Book Review: Science, A History by John Gribbin

• When Copernicus published a book in 1543 suggesting a model of the Universe with Sun at the center (correcting the earlier misconception of Earth being the center), the original edition of 400 copies did not even sell out!
• Galileo was trained in Medicine, but taught Mathematics at a University in Pisa and he was an Astronomer by practice. Apart from compass, he built his own telescope which was the best in his times.
• Unbiased historians find it impossible to say whether Newton or Hooke made more significant contribution. Not just in Mathematics and Physics, Newton had talents to rewrite history in his own favor as well.
• When James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769, it was not an immediate commercial success but two decades later, it was at the heart of industrial revolution.
• Marie Curie was banned from main laboratories for fear that sexual excitement of her presence there might prevent any research getting done.

 

Science is impersonal but scientists are not. Many of them struggled to make their ends meet but were driven by the pleasure of finding things out. They did not want to believe what their religion or society asked them to believe. They rather preferred experiments and equations to find the truth. One invention led to another and misconceptions were corrected with better explanations. It led to evolution of science. From Galileo to Stephen Hawking, science not only grew in volumes, it changed the way we live our lives. There were numerous scientists who dedicated their lives in pursuit of science. And standing on the shoulders of such giants were Newton and Einstein.

 

The history of science in the last 500 years is documented in this 600-page book through the lives of scientists who created it. You won’t appreciate science much by just going through a textbook. They are just theoretical equations and experiments. But when you understand the people who developed them along with their lives, their challenges and dilemma, you would appreciate more how the science we study came into existence.

 

John Gribbin, author of this book is a British science writer (has many popular science books to his credit), an astrophysicist and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His books are not only fascinating reads but make the science concepts such as quantum mechanics easier for a common man to understand and relate.