The Scientists: An Epic of Discovery [Hardcover]

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!

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.

A number of recent popular science books such as Why Does E=mc2? have explained baffling theories by outlining the history of the ideas themselves & explaining how they developed. So scientific history is not just about paying homage to the past but also provides excellent insight into the foundations of current scientific thinking.

This book gives us a concise overview of this history. It's beautifully presented in the style of a 'coffee-table' book with lots of pictures, but it also has more satisfying textual content than this format would imply. It details the lives & works of 43 great thinkers from various disciples, including astronomers from Galileo to Hubble, physicists such as Einstein, the self-labelled 'naturalist' Darwin & 'father of psychology' Freud. Each scientist has 6-8 pages dedicated to them, containing illustrations, a full-page portrait/photograph & a concise overview of their work. These overviews are written by their fellow scientists & in the cases of more recent figures, by people who actually met them (as claimed by Patrick Moore in his section about Hubble). Due to their brevity, many are a little dry, merely listing the scientists' works & influences but a few give insight into their characters as well. Collectively, bringing brief biographies of luminaries from such varied disciplines together really drums home the message that in science, there really is no substitute for work, work & more work; even those 'eureka' moments are the result of years of research.

For those who are interested in learning more about science & how it works, this book provides an invaluable insight. If you flicked through a copy in your local bookshop, the format may deceive you into thinking it's all nice pictures & no content but I'm glad to report that this is not the case at all. Nevertheless, I found it was most easily digested in small portions.