The scientists A history of science told through the lives of its greatest inventors

Review by Choice Review

Admirably ambitious in scope, Gribbin (Univ. of Sussex, UK) appealingly relates the history of Western science from the Renaissance up to the end of the last century through the accomplishments of the scientists who "wrote," as it were, that history. He finds a remarkably coincidental starting date for the story because Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica were published in the same year, 1543. But he is also quick to say he does not believe that individual genius drives the engine of scientific advancement (except perhaps for Newton). Rather, Gribbin posits that scientific progress is determined by the societal ethos and by technological invention. Thus, the discoveries of one researcher could for the most part have just as easily, sooner or later, been made by another researcher. Interwoven nonetheless with the accounts of individual discoveries are very brief (given the territory to be covered) anecdotal biographies of the discovering scientists--interesting details, to be sure, but they leave one eager for more. Indeed, the book is aimed, it would seem, at a lay readership, and as such trades off depth for breadth. Still, that breadth is extraordinary. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates. M. Schiff CUNY College of Staten Island

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

This is the most ambitious effort yet by astrophysicist Gribbin, who has written numerous biographical and topic-specific works. Gribbin uses biography as a vehicle to traverse science's history from Copernicus to the principals of the quantum and relativity revolutions. Or were they revolutions? Readers will find the author arguing against the notion; he promotes an evolutionary view in the biographical vignettes, describing how the greats in science, at some stage, tussled with the authority of predecessors. Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy were impediments nudged, not shoved, aside. Gribbin notes the arguments that gave them apparent weight until lifted by a contradicting experiment or observation. And there was a remarkable number of colorful figures among the performers noted here, with Gribbin alighting upon the likes of Benjamin Thompson, the American Tory who became a Bavarian count, discovered truths about heat, and founded the laboratory that produced Michael Faraday, one of the most storied lives in science. Populated by such characters and replete with scientific clarity, Gribbin's work is the epitome of what a general-interest history of science should be. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2003 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

As expansive (and as massive) as a textbook, this remarkably readable popular history explores the development of modern science through the individual stories of philosophers and scientists both renowned and overlooked. Prolific popular science writer Gribbin wants to use the lives of these thinkers to show how they "reflect the society in which they lived, and... the way the work of one specific scientist followed from that of another." While he makes this case well, the real joy in the book can be found in the way Gribbin (who has made complex science understandable in such books as In Search of Schr?dinger's Cat) revels not just in the development of science but also in the human details of his subjects' lives. He writes, "Science is made from people, not people by science," and the book weaves together countless stories of the people who made science, from the arrogance and political maneuverings of Tycho Brahe in the 16th century to Benjamin Thompson's exploits during the American Revolution as a spy for the British and his later life as Count Rumford of Bavaria (in the realm of science, he studied convection and helped discredit the caloric theory of heat). Though the names and discoveries become more and more prolific as the book reaches the 19th century, Gribbin does an admirable job of organizing his narrative around coherent topics (e.g., "The Darwinian Revolution," "Atoms and Molecules," "The Realm of Life"), leaving the reader exhausted by the journey, but in awe of the personalities and the sheer scope of 500 years' worth of scientific discovery. Illus. (Nov. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Fans of Gribbin's earlier works-In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, Q is for Quantum, and Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science-will not be disappointed with this anecdotal history. Well written and scholarly, it is still accessible, if not downright entertaining, for the general reader. Starting with the Renaissance, Gribbin traces the development of science over the past 500 years through the lives of the people who made it. From Copernicus and Galileo to Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling, Gribbin carefully places the individual in the time in which he or she lived, a real asset. He also clearly understands the important role that technology played in making science's greatest discoveries possible. Thus, Gribbin accurately shows the development of science to be the result of the interplay among three factors: the person, the historical time, and the available technology. As he points out, it should be no surprise that the birth of science coincided with the development of the telescope and the microscope. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries or as a text for the history of science.-James Olson, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Five hundred years of science and scientists, by astronomer turned prolific popular-science writer Gribbin (The Birth of Time, 2000, etc.). Gribbin begins with Copernicus, a theorist who conducted no experiments and relied on the observations of others: a precursor rather than a scientist in the modern sense. Gribbin nominates William Gilbert, an Elizabethan Englishman, as the first true scientist, citing experiments that laid the foundation for an understanding of magnetism and electricity. Galileo knew Gilbert's work and adopted his methods, emphasizing experiment as the one sure route to scientific truth. Gribbin traces that theme through the lives and work of scientists down the ages. Refreshingly, he avoids the temptation to paint his subjects as unique geniuses, often pointing out cases such as Alfred Russel Wallace's independently duplicating the work of Darwin. Newton was driven by his intense rivalries with almost every other scientist of his day, notably Robert Hooke, the leading light of the Royal Society at the time when it lay on the cutting edge of discovery. The French Revolution was a dangerous time for scientists, leading to the death of Lavoisier, the founding father of chemistry; Cuvier, a central figure in biology, rode out the Reign of Terror by making himself an indispensable administrator. The opportunistic Benjamin Thompson changed his coat and his nationality numerous times, while performing work that led to a basic understanding of heat. Physicist George Gamow was an inveterate trickster who added a colleague's name to one of his papers to get a play on words. Gribbin entertainingly records their triumphs and eccentricities, the near-misses and the rival claims for precedence of the giants and the spear-carriers, always with a firm eye to the main story. A thoroughly readable survey of scientific history, spiced by a brilliant and memorable cast of characters. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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From the Introduction My aim is to outline the development of Western science, from the Renaissance to (roughly) the end of the twentieth century. This means leaving to one side the achievements of the Ancient Greeks, the Chinese, and the Islamic scientists and philosophers who did so much to keep the search for knowledge about our world alive during the period that Europeans refer to as the Dark and Middle Ages. But it also means telling a coherent story, with a clear beginning in both space and time, of the development of the world view that lies at the heart of our understanding of the Universe, and our place in it today. For human life turned out to be no different from any other kind of life on Earth. As the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace established in the nineteenth century, all you need to make human beings out of amoebas is the process of evolution by natural selection, and plenty of time. All the examples I have mentioned here highlight another feature of the story-telling process. It is natural to describe key events in terms of the work of individuals who made a mark in science - Copernicus, Vesalius, Darwin, Wallace and the rest. But this does not mean that science has progressed as a result of the work of a string of irreplaceable geniuses possessed of a special insight into how the world works. Geniuses maybe (though not always); but irreplaceable certainly not. Scientific progress builds step by step, and as the example of Darwin and Wallace shows, when the time is ripe, two or more individuals may make the next step independently of one another. It is the luck of the draw, or historical accident, whose name gets remembered as the discoverer of a new phenomenon. What is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution `coincides' with the development of the telescope and the microscope. I can think of only one partial exception to this situation, and even there I would qualify the exception more than most historians of science do. Isaac Newton was clearly something of a special case, both because of the breadth of his scientific achievements and in particular because of the clear way in which he laid down the ground rules on which science ought to operate. Even Newton, though, relied on his immediate predecessors, in particular Galileo Galilei and Rene´ Descartes, and in that sense his contributions followed naturally from what went before. If Newton had never lived, scientific progress might have been held back by a few decades. But only by a few decades. Edmond Halley or Robert Hooke might well have come up with the famous inverse square law of gravity; Gottfried Leibniz actually did invent calculus independently of Newton (and made a better job of it); and Christiaan Huygens's superior wave theory of light was held back by Newton's espousal of the rival particle theory. None of this will stop me from telling much of my version of the history of science in terms of the people involved, including Newton. My choice of individuals to highlight in this way is not intended to be comprehensive; nor are my discussions of their individual lives and work intended to be complete. I have chosen stories that represent the development of science in its historical context. Some of those stories, and the characters involved, may be familiar; others (I hope) less so. But the importance of the people and their lives is that they reflect the society in which they lived, and by discussing, for example, the way the work of one specific scientist followed from that of another, I mean to indicate the way in which one generation of scientists influenced the next. This might seem to beg the question of how the ball got rolling in the first place - the `first cause'. But in this case it is easy to find the first cause - Western science got started because the Renaissance happened. And once it got started, by giving a boost to technology it ensured that it would keep on rolling, with new scientific ideas leading to improved technology, and improved technology providing the scien- tists with the means to test new ideas to greater and greater accuracy. Technology came first, because it is possible to make machines by trial and error without fully understanding the principles on which they operate. But once science and technology got together, progress really took off. I will leave the debate about why the Renaissance happened when and where it did to the historians. If you want a definite date to mark the beginning of the revival of Western Europe, a convenient one is 1453, the year the Turks captured Constantinople (on 29 May). By then, many Greek-speaking scholars, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had already fled westwards (initially to Italy), taking their archives of documents with them. There, the study of those documents was taken up by the Italian humanist movement, who were interested in using the teaching found in classical literature to re-establish civilization along the lines that had existed before the Dark Ages. This does rather neatly tie the rise of modern Europe to the death of the last vestige of the old Roman Empire. But an equally important factor, as many people have argued, was the depopulation of Europe by the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which led the survivors to question the whole basis of society, made labour expensive and encour- aged the invention of technological devices to replace manpower. Even this is not the whole story. Johann Gutenberg's development of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century had an obvious impact on what was to become science, and discoveries brought back to Europe by another technological development, sailing ships capable of crossing the oceans, transformed society. Dating the end of the Renaissance is no easier than dating the beginning - you could say that it is still going on. A convenient round number is 1700; but from the present perspective an even better choice of date might be 1687, the year Isaac Newton published his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) and, in the words of Alexander Pope, `all was light'. The point I want to make is that the scientific revolution did not happen in isolation, and certainly did not start out as the mainspring of change, although in many ways science (through its influence on technology and on our world view) became the driving force of Western civilization. I want to show how science developed, but I don't have space to do justice to the full historical background, any more than most history books have space to do justice to the story of science. I don't even have space to do justice to all of the science here, so if you want the in-depth story of such key concepts as quantum theory, evolution by natural selection or plate tectonics, you will have to look in other books (including my own). My choice of events to highlight is necessarily incomplete, and therefore to some extent subjective, but my aim is to give a feel for the full sweep of science, which has taken us from the realization that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe and that human beings are `only' animals, to the theory of the Big Bang and a complete map of the human genome in just over 450 years. Excerpted from The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors by John Gribbin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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