modern period. They are grouped loosely in themes based on structural size, starting from the largest, `Universe', and proceeding through `Earth', `Molecules and Matter' to `Inside the Atom', and ending with a section called `Body and Mind'. The criterion for inclusion is fairly arbitrary. The introduction says a common theme is that `... all of them worked habitually and continually at science and were prolifically productive', but of course that could be said of many more who were not included.The contributions themselves are usually well written, but necessarily very short, at most a few pages. Because of this they are sometimes terse and what one gets is little more than a collection of facts. Although some attempt is made to set the work of the subjects in context, the brevity of the contributions makes this difficult. For example, in the article on Crick and Watson, the contribution of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin are mentioned in a couple of one-liners. (On the other hand, this article does provide a little of the personal relationship between the two men.) Perhaps this is not such a bad thing, as it may encourage readers to delve deeper. There is a good Further Reading section at the end of the book to help with this. Like all good `coffee table' books it is lavishly illustrated with excellent photographs and figures, many of which I have never seen before. Those of laboratories are particularly interesting, because they give a feel for the environment in which scientists in earlier times actually worked (many would be closed down by modern health and safety inspectors!).The book would make a good present for someone with a general interest in science, especially a young person with aspirations to be a scientist.

This is a Thames and Hudson book! You feel and smell it as soon as you open the cover! The binding is superlative, the paper cream and heavy, and it is built to last!In its 290 pages it gives a biography of 40 scientists who have changed the way we see the world. I would view these 7 page biographies as tasters, tempting the reader to explore further if anything appeals, and surely something will. As well as the usual suspects, such as Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, you will find other less well known scientists whose work is now part of our thoughts.For instance, James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physicist whose work laid the foundations of all that makes this world what it is: electricity, radio, bluetooth, WiFi, TV, and everything else electromagnetic. Alfred Wegener postulated continental drift, the mechanism that drives volcanoes and earthquakes as the material of the Earth is slowly subjected to convection currents. Alan Turing showed theoretically how a computer could be built. Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered the neural structure of the brain. The Leakeys found the origins of human life in East Africa.Each, in his way, made a fundamental contribution to our knowledge and understanding, and this coffee table book celebrates their lives and works in words and pictures. It is a book I like a lot!

Previous to reading The Scientists, I read Simon Flynn's excellent  The Science Magpie: A Hoard of Fascinating Facts, Stories, Poems, Diagrams and Jokes, Plucked from Science and Its History , and because he had mentioned in it so many eminent scientists that I'd never heard of, I decided to follow it up by reading a selection of essays about forty-three of the world's most famous scientists that is contained within this substantial volume. This is a gloriously produced hardcover edition with a multitude of fantastic reproductions of portraits, photographs, maps, documents and diagrams from the period that help to make the scientists and their individual achievements more accessible to the reader. These short biographies are written by different authors, each an expert in their field and an established scientist, and the enthusiasm and admiration for their subject comes easily across. For some it was more difficult than others to bring the person behind the scientific accomplishments to life; in several cases I found that the individual was entirely hidden behind an enumeration of their various attainments. Others were clearly written by experts in the field for other experts, so that I, as an interested layperson, struggled to follow. Yet others, among them Patrick Moore's article about Edwin Powell Hubble, were an enormous pleasure to read, because they managed to get across the person and the science in for a non-expert easy-to-understand language. Some reviewers have called this volume a "coffee-table book", rather unjustly, I find. These are scientists that, in the words of Virginia Morell, "shattered old ideas and ways of thinking"; they dispensed with dogma and opened the way for a scientific understanding of the world that, in large parts, is still valid to this day and was used by subsequent pioneers to build their ideas on in turn. Their names should be, if not household names, then at least much better known. I chose to read this book from cover to cover, other readers will probably decide to only read about the section they're interested in: Universe, Earth, Molecules and Matter, Inside the Atom, and Body and Mind; each part is preceded by a brief introduction, and there's an extensive bibliography added at the end. Of course this is a rather subjective selection, and others may (and will) disagree with the choice of scientists chosen and those who were omitted (I, for one, had hoped to see a few more women chosen (there are only three)), but this is an excellent introduction to some of the brightest minds history has ever produced and a fascinating foray into how we came to see the world today: built on a succession of discoveries and ideas. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in science and its history.