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  • Published: 27 August 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141042220
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 672
Categories:

Science: A History




"This book is the product of immense learning, and a lifetime spent working out how to write in a vivacious way about science and scientists. He moves me to bestow a reviewer's cliche I long ago vowed never to use: he has written a tour-de-force", Robert Macfarlane, Spectator.

In this book, John Gribbin tells the story of the people who made science and the turbulent times they lived in. As well as famous figures such as Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein, there are also the obscure, the eccentric, even the mad. This diversecast includes, among others, Andreas Vesalius, landmark 16th-century anatomist and secret grave-robber; the flamboyant Galileo, accused of heresy for his ideas; the obsessive, competitive Newton, who wrote his rivals out of the history books; GregorMendel, the Moravian monk who founded modern genetics; and Louis Agassiz, so determined to prove the existence of ice ages that he marched his colleagues up a mountain to show them the evidence.

  • Published: 27 August 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141042220
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 672
Categories:

About the author

John Gribbin

John Gribbin gained a PhD from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (then under the leadership of Fred Hoyle) before working as a science journalist for Nature and later New Scientist. He is the author of a number of bestselling popular science books, including In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, In Search of the Multiverse, Science: A History and The Universe: A Biography. He is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex and in 2000 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

John Gribbin is one of today's greatest writers of popular science and the author of bestselling books including In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, Stardust, Science: A History, Deep Simplicity and The Fellowship. He is famous to his many fans for making complex ideas simple, and says that his aim in his writing - much of it done with his wife Mary Gribbin - is to share his sense of wonder at the strangeness of the universe with his readers. John Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. He also enjoys working on science-fiction stories in his spare time, and does most of his writing in a shed in his back garden.

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