The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors

By John Gribbin

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400060133
• ISBN13: 9781400060139
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 646 Pages
• Weight: 2.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

How to Get Your Nonscientist Teenager Interested in Science

This is the book to buy for that teenager who loves the humanities, religion, literature but is AFRAID of science. Astrophysicist John Gribbin writes superbly about the great developments of Western Science from Copernicus to Einstein or Mendel, Darwin, and Watson and Crick. He truly has a gift for explaining the basics of science without burying the reader in mathematics or technical language. The strategy is to explain scientific advances through the lives of the great men who pushed the limits of scientific advances...such as the race to discover the spiral helix structure of DNA or the thought experiments of Farady and Einstein.

Highly Readable

I found this book very enlightening. Considering the enormity of the task Gribbin cut out for himself, I was impressed by the achievement. The right amount of information, both personal and scientific, was presented for each scientist. I especially liked the section headings that helped me find my way around when refering to something written earlier. I never got lost in the sea of names and events that usually mark a book of this type. Gribbin's style is highly readable. I am a science teacher and will be using this in class.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

As an engineer, this book explained the history of discovery of most of the topics that were brushed upon during my engineering undergraduate degree. The author gives a detailed history of the key discoveries that scientists have made (including those not often recognized) and the key discoveries that were passed from scientist to scientist to allow them to stand upon each others shoulders to find the next discovery. This is not a detailed science book, but it is an excellent history book that goes into enough technical detail for this engineer without getting into equations and derivations. I recommend this book for those truly interested in the story of how the laws of science were discovered and how past scientists have helped us to get where we are today.

Simply the best

This is undoubtedly John Gribbin's best book, and only a real nit picker could object to the fact that it doesn't cover every single scientist who ever lived. Where Gribbin is so good is in weaving the story of scientists'lives together to tell a gripping story of how science as a whole has developed from the time of Copernicus to the beginning of the 21st century. The chapter about Benjamin Thomson aka Lord Rumford is particularly good, and Gribbin delights in telling you about the weirdness of many of his subjects, including Henry Cavendish who was the richest man in England, and a great scientist, but only ate boiled mutton. Even if you don't care about the science, this is still grsat history.