Scientists and their Discoveries

This title is one of a series on ‘Documenting the Past’, supported by extensive extracts from original documents. There are astronomers, chemists, physicists, geologists and biologists: 21 main characters, including Marie Curie, Darwin, Einstein, Faraday, Hawking, Hubble, Mendel and Pasteur. Brief biographies and descriptions of their work are supplemented by quotations from notebooks, letters and autobiographies. There are some historical errors and misattributions, and some of the technical explanations within this reviewer’s competence are misleading. Three examples: The ‘Big Bang’ is not believed to have been ‘caused by the gradual build-up of a hot, dense cloud of gas’ (p.13); Einstein’s special theory of relativity does not apply ‘only to objects that [are] stationary or moving at fixed speeds’ (p.36); The angular deflection of starlight by the Sun, quoted from a letter of Einstein’s (p.37), written two years before he published his theory, is not the value he predicted at all, as claimed in the text; it is an approximation to the value calculated by Einstein from Newton’s theory before Einstein had devised his own theory. The value predicted by Einstein, and confirmed later, was about twice as much.