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 SCIENTIFICA HISTORICA

How the world’s great science books chart the history of knowledge

BRIAN CLEGG

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 ANCIENT WORLD
LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

2 RENAISSANCE IN PRINT
THE REVOLUTION IN BOOKS

3 MODERN CLASSICAL
VICTORIAN STABILITY

4 POST-CLASSICAL
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

5 THE NEXT GENERATION

TRANSFORMING UNDERSTANDING

BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PICTURE CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

T HE LATIN WORD scientifica describes something that produces

knowledge; from this broad scope, ‘science’ has come to describe our
understanding of the universe and the objects in it. One invention has been
central to the development of science. It’s not an incredibly complex piece
of hardware like the Large Hadron Collider, nor a sophisticated concept like
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but something far more familiar.
Without this technology, we would be left with little more than folk tales
and mysteries, because the invention is writing.
The importance of writing gives us the historica of the title, which
defines something based on research or producing an account – the
fundamental requirement for science to benefit from the written word. In
conceptual terms, writing is the technology that frees up communication
from the limits of time and space, destroying the shackles of the here and
now.
Most animals and even some plants communicate at some level, but
usually that communication is immediate and local, after which it is gone
forever. Writing transcends that limitation. I can take a book off the shelf
and read words that were written thousands of miles away and hundreds, or
even thousands, of years ago. There are probably more communications on
my bookshelves from dead people than there are from the living – and
certainly very few of the books I own were written by authors who live near
to me. Writing takes care of time and space. And that is its significance in
making science possible.
The power of writing for science is that books act as a storage medium
for ideas and discoveries; we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.
Science can only work as it does by building on the discoveries and theories
of others. Isaac Newton famously said (probably paraphrasing Robert
Burton), ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’
Newton’s ability to make use of others’ ideas was only possible thanks to
the written word. And books have been central to the spread of science in
this manner ever since humanity began to look for rational explanations of
what they observed around them over 2,500 years ago.
The role of books in transcending time and space is illustrated well in the
complex web of written works that ties together the ancient Greek world,
Islamic scientists of the latter part of the first millennium and medieval
European scientists. The ancient Greeks wrote many books on scientific
topics following the revolutionary ideas of Thales of Miletus, who seems to
have been amongst the first to make the shift from mythological
explanations of the natural world to ones that came closer to a scientific
view, from around 600 BCE.
THALES OF MILETUS, FIFTEENTH CENTURY
A representation of the sixth-century BCE ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Thales of
Miletus.

Many of the books of the ancient Greek period were lost as their
civilisation fell and their libraries were ransacked. Just one example gives a
poignant reminder of this. In a strange little book called The Sand-
Reckoner, the remarkable third-century BCE mathematician and engineer
Archimedes of Syracuse attempted to work out how many grains of sand it
would take to fill the universe. (By ‘universe’ he had in mind roughly what
we would think of as the solar system.) This was not quite as useless a task
as it sounds. The Greek number system of the time was very limited. The
largest named number was a myriad – 10,000 – which meant that the largest
number usually considered was a myriad myriads, or 100 million. But
Archimedes wanted to show that it was possible to go far beyond this
limitation by devising a new type of number that could easily handle any
required value. He demonstrated its flexibility by attempting the remarkable
calculation with grains of sand.
Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī
AL-KITĀB AL-MUKHTAṢAR FĪ ḤISĀB AL-ĞABR WA’L-MUQĀBALA, COPY, 1342
Covering algebra, calendars, inheritance and more, this was one of the principal mathematics textbooks
from its first publication circa 820 CE to the sixteenth century.

The Sand-Reckoner has survived the ravages of time, but in it,

Archimedes referred to another volume that otherwise we would not have
known existed. To work out the number of sand grains required,
Archimedes first used geometry to estimate the size of the universe. He
based his calculation on the accepted astronomical model of the time, where
the Earth was at the centre of the universe with everything orbiting around
it. But he also noted:

Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of some hypotheses, in which the
premises lead to the result that the universe is many times greater than that now so
called. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the
 Earth revolves around the Sun in the circumference of a circle, the Sun lying in the
middle of the orbit …

This lost book by Aristarchus, referenced only by Archimedes, is the

first known suggestion of what would become the heliocentric Copernican
theory. As is the case for so many other titles from the period, we will never
know exactly what Aristarchus wrote.
The books of ancient Greece were largely forgotten in Europe after the
fall of the Roman Empire, but as the interest in science grew in the
flourishing Islamic world, surviving Greek titles were translated into Arabic
and supplemented a growing body of new work, notably in mathematics,
physics and medicine. A good example of the new life being brought into
the books of the period was Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-
muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completing and
Balancing) by Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, born around
780 CE, possibly in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq. This title was not just
influential in the Islamic world. Although some Greek works did start to
filter directly back into European awareness in the thirteenth century,
Arabic works were first translated a century earlier – both Arabic
translations of Greek titles and the original work of scholars such as al-
Khwārizmī. Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar led the way in introducing practical
algebra to the West (the word ‘algebra’ comes from al-ğabr in the title). Al-
Khwārizmī tells the reader that the book would be useful for ‘inheritance,
legacies, partition, lawsuits, and trade’.
GREEK AND ARABIC PHILOSOPHY, FOURTEENTH CENTURY

The left-hand illustration depicts Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 377 BCE), Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808–73 CE),
and Claudius Galenus (ca. 131–ca. 201 CE) discussing ideas; the illustration on the right shows an Arabic
scribe working on a philosophical text.
 So, thanks to the medium of the book, ideas from ancient Greece helped
inspire the flourishing scientists, medics and mathematicians of the Arabic-
speaking world, while translations of the Greek books and new titles by
Islamic writers would kick-start a scientific revolution in Europe. These
titles linked thinkers who were separated by centuries, languages, distance
and culture. It was the books that tied everything together.
The written word
Of course, the physical mechanism used to convey written communication
has changed several times from the earliest days of science books.
Hippocrates’ or Aristotle’s notion of a book would be very different from a
modern-day ebook on a Kindle. Greek books came in the form of scrolls –
continuous sheets of writing material rolled up to form a cylinder. The
Greeks inherited the format from ancient Egypt, where papyrus made from
reeds would have been the standard medium, though later, parchment
(treated animal skins) and paper were also used.
Although scrolls were reasonably practical for relatively small books
(which is why ancient books, such as the books that make up the Bible,
appear so short to modern eyes), they presented difficulties as a text got
longer. A scroll could be a good number of metres long, which made it
unwieldy and easy to get into a tangle. With more substantial scrolls there
would often be spindles at each end, but managing these presented their
own challenges. The reader had to unroll the scroll from one spindle and
roll the far side onto another spindle. Depending on the orientation of the
text, they would then either read continuously down the scroll like an
autocue (which was particularly difficult on the wrists) or across it, with
text printed in chunks like pages, in which case, there was a considerable
delay in getting onto the next section of text. The format was particularly
cumbersome if the aim was to find a particular section rather than read the
book from beginning to end.
SEATED SCRIBE, CA. 2500–2350 BCE

An ancient Egyptian scribe working on a papyrus in a statue from the fifth dynasty.

Although the Romans made surprisingly little contribution to science

itself, they gave science books (and literature in general) a huge boost by
devising the codex, introduced in the first century CE. This was what we
now think of as a traditional book – sheaves of leaves, bound together,
which could be flicked through to a particular location and read easily page
by page. The codex was also significantly easier than a scroll to copy – a
process that was essential to the role of the book in spreading the word of
science. A whole industry of book copying sprung up, particularly within
religious institutions, which made it possible for books to transmit scientific
theories far beyond their initial sources. This first flowering of copying
blossomed wildly with the invention of the printing press, transforming the
written word from an extremely expensive vehicle for communication to
the few into a mechanism by which science could reach the masses.
TWO SCRIBES, CA. 2400 BCE

Fifth dynasty relief from the Mastaba of Akheteps at Saqqara, the necropolis for the ancient Egyptian
capital of Memphis.
WOMAN WITH BOOK, FIRST CENTURY CE

A portrait of a Roman woman known as Sappho holding a book and a stylus, painted on plaster at
Pompeii.

Printing presses per se date back as far as the codex, but early presses
relied on carving the original words and images in reverse, typically into a
wooden block, which would then be used to impress the ink onto the paper.
The woodcut technique (and later the process of lithography, based on
stones or metal plates marked with ink-resistant materials) would be used
for illustrations until modern photographic techniques could be
incorporated. However, woodcuts were slow to produce, making it
impractical to print many whole books of any length. Nonetheless, from the
ninth century, China was producing short scrolls using this method. The
earliest known book printed this way was the Dunhuang Diamond Sutra
from the year 868 CE. The Chinese would continue to print books from
wooden blocks well after their development of moveable type.
Like many great ideas, moveable type was a simple one. Rather than
trying to carve the whole of a book’s page into a single block, a large
quantity of individual characters on small blocks were produced, which
could be bound together to form a page. The set page could be used until
the print run was completed, then dismantled so that the individual blocks
could be reused to create another page. Setting up the page (a process called
typesetting) took a considerable amount of time – until mechanical
typesetting devices were introduced in the nineteenth century – but this was
only comparable to the time taken to painstakingly copy a few manuscript
pages, after which as many copies as were required could be run off.

DIAMOND SUTRA, COPY, 868 CE

This Chinese copy of the Indian Buddhist Diamond Sutra (below) is the world’s earliest dated, printed
book. The scroll is made from seven panels and includes a frontispiece (above).
 The early Chinese moveable-type blocks were made of ceramic or wood,
first developed in the eleventh century, though the earliest known book
printed using moveable type is Notes of the Jade Hall from 1193, which
used fired clay characters. By the fourteenth century, metal, which has the
advantage of being more durable, took over. Yet despite this early lead,
moveable type would not prove hugely popular in China in the way it
would rapidly become so in Europe when it was introduced in the fifteenth
century. This seems to have been down to the economy of scale. Those
using the Roman alphabet only had to produce around 50 varieties of type
block (lower case and upper case), leaving aside special fonts for titles. But
for the Chinese market, with characters running into the thousands, there
was far less benefit to be gained from moveable type over carving a whole
page as a block.
REVOLVING TYPECASE, 1313

A revolving table Chinese typecase with individual moveable type characters arranged primarily by
rhyming scheme, from Wang Zhen’s Nong Shu (Book of Agriculture).
PRINTING PRESS, 1440

An illustration of Laurens Janszoon Coster’s alleged invention of the printing press, the Dutch rival to
German printing-press inventor Johannes Gutenberg.
WOODBLOCK OF AMBROSIA ALTERA, CA. 1562

Woodblock designed by Giorgio Liberale and cut by Wolfgang Meyerpeck for the illustrated editions of
Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Herbár (1562), New Kreüterbuch (1563) and Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii
Dioscoridis Anarzabei de Medica materia (1565).

From technical documents to mass communication

As we move through the different periods of scientific writing, the shift in
the availability of texts was matched by a transformation in the nature of
science books. Initially, books were the means for one natural philosopher
(the predecessor to the term ‘scientist’, which was not introduced until the
1830s) to communicate with his or her peers. The standard language for
writing such books in Europe was Latin. This common language was a way
to enable information to pass easily from country to country, just as English
is used today as the standard language for scientific papers. However, it was
also a conscious mechanism to limit access to the information to the
cognoscenti. It was the practice of medieval natural philosophers, such as
the thirteenth-century English friar Roger Bacon, to keep scientific
knowledge from the common herd. Bacon noted (quoting an earlier source)
that ‘it is stupid to offer lettuces to an ass since he is content with his
thistles.’
By the seventeenth century, though, this attitude was changing. Galileo
wrote his scientific masterpieces in Italian, rather than Latin, with the aim
of reaching out to the public. Isaac Newton had intended the third volume
of his crowning glory, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to
work for a wider audience, until a falling out with colleagues changed his
mind. Other writers would specifically produce books that simplified the
heavyweight works of science for a wider audience. For example, the
eighteenth-century French scientist and author Émilie du Châtelet – who
wrote her own impressive review of contemporary science in Institutions de
Physique (Lessons in Physics) – not only translated Newton’s masterpiece,
the Principia, into French, but offered a commentary to make it more
approachable to the general reader.
Maurice Quentin de la Tour
MADAME DU CHÂTELET- LOMONT, OIL ON CANVAS, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Portrait of the French scientist and author Émilie du Châtelet.

With the establishment of scientific bodies, such as the Royal Society in

London, founded in 1660, scientific journals began to be available for the
more focused spreading of scientific ideas amongst experts. By the late
nineteenth century, scientists were still writing some books for their peers
(and textbooks would always be required for students), but these were
gradually eclipsed by books intended for the general public. A good
example of a title that straddled the two modes of scientific communication
was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology from the 1830s. Though
relatively technical, the three-volume book with coloured illustrations was
sufficiently approachable to bring the latest thinking in geology – with its
profound implications that the Earth was much older than had been
previously assumed – to a fascinated wider public. Similarly, when the great
nineteenth-century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell wrote his
heavy-duty Theory of Heat, even as lowly a publication as The Ironmonger
was able to recommend the book to its readers, noting that ‘the language
throughout is simple and the conclusions striking’.

Charles Lyell
PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY, JOHN MURRAY, 3 VOLS., 1830–3

Geological map of South East England: one of the coloured plates from volume III.

In modern times, while the majority of scientist-to-scientist

communication is in the form of emails, papers and press releases, the book
remains a significant format for communication of science to the wider
world. In that sense, science books have transformed from being a vehicle
for insider communication between the cognoscenti to something for all of
us to appreciate better just what science is doing and how it affects our
lives.
A standard cover
The move to wider science communication has paralleled a change in the
nature of book binding. Look at any pre-Victorian title and it is liable to
have a dull leather or fabric binding with little more to make it stand out
than some decoration on the spine. This is because many books right up to
the late nineteenth century would be produced with no covers at all – the
publisher would just provide the inner leaves, and these would be taken to a
bookbinder, whose job was to produce a uniform cover for the book to
match the rest of the owner’s library.
As more people began to read, more books were published with cheap
paper or board covers, making them instantly accessible. But it is notable
that, for example, when the pioneer motion photographer Eadweard
Muybridge travelled to America in the 1850s, his first source of income was
transporting unbound books from the London Printing and Publishing
Company, to sell for binding in the United States, starting in New York and
then moving out to the rapidly growing city of San Francisco.
The idea of a standard, illustrated publisher’s cover is a relatively
modern addition to the science book. Even as recently as the first half of the
twentieth century, most science books for the public were fairly dull in
appearance. It was thought that any attempt to be too popularist was simply
inappropriate for the material. In fact, many scientists who did write for the
public were frowned upon by their peers, who considered this an unworthy
role for a true scientist. It was only really in the 1960s that the covers of
popular science books would start to match the significance of their
contents, and the expectations of their audience.
Though by no means the first to achieve bestseller status, a standout
example of a book that was bought by a wide range of the public was A
Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, published in 1988. Famously
described as the title most likely to have been bought without ever being
read, Hawking’s book appeared on many shelves where volumes of science
would not normally be seen. Crucially, it made publishers realise that the
public had an appetite for popular science titles. Since its publication, the
genre has flourished, with hundreds of titles published each year.
The nature of science books has changed throughout the existence of the
written word. But they remain an essential marker of the progress of science
and of its relevance to our society. Science and the book have gone hand in
hand in forging the future.

Stephen Hawking
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, BANTAM PRESS, 1988
Hawking’s book, here in first edition, was hugely influential on the development of popular science: the
introduction by Carl Sagan was later replaced by Hawking’s own.
BOOKBINDERY WORKSHOP, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

This engraving shows a workshop where existing books are given bindings to fit with the buyer’s library.
BIRDSALLS BOOK BINDERS, 1888

Staff at work in the Northampton-based bookbinding company from the late nineteenth century.

About this book

In Scientifica Historica we will explore the history of science books,
splitting roughly 2,500 years into five periods. The first chapter, Ancient
World, lays the foundations, from the earliest scientific writing through to
around 1200. In the second part of the book, Renaissance in Print, running
through to the end of the eighteenth century, we see how the move from the
hand-copied books of the ancient world to printed titles would transform the
nature and availability of science writing. The third chapter, Modern
Classical, covers the nineteenth century, when we see the role of science
writing beginning to transform as science comes of age and journals take
over as the primary vehicle for scientist-to-scientist communication, leaving
science books to take on a broader audience.
The final two chapters, Post-Classical and The Next Generation, cover
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which have seen a huge change in
both science and the nature of science writing. The Post-Classical chapter
reflects the shift in the way that science was undertaken, moving from a
mostly amateur activity to a totally professional occupation, where the
mathematical component of science grew exponentially, and scientific
theories (sometime highly counter-intuitive) became more important than
merely collecting information. The Post-Classical and The Next Generation
eras are divided around 1980, when the modern, popular science book
began to dominate. Up to this point, many of the key science books were
written by leading scientists and tended to take a patronising approach to
their audience. But with some notable exceptions, the later popular science
titles have been written for a more discerning audience who expect a better
quality of writing and accessibility.
Each of the five chapters covers a wide range of titles to illustrate the
way that books have been used and how they have changed through the
ages. Mostly these have been restricted to original pieces of writing.
However, we have also explored the increasingly popular spin-off titles
from television series which have indubitably become an important part of
science writing in the final period covered.
Many of these titles are from Europe and North America. This simply
reflects the way that the history of modern science communication – and
science itself – has developed. For a book to be significant in the history of
science, from the Renaissance up to recent times, it will generally have
come from these two continents. The reasons that science flourished
particularly in Europe and North America from the fourteenth century
onwards are disputed, but it seems to have been driven by a combination of
growth of trading wealth, luck (particularly in terms of the origins of the
Industrial Revolution) and a relative lack of religious suppression. In recent
times, countries such as China and India have once more become big
players in the sciences, but as yet this has not been reflected in science
writing, perhaps in part because of the dominance of English as the
universal language of science. This doesn’t mean that there have not been
very popular titles outside the ones covered in this book, but they have had
less influence on our worldwide understanding of scientific matters. The
majority of scientific papers are published in English for the same reason –
although the great science communicators come from around the world.
Doom-mongers are always announcing the death of books, but science
titles have maintained a healthy existence throughout each of our five
periods and should do so into the future. Their nature may have changed,
but they continue to be an unrivalled mechanism for linking humans to our
universe. A television show or YouTube video can only ever skim the
surface of a topic. A one-hour programme will typically not be able to
cover the contents of a single chapter of a book. A science book enables the
reader to take in so many different ways of understanding a topic, to be able
to process the information at their own speed and to appreciate it in far
more depth than pictures and speech alone can provide.
The science book has been a shining beacon of human progress since the
invention of writing – and long may it continue to be so.

Timeline of the development of the book

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1
ANCIENT WORLD
LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS
F OR CENTURIES THERE have been debates over what makes humans
unique among the animals. Biologists frequently insist that there is nothing
special about the species Homo sapiens. The term ‘exceptionalism’ is used
in biology circles in a derogatory fashion to describe the attempt to give us
a special status. And, certainly, there are few human abilities that aren’t
duplicated in some fashion by other animals. However, Homo sapiens far
exceeds other species in its collective capabilities to adapt its environment
for life, and the driver for this ability seems to be creativity.
This remarkable trait was present when Homo sapiens first evolved, over
200,000 years ago. Creativity means that humans do not simply accept
things as they are and live in the present, but can think outside the moment
and ask questions such as ‘Why does that happen?’ or ‘What if I did this?’
or ‘What could I do to make things different?’
When early humans looked beyond scratching an existence to the full
might of nature – from the Sun and the stars to the devastating power of
lightning and hurricanes – the first responses to the question ‘Why does that
happen?’ involved deities or magic. The assumption was that there had to
be supernatural forces, capable of actions that were forever beyond our
understanding, even if they perhaps could be placated by human rituals.
However, with the establishment of static gatherings of people in the early
cities, there was an opportunity to begin to take what we would now
consider a more scientific approach.
First came the use of numbers (although arguably a separate discipline to
science, mathematics is so tightly tied to the sciences that we will be
considering it an integral part of Scientifica Historica). More accurately,
what seems to have come first was the tally, a mechanism for counting that
did not require numbers. Say, for example, a neighbour borrowed some
loaves of bread and you wanted to make sure that your loaves were all
replaced. Without numbers, you could put a pebble in a safe place for each
loaf the neighbour took. When they handed over a replacement loaf, you
would throw away a pebble corresponding to it until there were no pebbles
left.
We don’t know for certain how long such systems were used as they
leave no permanent record, but a number of ancient bones have been
discovered that appear to have tally marks on them. The Ishango bone,
which is over 20,000 years old, is a baboon’s leg bone, found on what is
now the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It
has a series of notches carved into it, which are widely interpreted as being
a tally. The even older Lebombo bone, dating back over 40,000 years, also
has a series of notches, though there is more dispute about their nature.
Tally markers can preserve information remarkably well, as witnessed by
the fact that these bones still exist so long after they were first created. Such
bones can be considered the earliest ancestor of a written record. Of a
similar age to the Lebombo bone are some of the early cave paintings,
which provide another form of communication that had the potential to
establish traditions across a period of time.
Keeping a long-term written record may not have had significance for
the makers of the bone tallies, but as cities and trade grew, the need for
accounting meant that records began to be kept. At the time, these may
simply have been markers of financial transactions, however the ability to
keep information to a later date, and to share it, would be crucial for the
development of a scientific view of the world.
FOUR VIEWS OF THE ISHANGO BONE, CA. 20,000–18,000 BCE

The series of notches on this baboon leg bone are thought to be tally marks, housed in the Royal Belgian
Institure of Natural Sciences.

From tallies to writing

Over the centuries, straightforward pictures and simple notch-based tallies
developed into pictograms. As the name suggests, pictograms were image-
based, but unlike cave paintings they were stylised into a standard form to
represent individual concepts. Some modern Chinese characters still take
this form – the character for ‘door’ for example, looks a little like a door.
 With some thought, pictograms could also be used to convey less
concrete notions. For example, a series of pictograms could be used to
communicate the process of putting bread into a basket. If we see a loaf of
bread, then a hand, then a loaf in a basket, the message is fairly clear. (For a
modern example of a message using pictograms, think of an IKEA
instruction sheet.) In that basic form there is no separate symbol to display
the concept of ‘in’ or ‘into’, meaning that we need an awful lot of
pictograms. There would need to be, for example, a different symbol for a
loaf in a basket and for a dog in a basket. But it is not hard to imagine
something like an arrow being used to indicate the relationship of ‘in’, after
which we just need the pictograms for bread (or dog) and basket with that
linking arrow image. A symbol such as this arrow is known as an ideogram,
as it indicates something significantly more abstract than an object or an
action.
It was this kind of gradual abstraction that led to the formation of proto-
writing, the precursor to modern scripts, which seems to have developed at
least 6,000 years ago. One early example appearing to carry such proto-
writing is a set of tablets found in Tărtăria, located in modern-day Romania,
in what was once Transylvania. These are clay tablets marked with a mix of
pictograms, lines and symbols. As we don’t know what they mean, it’s
possible they were purely decorative, but they are usually assumed to be a
precursor to writing, putting across information in a more structured fashion
than simple decoration.
In some ways similar, Egyptian hieroglyphs also combined pictograms
and ideograms, but did so with more distinct structures. The symbols were
not restricted to words, but could also form parts of words, making it
possible to build compound words from a mix of symbols, requiring a stock
of fewer distinct images. We tend to think of hieroglyphics as the standard
script of ancient Egypt because it is what we see on ancient tombs and wall
paintings, but in fact it was developed as a formal means of writing for
special settings and was too complex for everyday use. Another system,
hieratic, was developed in parallel and involved far fewer, more stylised
symbols – similar to Chinese characters – which could be written more
quickly than hieroglyphs.
However, the Egyptians were not to the first to develop a stylised writing
system. Another of the ancient powers of the region, the Sumerian
civilisation (which later developed into the Babylonians), devised their
cuneiform script around 3600 BCE, making it the earliest known writing
system. This script originally combined stylus marks representing numbers
with a pictogram-based form of writing. A millennium later, it had become
more stylised, with all characters made up of combinations of wedge-
shaped marks produced on clay tablets using a stylus: this was the origin of
the words ‘style’ and ‘stylised’.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE ‘DOOR’ CHARACTER

Although very stylised, the door character bears a resemblance to a traditional door with a transom.

The European alphabet has a Greek name (alpha and beta are the first
two letters of the Greek alphabet), but a more complex background. It
seems to have originally derived from the proto-Canaanite abjad. An abjad
is like an alphabet but without vowels, which are implied or shown by
accent markers – both Arabic and Hebrew use modern abjads. The proto-
Canaanite abjad was in use in parts of the Middle East from around 3,500
years ago. Used by the Phoenicians, it was the source of both Greek and
Aramaic letters. Greek, though, appears to have been the first true alphabet,
with vowels represented by separate characters, originating about 1000 BCE.
The alphabet used in most Western countries is often called Latin or
Roman; our upper-case letters are pretty much the same as those used for
carving inscriptions by the Romans – their equivalent of Egyptian
hieroglyphs. (The character set is not identical, as the Romans didn’t have
separate letters J and U, using I and V, which were easier to carve.) Like the
Egyptians with hieratic, the Romans also had an everyday set of characters,
known as Roman cursive, which morphed into our lower-case letters. For
the Romans these were two totally separate styles which would not be
mixed, but after the fall of the Roman Empire various options of combining
them were tried, such as using capitals to emphasise new sections of
writing, or to pick out nouns (as is still the case in modern German).
When first introduced, though, these letters would not have been called
upper case and lower case. This terminology dates from the moveable type
printing era, when pages of type were set using individual metal letters,
bound together to form a page (see here). The two kinds of character were
kept in separate boxes, with the basic letters (technically referred to as
minuscule) in a lower case and the fancier capital versions in a higher
‘upper case’.
Why is the development of writing so important? Because without
writing, it is hard to see how a scientific tradition could be built. Stories of
the gods at work in the heavens or throwing lightning do not need precision.
They benefit, if anything, from the embellishment and modification that
inevitably accompanies an oral tradition. As verbal stories are passed from
person to person, less and less of the original remains. But for scientific
ideas to be tested and built on, nothing else could match the unchanging
foundation provided by the written word.

FRESCO FROM THE TOMB OF NEFERTARI, TWELFTH CENTURY BCE

The burial chamber of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens, Luxor, features excerpts and scenes from
several chapters of the Book of the Dead. Here, three genii guard the Second Gate of the Kingdom of
Osiris.

GREEK STELE, 163/4 CE

Stelae were stone slabs with inscriptions often used as grave or boundary markers. This stele records the
eponymous archon (chief magistrate), Philisteides, and the kosmetes (military trainer of young men),
Claudius, at the top, beneath is a list of trainers and trainees, as well as a variety of festivals and events.

THE LYON TABLET, 48 CE

The Latin text reproduces emperor Caludius’s speech in favour of some leading citizens from Gaul being
allowed to sit on the Senate.

The permanence of clay

As we have seen, the earliest written records were not books, but pieces of
clay. Working on a far greater scale than the Tărtăria tablets, the Sumerians
and the later Babylonians of Mesopotamia produced vast quantities of clay
tablets, originally for accounting purposes. These blocks of clay could be
easily marked using the stylus-end ‘cuneiform’ markers which were first
used to represent numbers, but soon also used in combination to form the
stylised characters derived from earlier pictograms.
If the markings were just a temporary note, the clay could be moistened,
wiped and reused – but by baking the clay tablet in an oven it became a
permanent store of the information recorded on it. It would be an
exaggeration to describe these tablets as scientific, but some did give
guidance on, for example, practical mathematics. They did not contain
mathematical proofs, but there were examples of Pythagorean triples –
collections of numbers such as 3, 4, 5 and 8, 15, 17, which reflect the
relationship of lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle that would later
be proved in Pythagoras’s theorem.
ASSYRIAN CLAY TABLETS

An accounting tablet (above) from Anatolia, ca. twentieth – nineteenth century BCE, and an astronomical
tablet (below) from Nineveh, whose date and origin is debated.
Unknown
EDWIN SMITH PAPYRUS, CA. 1600 BCE

The 4.7 metre (15 foot)-long scroll may have originated in Thebes and was bought by American
archeologist Edwin Smith in 1862.

Remarkably, these numerical records date back around 3,800 years. Such
tablets also began to be used to record what we would now think of as
scientific data, specifically astronomical observations. This information
provided the basis both for calendars and for astrological use – there is no
evidence at this stage of the application of scientific theories – yet like the
invention of writing itself, such collections of data were necessary
precursors to the scientific approach.
Similar practical examples (rather than work that had a detailed
theoretical basis) began to crop up in the Egyptian civilisation. Practical
geometry was an essential for both the measurement of fields and the
construction of buildings, again bringing in the guidance of Pythagorean
triples. And medicine took the first steps in its long journey from magic to
science. The oldest-known example of a written document giving medical
guidance with some resemblance of a scientific approach – although not
long enough to be considered a true book – is the Egyptian Edwin Smith
papyrus, which is around 3,600 years old. It takes the form of a papyrus
scroll around 4.7 metres (15 feet) in length, and deals primarily with
injuries and surgical techniques, though it does also include a number of
magic spells intended for medical purposes.
China was the next of the great civilisations to venture into proto-
scientific fields, with mathematical documents dating back at least 3,000
years. It would be relatively late coming to physical or biological sciences,
however, as there were philosophical barriers in the way of accepting a
purely mechanistic view of the world. India, too, would produce impressive
mathematical and later astronomical works from around 500 BCE, which
would feed into the development of modern science.
However, the foundations of the approach that has come to dominate
science worldwide were primarily developed in ancient Greece. The Greeks
built on mathematical ideas from Babylonia and Egypt, but they would take
the lead in attempting to build a rational explanation for nature that would
eventually become science. They were also the earliest to produce what is
close to the modern concept of a science book, though many of the early
examples no longer survive.

The early Greeks

The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus was one of the first to move away
from ascribing the forces and structures of nature to the mythical actions of
the gods, constructing instead a philosophy that built on theories of the
interaction of natural objects. Thales was alive at the same time as the now
better-known Pythagoras, who was born around 570 BCE and whose school
put numbers at the centre of the explanation of the universe.
With many of the early Greek philosophers it is difficult to know exactly
which ideas belonged to the big names that get remembered and which
were produced by their followers. Using a famous name added weight to an
argument (rather like having a celebrity endorse a product today), and it
was common to deploy the big names in a piece of writing even if they
weren’t directly involved. We know that Pythagoras did not come up with
the mathematical theorem named after him. As we have seen, Pythagorean
triples predated him by 1,000 years, and proofs of the theorem were
developed well before he was born. It is possible, though, that he was
responsible for the first scientific theorising on the nature of music,
showing how specific ratios of lengths of vibrating objects (strings or organ
pipes, for example) produced notes that sounded harmonic and pleasant.
With the output of Thales and Pythagoras we have the problem that not a
single piece of their writing has survived. Everything we know is hearsay.
Among the earliest extant examples of what could be considered scientific
books is the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of disparate works on the
subject of medicine, which includes the famous Hippocratic Oath requiring
a physician to behave ethically with patients. Again, we don’t know if the
fifth-century BCE Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos wrote any of the 60
or so titles in this collection. Certainly, the majority of the volumes date
back to his period and a little later, though the last was added as much as
nine centuries afterwards.
Because of having multiple authors over a period of time, the Corpus is a
mix of ideas with no consistency of viewpoint: some of its texts are aimed
at other physicians, others at lay readers. If these books can be considered
amongst the earliest of scientific titles, they very much take the form of a
compendium presenting competing theories, rather than providing the
reader with the scientific consensus of the time. There was no ‘standard
text’ here. However, some ideas were better supported than others, notably
that of the ‘four humours’ – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm –
fluids in the body which it was believed, incorrectly, had to be kept in
balance for health. This led to such treatments as bloodletting to reduce an
‘excess’ of blood – a life-threatening and useless practice that would remain
central to medical work all the way through to the nineteenth century. Like
the earlier Egyptian medical documents, these books were originally
produced in the form of scrolls, though later editions would see them copied
into the familiar codex book form, where eventually all the books of the
Corpus would be made available as a single volume.
François Langlois (after Claude Vignon),
PYTHAGORAS, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

An etching of an imagined Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BCE).

Hippocrates
HIPPOCRATIC CORPUS, FRANCISCUS MINUTIUS CALVUS, 1525

The title page of a 1525 edition of the Corpus, translated from Greek into Latin by Marcus Fabius
Calvus.
Unknown
THE GUILD BOOK OF THE BARBER SURGEONS OF YORK, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

This text for surgeons shows the four medical humours.

Leonhard Thurneisser
THE BOOK OF ALCHEMY, 1574

Above, an illustration of the four humours (phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile) within a half
female and half male figure.
Unknown
THE GUILD BOOK OF THE BARBER SURGEONS OF YORK, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Left, a ‘phlebotomy chart’ for bleeding.

The survival of books from this period is very much hit and miss (and far
more miss than hit). In modern times, many of the books that are
conventionally published will be produced in the thousands. However, prior
to the printing press, each volume had to be painstakingly copied by hand.
It’s entirely possible that initially only a handful of copies of a title may
have existed, though if a title became successful there would be a branching
out of copies, copies of copies, and so on.
Though this copying process helped preserve some text it also presented
a distinct danger to the accuracy of the contents. Copyists regularly
introduced variations in the text, either accidentally or intentionally if they
disagreed with the message. Examples of deliberate later additions and
‘improvements’ are often found in much-copied ancient works, where
modern analysis can show how the original message was modified to match
the cultural requirements of a later period. This presented a particular
danger for scientific books where preserving the detail was essential.
However, copying did at least mean that there were fall-backs if an original
book was lost. A much greater danger than either errors or deliberate
changes introduced in copying was the instability of ancient societies – and
no better example of this can be found than the fate of the Library of
Alexandria.

The eighth wonder of the ancient world

We’re used to being told of the seven wonders of the ancient world: the
Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of
Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos at Alexandria.
Indubitably many of these structures were impressive. This was particularly
true of by far the most ancient of the seven, the Great Pyramid, which is not
just the only one to survive to the present day, but would also continue to be
the tallest man-made structure in the world from its construction around
4,500 years ago all the way up to 1311, when Lincoln Cathedral became the
first of many churches and subsequent towers to top it. However, in terms
of lasting value to civilisation, surely by far the greatest wonder of the
ancient world was the Library of Alexandria.
Alexandria, said to have been founded by the Macedonian king and
conqueror Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, was the cultural centre of the
European, Middle Eastern and North African world in this period. Located
on the northern coast of Egypt, the location cemented Alexander’s
integration of Egypt into the Greek civilisation. It’s not clear exactly when
the library was first opened – it is believed to be sometime between 300 and
250 BCE – but it was the ancient equivalent of a national library such as the
British Library or the US Library of Congress, intended as much as possible
to collect all the books of its culture. In fact, the Library of Alexandria had
a wider remit still, no longer conceivable in the modern world: the intention
was to collect all the world’s wisdom. Any books that arrived in the city –
on a ship, for example – would be copied, with the original retained by the
library and the copy returned to the (presumably disgruntled) owners.
The library’s books were largely held in the form of papyrus scrolls. The
number of books it contained will never be known, as the catalogue has
been lost. Claims from relatively near to the time of the library’s destruction
put the number in the high 400,000s, though modern estimates, inevitably
little more than educated guesswork, place the number at anywhere between
40,000 and 400,000. Whichever end of the scale is accurate, it was a huge
number of books for the time, which inevitably would have included all the
major scientific literature of the classical world.
Today we only have a small fraction of those early texts, partly due to
the library’s destruction, when a significant part of the collection was lost.
This involved a number of unrelated attacks on Alexandria when the library
suffered collateral damage, rather than the single burning that has often
been depicted. Thankfully, some books did survive to be translated and
appreciated by the Arabic-speaking scholars between the eighth and
fourteenth centuries. These texts travelled to the West, preserving works of
the most influential scientific ancient Greek philosopher: Aristotle.
Unknown
BURNING BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA, ENGRAVING, SIXTEENTH CENTURY

A representation of the books in the library being burned – in reality this was less of a single organised
burning, more the result of repeated damage.
Otto von Corven
A HALL IN THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA, NINETEENTH CENTURY

An imagined scene in the library, where scholars converse over scrolls, which can be seen stacked end-on
in the shelves on the far wall.

Aristotle’s universe
Born in 384 BCE in Stagira in Greece and educated at Plato’s Academy in
Athens, Aristotle is said to have been tutor to Alexander the Great. In recent
years, Aristotle has had something of a bad press amongst science writers,
and it has become popular to deride his lack of a modern scientific
approach. It’s certainly true that some of Aristotle’s theories on nature were
far more driven by the ancient Greek tradition of deciding what was correct
by intellectual debate than they were by observation and experiment.
Infamously, Aristotle is said to have pronounced that women have fewer
teeth than men, based purely on his philosophical arguments, rather than
actually bothering to check and discover that, in fact, women and men have
exactly the same number of teeth.
Nonetheless, though Aristotle’s ideas on science have been almost
universally shown to be incorrect, it would be unfair to ignore his books, as
he was a hugely influential figure. The concepts that he developed (often
based on older ideas, but refined in Aristotle’s approach), would continue to
be supported for nearly 2,000 years. These notably included the model of
the universe that had the Earth at the centre with the Sun, planets and stars
travelling around it on crystal spheres, and the five-element theory, which
considered everything on Earth to be made from earth, water, air and fire,
with a fifth element (quintessence) limited to the heavenly bodies.
Of the volumes of Aristotle’s scientific work that have survived, one of
the most influential was the Physics. Given the modern usage of the word,
the title is misleading. The book deals with the nature of change and motion
(something of an obsession in Greek scientific philosophy, particularly after
the Eleatic school had decided that movement was an illusion and didn’t
exist). Where now the mechanics of motion is a subset of physics, Aristotle
had in mind not just the physical mechanisms of the motion of bodies but of
all things involved in movement and change – so his ‘physics’ took in
aspects of what now would be regarded as biology (and, inevitably,
philosophy too, as Aristotle’s Physics was, in the end, philosophy applied to
scientific topics rather than science in the modern sense).
Guillaume de Conches
DE PHILOSOPHIA MUNDI, 1276–7

Below left, the world (universe) according to Aristotle from this French medieval scholastic’s book.
Raphael
THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS, 1509–11

This fresco (below right) from the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican includes over 20 philosophers, with
Plato and Aristotle (shown here) central.

In the eight books of the Physics, Aristotle introduced the notion of

matter and explored the nature of motion. Though his concepts have all
been proved wrong, they tie together into a rational whole. In fact, this
strong interlinking of his concepts is one of the reasons that his model of
the universe (the solar system in modern terms) with the Earth at its centre
rather than the Sun, persisted so long.
If we only consider the Sun and the Earth, it seems logical that the Sun
travels around the Earth: that’s certainly what it appears to do. Of course,
we now know that the Sun’s motion in the sky is due to the Earth turning,
but we still say for convenience that ‘the Sun rises’ not, ‘the Sun becomes
visible over the horizon due to the turning of the Earth’. However, when
using Aristotle’s model where all heavenly bodies turn around the Earth, the
motion of the planets with orbits outside of the Earth’s – Mars, for instance
– seems bizarre. These planets appear to occasionally reverse their motion
through space. The whole business is greatly simplified if we assume that
the Sun is at the centre of the solar system, where the odd reversals of
planets like Mars is explained by the relative motion around the Sun at
different rates of the Earth and Mars.
However, if the Earth were not at the centre of things, Aristotle’s grand
plan built up in the Physics would have fallen apart. He argued that matter
has natural tendencies. Of the four earthly elements, he believed that earth
and water have an in-built tendency to head for the centre of the universe,
while air and fire tend to move away from it. So, he argued, heavy objects,
containing more earth-like matter, would naturally fall towards the Earth.
The more matter, the stronger the tendency, and the faster they would fall.
As Galileo demonstrated nearly 2,000 years later, this simply isn’t true, but
it wasn’t such a bad assumption. Feathers do fall slower than rocks – but
unfortunately not for the reason that Aristotle devised.
In the second volume of Physics, Aristotle examined causes, separating,
for example, the cause of something existing, both in terms of its material
and its form, from what we would normally think of as cause – making it
happen – and finally coming to the type of cause that has caused many
problems in the development of science, the teleological cause – the
purpose behind its existence. We now only see a teleological cause (in
science, at least) when there is intervention in nature by a thinking entity. A
computer has a teleological cause – it was made for a purpose – but
earthquakes, say, or evolution, aren’t created with a goal in mind. They
don’t have a purpose. But assumptions of a teleological cause have proved a
significant problem in the development of some areas of science, and can
continue to be a problem when religious beliefs are not separated from
scientific theories.
The Physics goes on to consider everything from infinity to the nature of
motion. Another example of the interlocking nature of Aristotle’s grand
vision is the way that he used his (incorrect) understanding of motion to
argue against the existence of atoms. Although we tend to think of atoms as
being a modern concept, the fifth-century BCE ancient Greek philosophers
Leucippus and his pupil Democritus had argued that matter was made of
tiny fragments, which were so small that they were uncuttable – atomos in
Greek. If there were atoms, then there had to be a void – a space containing
nothing where there were gaps between atoms. (The early atomic theory
assumed that each atom was a different shape, and there are very few
shapes that can be packed together to fill space without there being any
gaps.) But Aristotle argued that such a void could not exist. Fascinatingly,
in doing so, he pretty much came up with Newton’s first law of motion –
albeit for the purposes of showing that the idea was ludicrous.
Aristotle
PHYSICS, COPY, THIRTEENTH CENTURY

A thirteenth-century Latin version of Aristotle’s fourth century BCE Physics, translated from Arabic in the
twelfth century by Gerard of Cremona.

Aristotle said that if there were a void, ‘no one could say why something
moved will come to rest somewhere; why should it do so here rather than
there? Hence it will either remain at rest or must move on to infinity unless
something stronger hinders it.’ His version of physics assumed that for
something to keep moving, it must be pushed. When we stop pushing it, it
naturally comes to a stop. This was, for example, what happened to a cart.
But what about an arrow in flight? Why did it keep moving after it left the
bowstring? To explain this, Aristotle decided that the air must continue to
push the arrow after it left the bow. But if there were a total void, it seemed
to him that there was nothing to influence the moving object in any way,
which seemed so counter-intuitive that he dismissed the idea of a vacuum.
Aristotle’s physics matched what was observed in everyday life, but he
couldn’t accept that the underlying reality could be different from this, so
the void – and therefore the existence of atoms – had to go.
Physics was by no means the limit of Aristotle’s many books on
scientific subjects. He wrote significantly more titles on biology and
zoology than physics and cosmology. Yet the Physics stands out because
Aristotle’s views on cosmology, motion and mechanics sat at the heart of
the Western understanding of the universe right through to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Other titles were, in their way, also influential. For
example, Aristotle’s History of Animals gave us the approach of grouping
animals by similar characteristics, and by contrast with the Physics it was
less philosophical and more focused on observation, recording a
considerable amount of accurate data on a range of species. However,
History of Animals is still less significant as a scientific work than the
Physics, despite having far more in it that is correct. In the twentieth
century, the physicist Ernest Rutherford is said to have remarked, ‘All
science is either physics or stamp collecting.’ The implication of this
distinctly snippy remark is that real science has to include explanations and
theories; it should not just be the collection of data. Books like History of
Animals were important, but certainly fall more into the stamp-collecting
camp than anything else.

The elements of mathematics

For a book with lasting influence, it is hard to beat Euclid’s Elements,
written around 290 BCE. This multi-volume masterpiece would still be used
as a textbook at the start of the twentieth century – and even now has a
strong influence on the underlying foundation of mathematics in axioms
and proofs. The topic of the book is one that centuries of children have
found painful at school, yet it was one of the earliest aspects of mathematics
to be studied as it was so practically useful: it is geometry.

Euclid
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, JOHN DAYE, 1570

Frontispiece of first English translation by Henry Billingsley of Euclid’s work from ca. 300 BCE, printed
in London, with a preface by Elizabethan mathematician and occultist John Dee.
Euclid
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, COPY, 888

A page of the oldest surviving manuscript of the Elements, the D’Orville Euclid, written by ‘Stephanos the
clerk’, showing a detail of Pythagoras’s theorem.
Euclid
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, ERHARD RATDOLT, 1482

The first printed edition of the Elements (top left).

Euclid
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, COPY, THIRTEENTH CENTURY

An Arabic translation by Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (top right).

Euclid
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, PICKERING, 1847

An elegant English translation by Oliver Byrne, which uses coloured graphics to illustrate the proofs
(left).
Euclid
THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, CA. 1294

A handsome Latin manuscript version of the Elements.

Geometry literally means measuring the Earth. It was devised to help

make the measurements required to divide up land and construct buildings,
bringing together the concepts of linear dimensions and of measuring
angles. The ancient Egyptians made extensive use of geometry, but their
approach was purely pragmatic. They used what worked without worrying
about why it did so. What the Greeks brought to the table, and what was
crystallised in the Elements, was a step-by-step process of logical
construction and proof. It was a move from rule-of-thumb practice to the
more precise requirements of science. Euclid did not originate the concept
of geometric proofs, but what he did in the tour-de-force that is the
Elements was bring together a whole range of constructions and proofs,
building the whole in incremental stages, starting with the most basic of
assumptions.
We refer to Euclid as the author of the Elements, but there is a degree of
uncertainty over whether or not Euclid existed at all as a person. The
biographical details we have for him all seem to have been later imaginings.
It has been suggested that the Elements might have been the work of a
group, rather than an individual, who picked the name Euclid as a tribute to
the (definitely real) earlier philosopher Euclid of Megara. Whether or not
the Euclid of the Elements truly existed, though, this was a breakthrough
book.
The Elements consists of a total of 13 volumes. It starts with ‘postulates
and common notions’ – what mathematicians would now call axioms, the
essential assumptions on which the constructions and proofs (or
‘propositions’) that follow would be based. Axioms are apparently simple
statements such as, for example, the idea that a straight line can be drawn
between any two points. The book then goes on to give constructions using
a straight edge and a pair of compasses of, for example, a circle, and begins
to build its geometric theorems, from the famous Pythagoras’s theorem to
those giving the relationship between pairs of triangles with similar
proportions. Each of the proofs ends with the Greek letters OEΔ, which in
Latin translation would become the familiar QED for quod erat
demonstrandum, roughly ‘what was to be shown’.
The Elements not only provided the tools necessary for much practical
geometry, but laid out the pattern for constructing mathematical proofs,
building on simpler proofs to reach more complex conclusions. In its later
volumes, the book also contains other mathematical principles, including
some basic aspects of prime numbers, lowest common denominators and
highest common factors. It explores irrational numbers such as the square
root of 2, which can’t be made from a ratio of whole numbers, and covers a
small amount of 3D geometry, such as the volumes of simple 3D shapes
and the construction of the so-called Platonic solids, where each side is
made up of an identical flat shape.
 The Elements was one of the many ancient Greek books that were lost
after the fall of Greek civilisation, but came back to the West via Arabic
translations in the early Middle Ages. Because of its continued importance
– the Elements, for example, was central to the mathematics part of the
European university syllabuses for centuries – the Elements had many
translations and was one of the earliest scientific books to be mass-
produced in printed form, rather than hand-copied.

Moving the world

We also shouldn’t overlook the impact of the books of Archimedes, the
mathematician and engineer who lived from around 287 to 212 BCE, when it
is said he was killed by a Roman invader on Syracuse. Archimedes was
without doubt a leading mathematician, who worked on geometry, spirals
and the value of pi, and was responsible for an ancestor of integral calculus
used for calculating areas and volumes of shapes.
We tend to remember Archimedes for the legend of him leaping from his
bath shouting ‘Eureka!’, and for his claim that with a fulcrum and a long-
enough lever, he could move the Earth. Best known of his engineering feats
are his screw-based pump and the ‘Archimedes principle’ – his method to
measure the volume of an irregularly shaped object (that Eureka moment),
which he famously used to test the gold content of a crown. The crown had
been supplied to King Hiero, who wanted to check if the goldsmith had
dishonestly replaced some of the gold with another metal. By combining
the crown’s weight with its volume, Archimedes was able to work out its
density and show that it was not pure gold. This was a limited example of a
wider principle he determined, that an object dipped into a fluid is pushed
up by a force equal to the weight of the water it displaces. Archimedes also
devised a number of weapons of war, including a death ray in the form of
mirrors used to focus the rays of the Sun to start a fire on a ship.
Leonardo da Vinci
CODEX ATLANTICUS, 1478–1519

A page from one of da Vinci’s notebooks showing machines for lifting and pumping water. Leonardo
drew on ideas from Archimedes and others.
Giammaria Mazzuchelli
NOTIZIE ISTORICHE DI ARCHIMEDE, RIZZARDI, 1737

An illustration from Mazzuchelli’s book Historical and critical information about the life, inventions and
writings of Archimedes of Syracuse.

A relatively high number of Archimedes’ books have survived, notably

The Sand-Reckoner (see here), On Floating Bodies, On the Sphere and the
Cylinder, On Spirals and On the Equilibrium of Planes. They cover the
physics of floating bodies, a range of geometric techniques for calculating
sizes of objects, and, notably, in The Sand-Reckoner, the calculation of the
number of grains of sand that would fill the universe as a way to
demonstrate extending the Greek number system.
Although it may not have included anything original, or directly had an
influence on the development of science, one remarkable Roman work from
this period also deserves a mention. Roman civilisation was too focused on
practical and militaristic goals to deliver any new science. Rome did
introduce the codex, making books far more practical to read, but
interesting scientific examples from Roman authors are few and far
between. The exception is ‘De Rerum Natura’ (On the Nature of Things) by
Titus Lucretius Carus, written in the first century BCE. This takes the form
of a long poem made up of 7,400 lines, based on the natural philosophy of
Epicurus, a Greek philosopher from the third century BCE, whose ideas
included atomism. Lucretius’s poem takes in everything from the nature of
space and matter to agriculture and disease. Other books of the period, most
notably Pliny’s massive Naturalis Historia, collected together existing
scientific knowledge, but added little or nothing new.
Archimedes
ON THE SPHERE AND THE CYLINDER, CA. 1450

Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca was also a mathematician; he translated into Latin a number of
works by Archimedes and added illustrations to help explain the mathematical theorems.
Titus Lucretius Carus
‘DE RERUM NATURA’, PAULUS FRIDENPERGER, 1486

A page from an early printed version of Lucretius’s first century BCE poem.

Wheels within wheels

By the second century CE, Greece was part of the Roman Empire. The most
prolific medical author of the ancient world, Galen, was one of the empire’s
most famous physicians. Born in the Greek city of Pergamon in 129 CE,
Galen stuck largely to the theories of Hippocrates and his followers, though
he did have significantly more experience of anatomy than his predecessors
– albeit his knowledge was largely based on monkeys and pigs, so suffered
a little when applied to humans. There was a slightly more scientific basis
to some elements of his medicine, notably in his suggestion that the arteries
carry blood. His vast corpus of books would go on to influence the practice
of medicine through to the seventeenth century.

Pseudo-Galen
ANATHOMIA, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Galen, like many classical authors, had a number of texts attributed to him. This page depicts a pregnant
woman.
Guy of Pavia
LIBER NOTABILIUM PHILIPPI SEPTIMI, 1345

Above, a dissection from the abdomen of a cadaver from a book claiming to be taken from Galen’s work,
housed in the Musée Condé, Chantilly.
Pseudo-Galen
ANATHOMIA, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

A ‘wound man’ from the same volume as the image opposite.

Bartolomeu Velho
COSMOGRAPHIA, 1568

Ptolemy’s geocentric universe (without the epicycles) drawn by this Portuguese cosmographer and
cartographer.

Another book from the same time would also have a long impact: based
on Aristotle’s physics, it succeeded in keeping alive an incorrect view of the
structure of the solar system for 1,500 years. This was the book now known
as the Almagest, written by the Egyptian-Greek astronomer Ptolemy. The
name Almagest – translating as ‘The Greatest’ – is not Greek (or Egyptian),
but Arabic, as the book was introduced to the West, like so many Greek
texts, via an Arabic translation.
Dating to around 150 CE, the Almagest was actually titled Mathēmatikē
Syntaxis in the original Greek (roughly, ‘Mathematical Treatise’). The title
might seem odd given it dealt with astronomy, but we need to remember
that until the nineteenth century, astronomy and cosmology were considered
part of mathematics, not the physical sciences where they have now been
more sensibly reassigned.
 This hugely influential book in 13 volumes starts by describing the
Earth-centred view of the universe that Aristotle had made the standard
model, and goes on to cover the motions of the Sun and planets – including
the related concepts as seen from the Earth of, for example, eclipses, the
equinoxes and the solstices. Ptolemy also described the constellations and
put together a catalogue of the fixed stars. This catalogue was not all
Ptolemy’s own work, but was largely based on an earlier catalogue by the
ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus that was already around 280 years
old.
As we have seen, there was a problem arising from the requirement of
Aristotelian cosmology that everything orbited around the Earth: the way
that planets outside the Earth’s orbit would suddenly reverse their direction
in so-called retrograde motion. To offer a scientific explanation of how this
was possible, Ptolemy was forced to introduce a series of fixes to the older,
simple Aristotelian model that had each orbiting planet embedded in a
nested crystal sphere.
Andreas Cellarius
HARMONIA MACROCOSMICA, JOHANNES JANSSONIUS, 1660

Cellarius’s The Celestial Atlas, or the Harmony of the Universe depicted the world systems of Ptolemy,
Tycho Brahe and Nicolaus Copernicus.
 Ingeniously (if painfully), Ptolemy managed to match observation, and
to keep the (also incorrect) assumption that all orbits had to be circular as
this was the ‘perfect’ shape and the heavens required perfection. He did this
using a structure known as epicycles. The idea was that instead of Mars,
say, simply travelling around the Earth in a circular motion – which it
clearly didn’t – there was instead an empty point in space that orbited the
Earth, called a ‘deferent’. Mars then orbited that moving empty point in
space in another circular orbit (an epicycle). It was the original case of
‘wheels within wheels’. To make things even more complex, because this
model still didn’t quite match what was observed, Ptolemy stated that
instead of travelling on circles around the Earth, deferents orbited a point a
little way from the Earth called the ‘eccentric’.
If, frankly, eccentric sounds the ideal word for such a contrived structure,
the complexity of Ptolemy’s model was necessary to make actual
observation fit with the Aristotelian model of the universe. Even today
scientists can get very attached to their theories, and in the light of
contradictory evidence will repeatedly modify aspects of the theory to keep
it working. This has happened, for example, several times with the Big
Bang theory, which is still our best idea of the way that the universe came
into being, but has had to be patched up repeatedly to match observations.

Andreas Cellarius
HARMONIA MACROCOSMICA, JOHANNES JANSSONIUS, 1660

A further engraving by Cellarius setting Ptolemy’s structure for the universe against the constellations of
the zodiac.
PTOLEMY, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

In this illustration from Gautier de Metz’s Image du Monde (Image of the World), Ptolemy is mistakenly
depicted as a king as he observes the heavens.
Andreas Cellarius
HARMONIA MACROCOSMICA, JOHANNES JANSSONIUS, 1660

The engraving above illustrates the planetary motions in eccentric and epicyclical orbits, while the
engraving opposite is of the early Christian view of the structure of the universe.
 Mathematics in the early years of the first millennium was not limited to
Ptolemy’s epicycles or the geometrical wonders of the Elements and was
being studied around the world. Several other important mathematical
volumes would emerge during this period. The earliest of these, developed
over a long period starting several centuries earlier but coming to final
fruition around 200 CE, was the anonymously authored Jiuzhang Suanshu
(The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art), a summary of state-of-the-art
mathematics in China. The approach taken in the book was one of problem-
solving – a more pragmatic one than that of the Elements with its formal
proofs, but using significantly more mathematical logic than was present in
the simple use of Pythagorean triples in Sumerian clay tablets. Given this
practical approach, it’s not surprising that Jiuzhang Suanshu gives us such
day-to-day requirements of an early civilisation as measuring the areas of
shapes (and, yes, calculating the size of Pythagorean triangles),
computations required for trade and taxation, and basic equations. It also
includes some slightly more abstract concepts, such as square and cube
roots and the volumes of solid objects.

Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi

KITAB SUWAR AL-KAWAKIB AL-ATHABITA, FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Based on Ptolemy’s Almagest, this late fifteenth-century Iranian text illustrates 48 constellations including
Cancer and Taurus and opposite Aquila.

There is no surviving book to attribute to her, but it’s important that we

also note the late-Greek philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, who lived
in Alexandria from the middle of the fourth century. Hypatia was known to
have written a number of commentaries and is thought to have edited the
Almagest. Historically, women’s contribution to science, and science
writing, has only relatively recently become commonplace, as it is only
recently that women have had the same opportunities as men. Hypatia
provides our first certain example. This doesn’t mean that Hypatia was the
first woman to write science books; all the way up to the nineteenth century
it was not uncommon for books by women to be published anonymously or
under a pseudonym (think, for instance, of the Brontë sisters, who initially
wrote as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). It is only in recent years that women
writers have produced influential science books with anything like the same
frequency as men. This move towards gender equality has come
significantly later than it did for fiction authors, though thankfully
considerable progress has now been made. For the moment, though, female
writers will be thin on the ground.
Unknown
JIUZHANG SUANSHU, SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Late edition, showing the method of estimating pi by drawing a polygon with more and more sides,
making an increasingly accurate approximation to a circle.
Mathematical transformations
Just as the Elements would have a huge influence on Western mathematics,
Jiuzhang Suanshu was central to China’s mainstream development of
maths. Like China, India also had a flourishing ancient mathematical
tradition, but there, individual mathematicians were given more credit, and
so, unlike the anonymous Jiuzhang Suanshu, we know quite a lot about the
author of a key Indian mathematical work, Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta
(roughly, ‘The established (or improved) treatise of Brahma’), dating to
628. Its author was Brahmagupta, born around 598, who like many
mathematicians of the time studied astronomy as well as mathematics – the
book often uses astronomical examples in its content.
As was the case with the Chinese book, this was mathematics presented
as statement of fact, rather than as a result of logical proof, and it was
provided in an unusually complex fashion, as Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta was
written in the form of poetry. The book was important not only for its
various geometric results, but also for its developments in algebra,
including one of the two solutions to the quadratic equation familiar to
high-school students. Probably the book’s most important innovation was in
dealing with non-positive integers. It covered negative numbers, a concept
not then widely in use, and treated zero as a number, rather than a simple
placeholder for numbers with no value in a particular column. Brahmagupta
didn’t get this entirely right – he thought that 0 ÷ 0 = 0. However, this was
still a major development in mathematical thought. The use of zero would
be essential for the development of modern mathematics.
The concept of zero as a number (as opposed to a placeholder) originated
in India, as did the useful Hindu numerals, but they would come to the West
through the thriving new academic centres of the Islamic world. A text that
would have significant influence was Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr
wa’l-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completing and
Balancing), written around 820 in Arabic by Abu Ja’far Muḥammad ibn
Mūsā al-Khwārizmī and translated into Latin by Robert of Chester in 1145.
We have few reliable biographical details about al-Khwārizmī. He was born
in Persia around 780, possibly in Baghdad, and definitely worked in Caliph
al-Mamun’s Baghdad House of Wisdom, as the Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar was
dedicated to the caliph.
Pṛthūdhaka
COMMENTARY ON BRĀHMASPHUṬASIDDHĀNTA, TENTH CENTURY

A commentary on Brahmagaputa’s celebrated work of 628, with annotation by its translator into English,
Henry Thomas Colebrooke.

The author and his book give us two technical mathematical terms:
‘algorithm’, from the Latinised version of al-Khwārizmī’s name,
Algorithmi; and ‘algebra’, from the ‘al-ğabr’ of the title. It is in the
exploration of algebra that this book proved such a success. Al-Khwārizmī
was not the first to work on algebraic problems outside India. The third-
century Greek philosopher Diophantus had dealt with algebraic equations
with powers of a variable value in his book Arithmetica, but he did not
attempt to produce generalised solutions that would work for any equation
of the same form. Al-Khwārizmī’s version of algebra was in some ways
more different from our current approach than that of Diophantus – al-
Khwārizmī only works in terms of words, where Diophantus used
something closer to a modern equation – but, crucially, al-Khwārizmī dealt
with general solutions, so his approach could be applied to a wide range of
possibilities.
Another important book by the same author, preserved only in a Latin
translation, Algoritmi de numero Indorum (Al-Khwārizmī Concerning the
Hindu Art of Reckoning), was a description of the Indian number system
(which as we have seen would become known as Arabic numerals in the
West, because of the route they took). However, this content proved less
significant in terms of the wider development of mathematics, as
Indian/Arabic numerals were not widely adopted in the West until
Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (see here) reintroduced the numbering system at
the start of the thirteenth century.

Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

AL-KITĀB AL-MUKHTAṢARFī ḤISĀB AL-ĞABR WA’L-MUQĀBALA, CA. 1145

A page from Robert of Chester’s translation, which he produced when living in Segovia in Spain.

Arabic optics and medicine

A major figure in the translation of ancient Greek texts into Arabic was
Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, born in Al-Hira, in what is now Iraq, in 809. Ibn Isḥāq
was a physician, so had a particular interest in medical sources, though he
translated a wider range of scientific documents. However, he was also
responsible for his own contribution to science writing, notably in Al-Ashr
Makalat Fi’l’ayn (The Book of the Ten Treatises on the Eye), which has
been described as the earliest extant systematic textbook on ophthalmology.
There is no doubt that ibn Isḥāq was heavily influenced by ancient Greek
texts, particularly Galen, who he widely referenced, but there are also
elements of Al-Ashr Makalat Fi’l’ayn which seem to be original
observations from ibn Isḥāq’s experimental work, including some
impressive illustrations.
Mathematics and medicine were not all that was being produced in the
thriving Islamic culture and being passed on to the West. There were a
number of titles that covered optics and light, notably those written by Abū
‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, whose name was Latinised to Alhazen. Born
in what is now Basra in Iraq in 965, al-Haytham was said to have had a
similar character to Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance polymath
who took on roles designing anything from bridges to war machines despite
having no previous experience.
According to legend, al-Haytham bit off more than he could chew by
promising the Caliph al-Hakim that he could divert the Nile to control
flooding and irrigation. Failing to do so, al-Haytham is said to have
pretended to be insane, a pretence he had to maintain for years until the
caliph’s death. What we know more certainly is that al-Haytham wrote a
number of books, including Mizan al-Hikmah (Scale of Wisdom) and
particularly notably Kitāb al-Manā ir (Book of Optics), which contain a
wide range of experimentally-based observations on light, both in the way it
reflects from mirrors – flat and curved – and is refracted (bent) when
passing from one material to another. Al-Haytham even used the refraction
of the atmosphere that allows light to continue in the sky after the Sun is
below the horizon to estimate the thickness of the atmosphere.
Al-Haytham’s work would be highly influential on medieval Western
optics, but even more impact was felt from another Arabic text, ibn Sīnā’s
al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb, known in the West as Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine.
Ibn Sīnā – whose full name was Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-
Ḥasan ibn ‘Alī ibn Sīnā – was born around 980 in what is now Uzbekistan,
though his work as a physician was primarily in Persia. The five volumes of
the Canon of Medicine would become central to medical practice both in
the Islamic world and Europe.
Like many of the originators of great science books of the period, ibn
Sīnā used information from the best of ancient Greek writing on the topic –
taking in the work of Hippocrates and Galen, including the four humours,
and mixing in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. He then added in his own
ideas to make a heady mixture that would importantly include both a guide
to natural substances with medical properties (the Materia Medica) and a
formulary describing the manufacture of compound drugs. Although a wide
range of these would no longer now be considered effective (or even safe),
some indubitably had a genuine medical benefit.
Ḥunayn Ibn-Isḥāq
AL-ASHR MAKALAT FI’L’AYN, TWELFTH CENTURY

A twelfth-century copy of the ninth-century work Al-Ashr Makalat Fi’l’ayn on the structure, diseases and
treatment of the eye.
Ḥunayn Ibn-Isḥāq
AL-ASHR MAKALAT FI’L’AYN, TWELFTH CENTURY

A page from one of two known manuscript copies of the ninth-century work Al-Ashr Makalat Fi’l’ayn
showing a schema of the eye.
Ibn Al-Haytham
KITĀB AL-MANĀ IR, THIRTEENTH CENTURY

A thirteenth-century copy of the tenth/eleventh-century work Kitāb al-Manā ir on light and optics,
revised by Kamal al-Din al-Farisi, here showing the optical workings of the eye.
Ibn Sīnā
AL-QĀNŪN FĪ AL-ṬIBB, 1632

A copy of the eleventh-century work al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb. The cover shows a doctor taking a woman’s
pulse; inner pages show internal organs and the nervous system.
Mathematics moves on
While the Arabic-speaking world was spreading the word for mathematics
that at least in part originated in India, Indian mathematicians were not
standing still. By the twelfth century, another mathematical genius was
rivalling Brahmagupta. His name was Bhāskara, often known as Bhāskara
II to avoid confusion with a seventh-century mathematician. Born in 1114,
probably in the modern state of Karnataka, Bhāskara is known for a single
important work, the Siddhānta Śiromaṇī, a name not dissimilar to Ptolemy’s
Almagest in meaning, translating as ‘Crown of Treatises’.
The four parts of the book cover arithmetic and measurement, algebra,
the movement of the planets and the rotation of the heavens. The first
volume has many practical applications, such as the calculation of interest,
but also includes more sophisticated number theory concepts such as zero
and negative numbers. (Like Brahmagupta, Bhāskara had problems with 0
÷ 0, in his case declaring the result to be infinite.) However, more
impressive was the algebra in the second volume, which covers a far wider
range of equations than earlier texts and develops some early ideas on what
would become calculus (though there is no evidence that the subsequent
seventeenth-century development of calculus as we now know it was
influenced by this book). Much of the astronomical work in the book was
based on existing models, both from ancient Greece and earlier Indian
philosophers, but Bhāskara seems to have improved on their calculations to
give more accurate values.
Mathematical skill was also central to a highly influential work from this
period – Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation), written in 1202.
Properly Leonardo of Pisa, Fibonacci (a nickname based on ‘son of
Bonacci’) was a master Italian mathematician who was born in Pisa around
1175. Like most mathematical books of the period, the Liber Abaci contains
practical mathematical tips on, for example, the calculation of interest. It
also came closer to our modern representation of fractions. Before
Fibonacci, these were written out as the Greeks had as combinations of 1/x
rather than having larger numbers above the dividing line. So, for instance,
what we would denote 3/4, prior to Fibonacci could only be represented as
1/2 + 1/4. Liber Abaci also introduced the Fibonacci series – the series
produced by adding together the previous two numbers that begins 1, 1, 2,
3, 5, 8, 13, 21… which Fibonacci illustrated with the growth in population
from a breeding pair of rabbits.
Bhāskara II
LILAVATI, 1650

A page from Lilavati, the first volume of Siddhānta Śiromaṇī. It uses the Pythagorean theorem to work
out a problem where a snake is heading from a pillar to its hole and a peacock has to fly down along the
hypotenuse to catch it.

However, the book’s main claim to fame was in succeeding where

translations of Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar (see here) hadn’t in spreading the use
of Arabic numerals into Europe, which Fibonacci accurately described as
‘Indian style’. At the time, numbers were either written out as words or
represented using the clumsy Roman numerals, making the more modern
system so much more practical. As we have seen, Liber Abaci was not the
first foreign book to praise the benefits of the Indian system – in fact, they
had already been highlighted as far back as 662 by a Syrian bishop – but it
seems to have been the one that really lit the spark for the use of these
representations.
Along with numerals, Liber Abaci introduced the use of the zero to
Europe, an essential for the development of modern mathematics. The zero
proved more popular initially with mathematicians than it did with
accountants. It was easy to change a zero into a 6, 8 or 9 in a manuscript, so
it was treated with suspicion. In 1299, for example, the council of the
Italian city of Florence banned the use of Indian numerals in accounts for
this reason. Even as late as the sixteenth century, a Belgian priest informed
his suppliers that they should only use words as numerical values in their
contracts.

Bhāskara II
LILAVATI, 1650

This page features another example of Pythagoras’s theorem.

Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci)

LIBER ABACI, 1227
Pages from the book that introduced the Fibonacci series and popularized Arabic/Indian numerals,
showing fractions, in the collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

Against all odds

By the thirteenth century, when Fibonacci was writing, an increasing
number of Europeans were producing books that primarily commented on
ancient Greek and Islamic science, but also added new ideas of their own.
Few of these books have had a lasting impact, but the Opus Majus of Roger
Bacon is worth picking out, both as one of the most impressive examples of
its kind and also because of Bacon’s remarkable story.
A Franciscan friar based mostly in the English city of Oxford, Bacon
was born in either 1214 or 1220 (there are two interpretations of his only
autobiographical comment). Bacon seems to have had a driven personality.
Despite a ruling from the head of his order that friars should not write
books, Bacon was determined to produce a scientific encyclopaedia and
looked for political support in the church to enable him to do so. The
French cardinal Guy de Foulques had shown an interest in Bacon’s work, so
Bacon asked de Foulques to get him an exception from the rule and some
funding. Unfortunately, the request seems to have become garbled along the
way; after two years, de Foulques finally replied giving his support to
Bacon and asking that the (non-existent) book be sent to him immediately.
To make matters worse, de Foulques told Bacon to do this secretly, so gave
him no defence against the Franciscan prohibition of writing books and
provided no cash, which was a disaster as Bacon had already used up his
inheritance.
ROGER BACON, 1617

No contemporary images are known to exist of this thirteenth-century English friar, proto-scientist and
author; this illustration is from Symbola Aureae Mensae by Michael Maier (1568–1622).
Roger Bacon
OPUS MAJUS, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

This copy of Bacon’s Opus Majus was donated to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1634, where it has
remained ever since.
Roger Bacon
OPUS MAJUS, THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The earliest known copy of some of Bacon’s work, housed in the British Library, London. The page
shown is from part five of the Opus Majus, titled ‘Tractatus perspective’.

With things looking dire, Bacon had a stroke of luck. To wide surprise,
de Foulques was elected Pope, as Clement IV. Bacon obtained formal papal
blessing on his venture and decided to write a proposal for his great
encyclopaedia, intending to provide a covering letter and a short synopsis of
the book. To say Bacon got carried away would be an understatement: his
proposal ended up 500,000 words long. While this was being copied, he
started on the covering letter – which also became a major manuscript. And
this happened once again – all in two years from 1266 to 1267. These three
volumes became known as the Opus Majus (Great Work), Opus Minus
(Lesser Work) and Opus Tertius (Third Work). Between them they included
mathematics and astronomy, optics, geography, philosophy and much more
– notably including a section describing the importance of experience and
experiment to understanding nature, rather than relying purely on
philosophical musing.
Bacon sent off the first two volumes of his vast proposal to the Pope –
it’s likely the third was still being copied at this point. Before he could get a
response, however, the news broke that the Pope had died. In all likelihood,
Clement never saw Bacon’s remarkable books. Clement’s successor as Pope
had no interest in science, and, according to legend, by his order Bacon was
imprisoned for his actions for as much as 13 years. At the time, Bacon’s
books were suppressed, but remarkably they survived and provide an
exceptional picture of the science of the period. While Bacon contributed
some original ideas, particularly on calendar reform and the nature of light,
and even dared to question some of Aristotle’s thinking, the importance of
the Opus Majus is in the scale of Bacon’s vision.
The books covered in this chapter, important though they were, were
restricted in the number of people they could reach, both by limited literacy
and the need to manually copy each volume. However, in the next chapter,
with the advent of the printing press and more widespread literacy, we will
see books that increasingly bore fruit.
OceanofPDF.com
2
RENAISSANCE IN PRINT
THE REVOLUTION IN BOOKS
I T IS FASHIONABLE to talk of revolutions in science, but the period covered
in this chapter – from around 1200 to the end of the eighteenth century –
featured two parallel revolutions. In the world of books, the introduction of
moveable-type printing technology made it possible for the science book to
reach a much wider audience. And in science itself, the work of Copernicus,
Newton and others transformed our view of the universe, and of the way
that science was undertaken. It was during this period that natural
philosophy evolved into science.
The historian of science David Wooton points out in his excellent 2015
book The Invention of Science how this period, for example, saw the literal
invention of the concept of discovery. When Columbus attempted to sail
west to China in 1492 and instead hit on the New World, he did not have an
appropriate word to describe what he had done; amongst European
languages, the word ‘discovery’ or its equivalent only existed in Portuguese
at the time (and even there had only been introduced a few years before).
The idea of looking outwards and making discoveries was the hallmark of
this new era in science. Up until this period, the tendency was not to look
outwards but inwards to philosophical musings, and backwards to try to use
and interpret ancient wisdom. The Renaissance brought the urge to discover
and think anew.
It might seem odd to make use of what seems like simply a voyage of
exploration to illustrate the changing nature of science – yet Columbus’s
voyages were amongst the first observations to clearly counter Aristotle’s
model of the universe. The four earthly elements in Aristotle’s world might
be combined in various ways, but his primary structure for the centre of the
universe required there to be a sphere of earth, surrounded by a sphere of
water, surrounded by a sphere of air, surrounded by a sphere of fire – each
having less of a tendency to be at the centre of everything than the sphere it
contained.

COLUMBUS’S LETTER, 1494

A woodcut Latin version, printed in Basel, of Columbus’s letter announcing the discovery of the New
World, written to King Ferdinand of Spain on the caravel ship Nina on 15 February 1493.
Henricus Martellus Germanus
WORLD MAP, CA. 1489

A world map contemporary with Columbus’s voyage, created by German cartographer Heinrich
Hammer, which may have been taken from a map by Columbus’s brother Bartolomeo.

If the universe was perfectly centred, the Earth would have no land at all
above the surface of the water, which would have been inconvenient to say
the least. It was therefore accepted that the sphere of earth was off-centre,
making it possible for a chunk of earth to stand out above the waters,
forming the land. If that were the case, though, apart from small local
cracks such as the English Channel, there had to be a single contiguous land
mass. As it became clearer that the New World was widely separated from
Europe, Aristotle’s model seemed increasingly unlikely, laying the
foundations for easier acceptance of one of the most famous Renaissance
titles, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus (see here).
Martin Waldseemüller
UNIVERSALIS COSMOGRAPHIA, VOSGEAN GYMNASIUM, CA. 1507

A wall map by the German cartographer, the first to use the name America – its full title was Universalis
cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes.

Master of invention
First, though, we need to take a step back to a collection of old-style
handwritten books that introduced no new scientific facts, but that are
iconic in the history of science and technology. These are the notebooks of
Leonardo da Vinci. His work marks perfectly the transitional period
between the old and the new – the notebooks were produced after moveable
type was invented, but were handwritten and never intended for publication
– yet Leonardo’s work was amongst the first where the visual nature of
some of the content makes it as attractive to the non-technical reader as is it
is to the engineer. This is doubly ironic as Leonardo appeared to go out of
his way to make his texts inaccessible, often working in mirror writing and
making notes that were intended for his eyes only.
In some ways, Leonardo’s approach is reminiscent of the view put across
by Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century English friar. As Bacon stated, ‘The
cause of the obscurity in the writings of all wise men has been that the
crowd derides and neglects the secrets of wisdom and knows nothing of the
use of these exceedingly important matters. And, if by chance, any
magnificent truth falls to its notice, it seizes upon it and abuses it to the
manifold disadvantage of persons and of the community.’ This is quoted
from a short work with a long title, thought to be written about 1250: De
Mirabile Potestate Artis et Naturae (in full, its title translates as ‘Letter
Concerning the Marvellous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the
Nullity of Magic’). The main content of the letter is a critique of fraudsters
who pretend to do magic, contrasting this with the wonders of nature and
science that Bacon mostly claimed to have observed. However, he also
described a series of mechanisms for ensuring that knowledge is kept to the
elite few and not made available to the masses.
Some such writing, Bacon said, is ‘hidden under characters and symbols,
others in enigmatical and figurative expressions’. So, he was suggesting, it
was possible to use ciphers, or such elliptical language that only those in the
know could follow what was being said (a familiar approach to Bacon from
the parables in the Bible). He then, as illustration, went on to describe the
manufacture of gunpowder several times, using a range of wording that can
be hard to follow and finished with an encrypted phrase that has never been
satisfactorily decoded. We can see in Leonardo’s notebooks that same urge
to keep the secrets of his discoveries and inventions from ordinary people.
And what a remarkable series of books this produced.
Born in the town of Vinci, near Florence in Italy, in 1452, Leonardo
started out in 1476 as an assistant to the artist Andrea del Verroccio, and
would go on to have the definitive Renaissance career as an artist, inventor
and engineer. His notebooks were voluminous. Through to his death in
1519, he wrote the equivalent of around 20 books. When he was not
sketching humans, animals, plants and geological features, he was devising
technology. Leonardo first came to this through producing mechanisms for
the stage, which at the time featured increasingly complex mechanisms to
put on spectacles where actors floated through the air and new vistas
opened up before the enthralled audience.
Leonardo da Vinci
SELF-PORTRAIT, CA. 1512

This red chalk picture is widely (but not universally) accepted to be a self-portrait by Leonardo, aged
around 60.
Leonardo da Vinci
CODEX ATLANTICUS, 1478–1519

A spread from one of Leonardo’s notebooks, showing hydraulic machines with wheels and gears that
exploit water energy.
Leonardo da Vinci
CODEX ATLANTICUS, 1478–1519

A page showing ‘the machine for flying’, which looks very similar to a modern-day hang glider.
Leonardo da Vinci
CÓDICE MADRID I, 1493

Leonardo’s sketches of chains, links and counterweights.

Leonardo da Vinci
CODEX ARUNDEL, 1508

Leonardo’s study of breathing apparatus for a diver.

Leonardo’s notebooks range from detailed guidance on painting

techniques (his pupil Francesco Melzi extracted material from the
notebooks to produce a Treatise on Painting) to exploded diagrams for his
mechanical devices. These included automata, such as a mechanical knight
and a ‘self-driving’ cart with a mechanism to gradually increase its steer to
the right during its movement. Biologically, he drew from dissections, took
a particularly modern-feeling mechanical approach to his understanding of
the workings of the body and dissected eyes to understand the optics of
vision before pouring all of this into his notebooks. He even included many
examples from Euclid’s Elements, illustrated in his own style.
Some of the most intricate and delightful illustrations in the notebooks
show the workings of gears. These were in their relative infancy at the time,
but Leonardo made use of everything from simple wheels with pegs around
to sophisticated worm gears. The inventions he showed in his notebooks
range from a diving suit to a form of tank, and his civil engineering
included everything from canals to the design of sophisticated bridges.
While Leonardo’s physics may have been little different from that of
Aristotle, the presentation of it in his work transformed the subject.

A revolution in the heavens

The European introduction of moveable-type printing presses in the 1440s
would see a series of transforming titles that might not yet have thrown off
Bacon’s view that science should be kept from the masses, but that would
spread far and wide among the educated, carrying the scientific message. Of
these, the first to have a dramatic (if distinctly slow) impact was De
Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly
Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus.
Nicolaus Copernicus
DE REVOLUTIONIBUS ORBIUM COELESTIUM, HENRICUS PETRUS, 1566

Early edition of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus from 23 years after its first publication in 1543, showing
the orbits of the planets around the sun.

Copernicus, more accurately Mikolaj Kopernik, was born in Thorn (now

Toruń) in Poland in 1473. Nominally a canon in the church, Copernicus
never became an active cleric, but he did make use of part of his lengthy
university education (he studied until he was 30), acting as physician to his
uncle. Over the years, he developed a significant interest in astronomy and
made many observations. Astronomers were still making use of the
epicycles from Ptolemy’s day (see here), and Copernicus gradually became
convinced that the only way to improve on this explanation featuring the
mess of strange motions in the heavens, was to redraw the model of the
universe (the solar system in modern terms) putting the Sun rather than
Earth at the centre. Copernicus did this in De Revolutionibus.
 The manuscript of this famous title was pretty well complete in the
1530s, but Copernicus hesitated to publish it, and it would only be printed
shortly before his death in 1543. In the final version, the Lutherian minister
Andreas Osiander, who acted as publisher, added an introductory letter
which made it clear that this was a model that made calculation easier,
rather than being necessarily a more accurate version of the truth than
Ptolemy’s model. (It’s often thought that resistance to the Copernican
theory came solely from the Catholic Church, which banned the title from
1616 to 1835, but early Protestant leader Martin Luther was also scathing
about the book, and called Copernicus a fool. In both cases, the problem
was that the Bible mentions the Sun moving in the sky, rather than the Earth
rotating.)

Nicolaus Copernicus
DE REVOLUTIONIBUS ORBIUM COELESTIUM, HENRICUS PETRUS, 1566

As Copernicus still assumed that orbits were circular he still had to make use of some epicycles and
deferents.
Sebastian Münster
COSMOGRAPHIA, HENRICHUM PETRI, 1564

An early world map from Münster’s far-reaching geographical, political and scientific encyclopaedia, in
an edition from around 20 years after its original printing in 1544.

It’s easy to picture Copernicus making the leap from Ptolemy’s model to
our current one in a single bound, but in reality, he still retained the idea
that planets should be attached to perfect spheres, giving them circular
orbits. Although his approach of putting the Sun at the centre did away with
the strange retrograde motion of the outer planets, circular orbits simply
didn’t work properly, and Copernicus still had to make use of Ptolemy’s
idea of eccentrics in order to match his theory with observation.
Astronomy and cosmology also featured in another book from around
the same period – a title destined to outsell not only Copernicus, but pretty
well every other book published in the sixteenth century apart from the
Bible. This was Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster. Born in Ingelheim
am Rhein in Germany in 1488, Münster only had an amateur interest in
natural philosophy – his day job was as professor of Hebrew – but his
enthusiasm for the subject and ability to communicate it made his book a
bestseller.
Perhaps one other aspect of the book hints at a reason why it sold so
well, and reflects a change in science publishing that would take well over
100 years to complete. Published in 1544, Münster’s book had the full title
of Cosmographia. Beschreibung aller Lender: in welcher begriffen aller
Voelker, Herrschaften, Stetten, und namhafftiger Flecken, herkommen:
Sitten, Gebreüch, Ordnung, Glauben, Secten und Hantierung durch die
gantze Welt und fürnemlich Teütscher Nation (roughly: ‘Cosmographia.
Describing all lands: covering all peoples, sovereignties, states and named
locations including customs, faiths and laws throughout the world and for a
whole German nation’) – Münster believed in giving value for money in his
titles. But note that this book was written in German. At a time when the
majority of learned scientific books were published in Latin, Münster made
his work more accessible to the wider public. It would still be translated
into Latin (and a number of other languages), but it was written for the
people.
In reality, Münster was more the contributing editor than the author of
this scientific encyclopaedia, which had over 100 contributors. The focus
was not primarily scientific, with many sections devoted to the geography
of a wide range of countries and regions, but Cosmographia lived up to its
name by starting off on astronomy and mathematics before focusing on
more detailed geography and many beautiful maps.
Sebastian Münster
COSMOGRAPHIA, HENRICHUM PETRI, 1544

Interior pages of the first edition of Cosmographia.

Alain Manesson Mallet
SYSTEME DE L’UNIVERS SELON COPERNICUS, CA. 1683

A later, coloured illustration of the universe as propounded by Copernicus (see here), from Mallet’s 1683
book Description de l’Univers. The book resembled Münster’s Cosmographia both in being published in
the country’s language, rather than in Latin, and in covering a combination of geographical and
astronomical topics.
Peter Bienewitz
ASTRONOMICUM CAESAREUM, PETER BIENEWITZ, 1540

The title page of this remarkable illustrated book, published by Bienewitz’s own press. Though based on
Ptolemy’s astronomy, the book was revolutionary in its use of interactive diagrams.

The lasting influence of Münster’s book was clear over 100 years later,
when the French military engineer and mapmaker Alain Manesson Mallet
wrote his five-volume Description de L’Univers (Description of the
Universe). Like Münster, Mallet made the decision to work in his native
language, though this was significantly more common by 1683 when
Description de L’Univers (which features on this book’s cover) was
published. But the book was also similar in format, combining astronomical
information with a large amount of geographical material, including both
maps and information on customs, religions and laws, just as
Cosmographia did.
It’s interesting to contrast Münster’s bestseller, which ran to at least
50,000 copies in German alone, with a contemporary volume that probably
sold fewer than 200 – yet also managed to be revolutionary in a strangely
literal sense. This was Astronomicum Caesareum (Caesarean Astronomy)
from 1540 by the German mathematician Peter Bienewitz, who was given
the Latin nickname Apianus (the Latin for ‘bee’, as Biene means bee in
German). The astronomy presented in Astronomicum Caesareum was
purely that of Ptolemy, untainted by new-fangled ideas, but what was
remarkable about the book is that for each planet there were beautiful
calculator dials with revolving moving parts, which allowed the reader to
work out the planet’s location at a given time, with calculators for eclipses,
phases of the Moon and a universal calendar thrown in.
Peter Bienewitz
ASTRONOMICUM CAESAREUM, PETER BIENEWITZ, 1540

Two of the 35 beautiful dial-like illustrations, known as volvelles, from this rare book.
Peter Bienewitz
ASTRONOMICUM CAESAREUM, PETER BIENEWITZ, 1540

Another illustrated spread from this rare book, showing a calculator for the position of Mars against the
zodiac.

From mines to maths to minds

If Münster took his readers on a journey from the heavens to terrestrial
geography, it was down to another German writer to carry on down into the
depths of the Earth. Generally recognised as the first significant
mineralogist, Georgius Agricola, born in the German town of Glauchau in
1494, would not live to see a finished copy of his book De Re Metallica
(On the Nature of Metals). (It might seem a little odd that a mineralogist
should be called ‘Farmer George’ in Latin – but Agricola was born Georg
Pawer, and Pawer (now Bauer) is simply the German for ‘farmer’.)
De Re Metallica is more an engineering book that one of pure science, in
that it is a practical guide for mining engineers, describing how to find
appropriate minerals and giving guidance on digging up, crushing and
smelting the ore and providing methods for separating out mixed metals. It
would remain an important guide right into the eighteenth century. Agricola
had seen a number of earlier works published, notably De Ortu et Causis
Subterraneorum, which was more scientific as a geology text, but these had
far less lasting impact. However, after completing De Re Metallica in
around 1550 there was a considerable delay in getting the many illustrations
carved into wooden blocks ready for printing. It seems likely it was the
production of these woodcuts that delayed the publication until 1556, the
year after Agricola’s death.
The sixteenth century was a period of a new awakening of mathematical
ideas. These would not fully come to fruition until the following century,
when the focus would be in Germany and England, but in the sixteenth
century, Italy was the home of two of the mathematical greats. The first,
Gerolamo Cardano, was born in Pavia in 1501. Cardano qualified as a
physician but was not able to practise medicine as his illegitimate birth and
lack of social graces turned those who could have awarded certification
against him. Medicine’s loss was mathematics’ gain. Cardano was a prolific
writer on maths and science, publishing over 200 works.

Georgius Agricola
DE RE METALLICA, HIERONYMUM FROBENIUM ET NICOLAUM EPISCOPIUM, 1556

Illustrations of a machine for drawing water (left) mining techniques (middle) and a smelting furnace
(right) from the woodcuts that delayed publication of the title.
Georgius Agricola
DE RE METALLICA, HIERONYMUM FROBENIUM ET NICOLAUM EPISCOPIUM, 1556

From mining to smelting, the whole process laid out from one of the wooden blocks that took so much
time to produce.

Out of Cardano’s prolific output, two books stand out. Ars Magna (The
Great Art), published in 1545, was a masterwork on algebra, pulling
together solutions to equations that had never been seen before (including,
controversially, solutions to cubic equations discovered by another
mathematician, Niccolò Tartaglia, who had told Cardano in confidence and
asked him not to publish them). The book also made wide use of negative
numbers – rarely seen in mathematics up to this point – and started to
address the idea of imaginary numbers based on the square root of negative
numbers. However, it is Cardano’s other masterpiece that seems far more
significant now. This was Liber de Ludo Aleae (Book on Games of
Chance). Although it was written in the 1560s, it would not be published
until 1663, long after Cardano’s death. This late work was important
because it was the first to take on probability in a systematic way, opening
up a whole new field of mathematics.
Although a lesser figure in some ways, the other Italian great of the
period was Rafael Bombelli, born in Bologna around 1525. Bombelli
covered the same area as Cardano’s Ars Magna with his simply titled
Algebra. This was most notable for giving what amounts to the full, modern
understanding of imaginary numbers, including providing us with the
modern symbol for the square root of -1, i.
The sixteenth century would prove to be an important time for writing on
the philosophy of science – analysing the scientific method itself. As Roger
Bacon had suggested should be the case in the thirteenth century, proto-
scientists such as Copernicus had tried to take an approach to natural
philosophy that was driven more by observation than based on
philosophical theorising alone. This approach would be clarified and
described effectively, if sometimes obscurely, by the English politician
Francis Bacon (no relation to Roger, as far as we know), born in London in
1561. Bacon wrote a number of books, most notably Novum Organum
Scientiarum (The New Instrument of Science) from 1620. His writing style
was odd and full of hyperbole, and it was more his approach than the detail
of his books that made a difference. He argued that natural philosophers
should be sceptical and should build knowledge by combining observation
with the logical process of induction.
Gerolamo Cardano
ARS MAGNA, JOHANN PETREIUS, 1545

The Italian mathematician’s masterpiece on algebra, first published in 1545, included a number of
previously unseen solutions.
Francis Bacon
NOVUM ORGANUM SCIENTIARUM, FRANCISCUM MOIARDUM ET ADRIANUM WIJNGAERDE, 1645

The frontispiece illustration from Bacon’s best-known title in an edition from 25 years after its original
publication in 1620.

Bacon is often described as the father of the scientific method, though

modern historians of science tend to play down his significance. His work
was certainly a notable influence on the founders of England’s Royal
Society, which was established in 1660, the oldest surviving, continuously
existing, scientific institution in the world. One of Bacon’s most important
observations was to do away with the traditional distinction between
artificial and natural. Natural philosophers had held it impossible to learn
from, say, an artificially produced rainbow about a natural rainbow – but
Bacon argued there was no difference ‘in form or essence’ between nature
and artifice.

The magnetic universe

Bacon’s methodology was slow to fully take root: if we look at the work of
the man who finally fixed the problem of epicycles, the German
mathematician Johannes Kepler, we see a gradual mental shift in his work
from an ancient Greek-style philosophical approach to a more Baconian,
data-driven method – from an inward looking approach to more outward
looking science. Kepler wrote three significant books on astronomy and
cosmology. The earliest, Mysterium Cosmographicum (Cosmographic
Mystery) from 1596, supported Copernicus, but in doing so came up with a
visually attractive but flawed philosophical argument for the structure of the
solar system.
Hans von Aachen
JOHANNES KEPLER, OIL ON CANVAS, CA. 1612

Portrait of the German mathematician.

Johannes Kepler
MYSTERIUM COSMOGRAPHICUM, ERASMI KEMPFERI/GODEFRIDI TAMPACHII, 1621

The Platonic solids that Kepler envisaged structuring the solar system in this edition of his 1596 title.

Kepler argued that each of the six planets known at the time, from
Mercury to Saturn, could be considered to exist on spheres, separated by the
five Platonic solids – the solids the ancient Greeks had identified that could
be constructed with sides of the same regular shape, such as triangles or
squares. His basis for this model was more theological and philosophical
than based on any scientific reasoning. However, it did enable him to start
the move away from the epicycles that had continued to plague the model
that Copernicus used (see here).
Kepler’s second astronomical title was De Stella Nova (On a New Star).
This was a description of the supernova of 1604, which appeared as a new
bright star that gradually faded away. Kepler was able to argue that, because
the new star had no parallax movement (the movement we see when, for
example, we look at an object with first one eye and then the other), it had
to be far enough away to be well outside the orbit of the Moon. As
Aristotle’s model required everything from the Moon’s orbit outwards to be
unchanging, this was another piece of evidence weakening the Aristotelian
view.
Johannes Kepler
MYSTERIUM COSMOGRAPHICUM, ERASMI KEMPFERI/GODEFRIDI TAMPACHII, 1621

Table and diagrams showing the ‘centres of eccentrics’ in this title predating Kepler’s doing away with the
need for these structures by using elliptical orbits.
Johannes Kepler
DE STELLA NOVA, PAUL SESSIUS, 1606

An illustration showing the location of the ‘new star’ in the constellation of Serpens – the serpent.
Johannes Kepler
ASTRONOMIA NOVA, GOTTHARD VÖGELIN, 1609

The book in which Kepler made the move away from circular orbits and hence was able to simplify the
structure of the solar system.

However, Kepler’s astronomical masterwork was realising that he could

fully do away with epicycles and accurately model what was observed by
removing the heavenly spheres entirely and instead having the planets move
on paths that he called ‘orbits’. These orbits were not circular, but followed
the egg-like shape of an ellipse (though some, such as that of the Earth,
were close to being circular). This model and Kepler’s first two laws of
planetary motion – that planets travelled in an ellipse with the Sun at one
focus, and that a line from a planet to the Sun would sweep out equal areas
in equal amounts of time – were published in his book Astronomia Nova
(The New Astronomy) in 1609 and were fundamental to the acceptance of
the Copernican model.
 Ironically, Kepler based a lot of his argument on the high-quality
observational work of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Yet the two had not
agreed on the structure of the heavens. Brahe realised the benefits of having
the Moon rotate around the Earth, and the planets around the Sun. But he
made a special case for the Earth, having the Sun (and its linked planets)
rotate around the Earth, thereby managing to keep in line with much of
Aristotle’s physics (and biblical commentary), even though he was happy to
dispute the idea of an unchanging space above the Moon’s orbit.
It is worth mentioning two further books of Kepler’s. First was
Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World), published in 1619. Like his
Mysterium Cosmographicum, this also made use of what we would now see
as philosophical rather than scientific arguments in suggesting that the
spacing of the planets obeyed the same sort of relationship as the musical
notes that form harmonies (producing the fanciful concept of the ‘music of
the spheres’, though Kepler did not believe that the planets generated actual
musical notes). However, the final section of the book also brought in his
third law of planetary motion, relating the size of the orbit to the time taken
to complete it. The second book, the Tabulae Rudolphinae (Rudolphine
Tables), published in 1627 and named after the Emperor Rudolf II, was a
star catalogue, based largely on the data of Brahe, which was not only
scientifically state of the art, but also included an impressive map of the
world.
Many philosophers wondered exactly how the planets were kept in place
if there were no crystal spheres to hold them there. One popular possible
answer was magnetism – the natural force known to have the ability to
influence solid objects at a distance. Kepler thought this was the case,
basing his belief on a book by the English natural philosopher William
Gilbert, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete
Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on That Great Magnet
the Earth), published in 1600.
Although Gilbert was wrong about gravity, his book was still an
important text as it was the first detailed scientific study of magnets. It
described a range of experiments he carried out, including producing
spherical magnets called ‘terrellas’, which he used to show how the effect
of the Earth’s magnetism would vary depending on your position on Earth.
This was a clear example of Bacon’s approach of learning about the natural
from the artificial, an essential for the experimental method to be able to
fully take hold. In his approach, Gilbert produced the first true science book
in the modern sense.

Johannes Kepler
TABULAE RUDOLPHINAE, J. SAUR, 1627/1658

The impressive world map commissioned by Kepler, drawn by Philip Eckebrecht and engraved by J.P.
Walsh. It was a later addition to Kepler’s book, which was first published in 1627; a proof exists from
1630, but it’s likely that the map was first published in 1658.
Johannes Kepler
TABULAE RUDOLPHINAE, J. SAUR, 1627

Internal page and title page from Kepler’s star catalogue.

Johannes Kepler
TABULAE RUDOLPHINAE, J. SAUR, 1627

One of the large number of Kepler’s astronomical tables based on Tycho Brahe’s data.
William Gilbert
DE MAGNETE, PETER SHORT, 1600

Pages from Gilbert’s book on magnets, with the illustration on the right showing one of his spherical
magnetic ‘terrellas’.
Jan Collaert I
THE INVENTION OF BOOK PRINTING, CA. 1600

An early illustration of men working at a book printer’s from a collection of prints entitled ‘New
Inventions of Modern Times’.

By the time Gilbert was writing his book, the printing press was
beginning to have a noticeable influence on science and the distribution of
information. In fact, Gilbert was the first to complain of a problem that has
troubled scientists and readers in general ever since: information overload.
He wrote that the intellectual now faced ‘so vast an Ocean of Books by
which the minds of studious men are troubled and fatigued’.
However, the impact of the printing press on science communication
was, without doubt, more good than bad. It meant that new ideas could be
shared between natural philosophers, enabling them to build on each other’s
inspiration. Where once the words of Aristotle were considered sacrosanct,
now it was possible to challenge ideas in print. The book was not only a
medium for the distribution of scientific information, but it also fostered
debate in a way that isolated individuals in far-flung universities never
could.

Inside the human body

Although astronomy (and to a degree magnetism) was a major factor in the
new science, it was not the only area that was seeing rapid development. In
1543, the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius had written De Humani
Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the Human Body in Seven Volumes), a
book that bettered even Leonardo da Vinci in its illustrations of human
anatomy. Vesalius broke away from the domination of the work of Galen
and Hippocrates, whose theories were as limiting as Aristotle’s were in
physics and cosmology, pointing out many anatomical errors and giving a
new understanding of anatomy based on far better observation of
dissections.
Andreas Vesalius
DE HUMANI CORPORIS, JOHANNES OPORINUS, 1543

The colourful woodcut frontispiece illustration from book seven of the first edition of Vesalius’s work on
the human body, showing Vesalius teaching at a medical school. This is the only completely coloured
copy known.
Andreas Vesalius
DE HUMANI CORPORIS, JOHANN OPORINUS, 1555

Interior illustrations of the human body in a Swiss printed edition from 12 years after the original
publication in 1543.
 Less than a hundred years later, the English physician William Harvey,
born in Folkestone in 1578, published a landmark medical book in 1628.
Just 72 pages long, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in
Animalibus (Anatomical Exercise of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in
Organisms) gives the first detailed analysis of the way that blood is
circulated around the body. Harvey’s work was based on careful
observation and experiments on animals, and by using ligatures in humans
to temporarily restrict the blood flow. Until this point the role of the heart
was largely seen as more spiritual than physical, but Harvey clearly
identified it as a pump that produced the blood flow. He identified one-way
valves and showed that circulation was necessary to account for the sheer
volume of blood that the heart pumped. Because Harvey’s model went
against medical ideas dating back to Galen, it took several decades before
this new hypothesis was widely accepted.
It is worth briefly jumping further forward a little in time to contrast
Harvey’s work with another famous medical book of the period, Nicolas
Culpeper’s Complete Herbal (originally published as The English
Physitian). Although Harvey’s work demonstrated an improving knowledge
of human anatomy, medicine was still mostly in the dark ages, tied to
unscientific and often harmful ancient Greek ideas. What Culpeper, born in
London in 1616, would do is focus on the one aspect of the medicine of the
time that had some potential for actually improving the patient’s health –
the pharmacopeia.

William Harvey
DE MOTU CORDIS, DOMINICI RICCIARDI, 1643

Illustrations on the use of ligatures to restrict blood flow from a 1643 edition, 15 years after its original
publication in 1628.
Nicholas Culpeper
COMPLETE HERBAL, EBENEZER SIBLEY, 1789

This edition, published over 100 years after the first edition in 1652, makes use of rich illustrations of the
herbs to help with identification in the field.
 The English Physitian was first published in 1652, and as its better-
known name from 1653 suggests, was a pharmaceutical guide concentrating
primarily on herbal medicines. One reason the book is fascinating is that
despite Culpeper’s enthusiasm for the benefits of herbal treatments, some of
which genuinely would have a positive medical effect, he was from an age
that had yet to throw off the non-scientific influence of astrology, and
therefore combined folk knowledge of what actually worked with fictional
reasoning that paired plants with the supposed influence of the planets.

So good they named him twice

Medicine, however, was making only slow steps forward, and the most
frequent breakthroughs in this period were in physics and cosmology, which
we return to for one of the most famous names from this era, Galileo
Galilei. Galileo was born in Pisa in 1564, the son of a professional musician
who was fascinated by the science behind musical instruments and who
influenced the young Galileo’s analytical view of the world.

Galileo Galilei
SIDEREUS NUNCIUS, TOMMASO BAGLIONI, 1610

Two of Galileo’s sketches of the Moon, showing the terminator separating the light and dark sides.
Galileo Galilei
SIDEREUS NUNCIUS, TOMMASO BAGLIONI, 1610

Galileo’s drawing of the Pleiades constellation brings in stars that had not previously been seen, thanks to
his observation through his newly constructed telescope.
Stefano della Bella,
FRONTISPIECE TO OPERE DI GALILEO GALILEI, ETCHING, 1656

The frontispiece from a collection of Galileo’s works, showing Galileo with a telescope.

Galileo worked widely in mathematics, physics and astronomy. As far as

personality goes, he was something of an opportunist. When, for example,
he heard that a Dutch inventor had arrived in Italy to demonstrate his
telescope in Venice, Galileo arranged for a friend to hold the inventor up, to
give Galileo time to assemble his own telescope and get to Venice first with
it. However, Galileo was also without doubt a genius, one of the first
natural philosophers who helped move the scientific viewpoint away from
the strictures of ancient Greece.
 Galileo wrote several notable books, though the first to reach a wide
non-technical audience – Sidereus Nuncius from 1610 (strictly more a
pamphlet than a book) – is by no means his most important. Apparently
translating as ‘Sidereal Messenger’, Sidereus Nuncius is more often called
the ‘Starry Messenger’. In fact, ‘starry’ isn’t a bad translation, as ‘sidereal’
was originally used to mean ‘starlike’, but over time has gained the more
technical meaning of a period of time measured by the passage of the stars
(i.e. the rotation of the Earth). Sidereus Nuncius was a summary of
Galileo’s early astronomical observations through his telescopes. It’s often
said he was the first to use a telescope for astronomy; he wasn’t, but there is
no doubt that his observations were significant. They notably included the
discovery of the four brightest moons of Jupiter (which Galileo, hoping to
win favour with the Tuscan court, named the Medicean Stars) and his
detailed study of the Moon.
Galileo’s description of the Moon was accompanied by beautiful
engraved images from his sketches, showing that the lunar surface, which
Aristotle’s worldview required to be perfect and flat, was, in fact, rugged
and varied. He concluded that the lunar landscape included high mountains,
which Galileo could see was the case because the view through his
telescope showed that the terminator – the line between the dark side and
the light side of the partly lit lunar face – was not a straight line, but crinkly,
as higher parts of the surface cast shadows into the sunlit parts.
Galileo Galilei
SYSTEMI DEL MONDO, I. A. HUGUETAN, 1641

The frontispiece from a later edition of Galileo’s book on models of the universe, first published in 1632,
showing Aristotle, Ptolemy and Copernicus.

One technique that Galileo used in his illustrations would be frowned

upon by modern science communicators. In some of his sketches of the
Moon there is a large crater on the terminator, making our natural satellite
look a little like the Death Star from the Star Wars movies. This huge crater
does not exist – it’s thought that Galileo was zooming in on a smaller crater
to make it clear what he was seeing – but without labelling it as such, it was
technically misleading. The pamphlet was by no means universally
accepted. Many, who had less effective telescopes, thought the moons of
Jupiter, for example, were nothing more than flaws in Galileo’s lenses.
There were elements in Sidereus Nuncius that ran counter to the
Aristotelian view of the universe, but Galileo’s big spanner in the works,
and his best-known work with the general public, was Dialogo Sopra i due
Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems) from 1632. This was the book that led to Galileo’s trial for heresy
and subsequent house arrest for life. Galileo is often portrayed as a martyr
for publishing this in the face of opposition from the Catholic Church,
though some of the fault was indubitably his own. In comparing the
Aristotelian and Copernican systems, Galileo makes the supporter of
Aristotle a character named Simplicio, whose name was suspiciously
similar to the Italian word for ‘simple-minded’. And, to make matters
worse, he included a section which put the Pope’s message – that the
Copernican model was just a mathematical nicety, useful for calculations
but not reflecting reality – in Simplicio’s voice. It was hardly politically
sensitive to imply that the Pope was a simpleton.
We need to remember that the main thrust of the book was not Galileo’s
original idea; rather, he was presenting evidence to support it. Sadly, the
only original part of the book – a section on the tides – is not just wrong,
but obviously wrong, as it put forward a theory that would only produce
one tide a day. Although this book is Galileo’s best known, what tends to be
missed is that its most important aspect was arguably that – like Münster’s
Cosmographia (see here) – it was written in the language of the people (in
Galileo’s case, Italian), rather than in Latin. Galileo was one of the earliest
significant writers of science books to realise the importance of getting the
message out to a wider public, and he wrote his two most important books
in the ‘vulgar’ tongue of his country.
Far eclipsing Dialogo for originality, though, was Galileo’s most
significant book, written in 1638 after his house arrest. This was Discorsi e
Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Scienze (Discourses and
Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences). In this book,
Galileo published his main ideas on physics. He described the motion of
pendulums, the way bodies accelerated under the force of gravity, their rate
being uninfluenced by their mass, the trajectories of projectiles and more.
Along the way, to future mathematicians’ delight, he was also one of the
very first to consider the mathematical implications of infinity.

Galileo Galilei
SYSTEMI DEL MONDO, BATISTA LANDINI, 1632

Diagrams of the Copernican solar system and phases of a body as it rotates around an illuminating
source.

What Galileo almost certainly didn’t do in researching this book was to

drop balls of different weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as legend has
it. It would have been very difficult to accurately time the falls, and there is
no evidence that the experiment ever took place. Instead, he presented an
ingenious thought experiment involving tying two falling bodies together,
which disproved Aristotle’s view that heavier bodies naturally fell faster,
and he supported his arguments on the effect of gravity with the results of
experiments where he rolled balls of different mass down inclined planes,
measuring their acceleration under far more controlled conditions than
would have been possible by dropping balls off a tower.
Once again, his book was written in Italian and, unlike many science
books from the period, it is still remarkably readable today. The book is
clearly intended for a wide audience, though Galileo archly remarks in the
introduction that he never intended it to be published (a service that was
performed by the publisher Elsevier – who still exist today – in Protestant
Holland). According to Galileo, he only intended to circulate the book to a
few friends and the whole thing came as a big surprise to him. If this was
intended to fool the Inquisition, he didn’t think much of their abilities – but
there were no repercussions this time.

Galileo Galilei
DUE NUOVE SCIENZE, ELSEVIER, 1638

Galileo’s masterpiece on physics, printed by Dutch publisher Elsevier, after Galileo’s house arrest made
publication in Italy impossible.

Geometry to chemistry
Someone who bridges the gap between Galileo and the other towering name
of the period, Isaac Newton, is the French philosopher René Descartes.
Though often best remembered for his statement ‘I think, therefore I am’,
Descartes put forward a range of scientific theories and made a major
breakthrough in mathematical technique. His most significant book was
Discours de la Méthode Pour bien conduire sa Raison, et chercher la Vérité
dans les Sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s
Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences) from 1637, which contains
his famous ‘I think’ quote. The Discours was Descartes’s attempt to give a
philosophical basis for a scientific method, but its greatest significance is
one of the appendices – which are effectively books in their own right – that
Descartes used to illustrate the outcome of using his method.
The appendix was La Géométrie (The Geometry). It may sound from the
title that it was little more than a re-working of Euclid, but it was far more
significant: the work contained in La Géométrie is the reason we refer to the
‘x y coordinates’ of mathematical charts as ‘Cartesian coordinates’ (even
though, perversely, Descartes didn’t use x and y; they were added by later
mathematicians to clarify his work.) Up until Descartes, geometry and
algebra were seen as totally independent disciplines. In his book, Descartes
showed that geometric curves and shapes could be rendered as algebraic
equations, making the manipulation of geometry something that could be
handled in terms of the often-simpler algebra.
René Descartes
DISCOURS DE LA MÉTHODE, JOANNES MAIRE, 1637

The geometry appendix of Descarte’s Discours, which linked algebra and geometry using Cartesian
coordinates.
Robert Boyle
THE SCEPTICAL CHYMIST, J. CADWELL, 1661

The title page from the first edition of Boyle’s book, which began the separation of chemistry from
alchemy as a discipline in its own right.

Descartes’s ideas would have a huge influence on someone who could

have learned a lesson or two in writing comprehensibly from Galileo. This
was the great mathematician and physicist born less than a year after
Galileo’s death, Isaac Newton. But before we get to his book Principia, a
landmark in the history of science books, we need to take a look at a title
that effectively marks the birth of a new science: Robert Boyle’s The
Sceptical Chymist.
Boyle was born in Lismore, Ireland in 1627, the fourteenth child of the
British Earl of Cork. He was technically a nobleman, but far enough down
the family pecking order to require some kind of profession. Most often this
would have taken the form of a career in the army or clergy, but Robert’s
European tour, taken when he was in his teens, seems to have sparked a
fascination with science that lasted throughout his life. Like most natural
philosophers of the period, his interests were wide. Boyle published a
significant book in 1660, his New Experiments Physico-Mechanical,
Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects, which introduced Boyle’s
law for gasses. Yet his work on the behaviour of gas was less original than
his transformation of chemistry. Just one year later, The Sceptical Chymist
would be published.
We now draw a very clear line between alchemy and chemistry.
Alchemy involved attempts to mix and react substances with an approach
that was as much spiritual as physical, hoping to achieve goals such as an
elixir of life or a philosopher’s stone, or the ability to transmute base metals
like lead into gold. Chemistry is a scientific study of the way that elements
interact. However, when Robert Boyle was active there was no such
distinction.
The approach that Boyle took could not be considered 100 per cent
chemistry, but he very much pushed alchemy in that direction. He was still
an alchemist as well as a chemist, and certainly attempted transmutation of
metals. However, his approach was far more in the spirit of modern science
than traditional alchemy. In The Sceptical Chymist he identified chemistry
as more than a tool of alchemy, as it had been seen to that date, but rather a
study in its own right of the way that different substances could be
combined as mixtures and compounds.
In the book, Boyle puts forward a hypothesis that seems surprisingly
modern. He suggested that matter was made up of atoms, a concept that, as
we have seen, had largely been out of favour since Aristotle (see here).
These atoms, he believed, linked together to form compounds and were
constantly in motion, with their collisions resulting in reactions. This idea
was prescient, though Boyle’s picture of the world was not perfect. What he
wrote was more inspired guesswork than the result of detailed experimental
analysis, limited as this was by the equipment and theories of the time. So,
for example, he believed that all matter we experience is made of
compounds, rather than ever being found as pure elements. However, his
approach was far more tied to experiment than that of many of his
contemporaries.
School of Peter Lely
PORTRAIT OF THE HON. ROBERT BOYLE, OIL ON CANVAS, CA. 1689

A portrait of Boyle (the painter may be Johannes Kerseboom) alongside a seventeenth century painting
by Hendrick Heerschop of an alchemist suffering a technical problem.

Scientific novelties
While Boyle envisaged the ultimate in small pieces of matter in the form of
atoms, his contemporary, Robert Hooke, examined, and reproduced in
greatly magnified drawings, the invisibly small world that was revealed by
the microscope in his book Micrographia. In doing so, he turned genuine
scientific discoveries into something close to an entertainment.
Hooke, who was born on the Isle of Wight in England in 1635, was an
impressive scientist in his own right, though he tends to be remembered
more for his role as curator of experiments for the Royal Society, where he
traded carefully worded insults with Isaac Newton. He also undertook
astronomical work, experimented in physics – producing Hooke’s law,
describing the elasticity of springs – and was a major player in the
rebuilding of London after the great fire of 1666, acting as surveyor for the
City. But as a writer, his Micrographia proved his most remarkable output.
With the lengthy full title of Micrographia: or Some Physiological
Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. With
Observations and Inquiries Thereupon, the book, published in 1665, was
the first to bring the view through the microscope to ordinary readers, in the
form of what would now probably be called a coffee-table book. In what
was already a large book, some of the illustrations even folded out, so that
readers could be delighted and horrified by the huge rendition of his
beautiful drawings of the likes of a lice, a flea and the compound eyes of a
fly.
It’s not that there isn’t plenty of text in Micrographia. Hooke used the
opportunity of its publication to range far and wide in his scientific
interests, considering everything from the nature of light to the origins of
fossils. However, it is the large copperplate engravings made from his
drawings that must have enthralled the book’s readers. The diarist Samuel
Pepys commented that Micrographia was ‘the most ingenious book that
ever I read in my life’.
Hooke’s observations also included a cross section of a piece of cork,
showing how the substance, which is apparently continuous to the naked
eye was made up of a collection of tiny box-like structures, which Hooke
was the first to name as ‘cells’. He likened the collection of cells to a
honeycomb, though the word itself seems to have been taken from the name
for a monk’s room, which were often arranged in rows of equal-sized
spaces.
Hooke was not the only one to capture the public’s imagination with
scientific novelties. The German scientist Otto von Guericke, born in
Magdeburg in 1602, would put on a scientific demonstration that amazed
the world. This would later appear in his Experimenta Nova (New
Experiments), published in 1672, which also included a wide range of other
observations on the nature of a vacuum (with work on static electricity
thrown in for good measure).
We tend to take the existence of a vacuum (in space, for example) as an
obvious possibility. But Aristotle had declared that a void or vacuum was
abhorred by nature, and until the seventeenth century it was assumed that
such a thing could simply not exist. Von Guericke carried out a vast range
of experiments on vacuums with early air pumps, but the one described in
Experimenta Nova that brought him fame was the Magdeburg hemispheres.
This was a pair of copper hemispheres about 50 cm (20 inches) across. In
1654, Von Guericke arranged an elaborate demonstration, removing as
much air as he could from between the pair of hemispheres. So strong was
the air pressure on the outside with a vacuum inside that two teams of 15
horses, one attached to each hemisphere, could not separate them.
Both von Guericke and Hooke grasped that going beyond simple
description of a theory was important if a scientific work was to attract the
attention of the public.

Otto von Guericke

EXPERIMENTA NOVA, JOHANNES JANSSONIUS, 1672

Illustration from von Guericke’s book of the Magdeburg hemispheres and the teams of horses attempting
to separate them after the air between was evacuated.
Robert Hooke
MICROGRAPHIA, JOHN MARTYN AND JAMES ALLESTRY, 1665

Some of the stunning illustrations from Hooke’s large format title including the eyes and head of a grey
drone fly
sea plants
cork
an ant
 A blue fly.

The gravity of the situation

Hooke’s name appeared a good few times in the original draft of one of the
most influential science books of all time: Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy), usually known as the Principia. Newton’s poor relations with
Hooke, which got worse over time, meant that before publication Newton
struck out the name of his fellow scientist whenever he could.
Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire in the east of
England in 1643 – or 1642, depending on your preference. In the period
before Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, dates near the turn
of the year can be confusing. In the Julian calendar that was used at the
time, Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, but by modern reckoning
this was 4 January 1643. His date of death is even more confusing. Modern
dating puts this as 31 March 1727, but in the calendar of the time it was 20
March 1726, as New Year’s Day at the time was held on 25 March.

Isaac Newton
PHILOSOPHÆ NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, JOSEPH STREATER, 1687

The title page from one of the most famous scientific works in history. This is where Newton introduced
his laws of motion and his theory of universal gravitation.

Newton’s three great contributions to science were his work on light and
colour (where he established, for example, that white light was composed of
the colours of the rainbow mixed together), on gravitation and motion, and
in developing the mathematical technique now called calculus, which he
called the method of fluxions. Newton would have considered himself a
mathematician rather than a natural philosopher (and he spent more time on
alchemy and theology than either), but his theories on light, gravity and
motion meant that the magnitude of his contributions to physics would only
be rivalled by Einstein’s.
Newton’s work on light and colour, which included a range of
experiments using both prisms and lenses and his own eyes, came first – yet
he was never one to publish in a hurry and his book on light and optics,
Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and
Colours of Light, would not be published until 1704, decades after the
research. This book was written in English, following the trend of using the
vulgar language that Galileo had made popular. But this was not the case
with his masterpiece, published in 1687. Not only was Principia written in
Latin, it seems deliberately to have been made more obscure than it needed
to be.
The book is in three volumes, the third of which Newton had intended to
be a more approachable text for the general reader – but as a result of
fallings out with other Fellows of the Royal Society he made it as
inaccessible to the non-scientist as the rest. The Principia brings us
everything from the concept of mass and the three laws of motion to
Newton’s gravitational law (though it is never shown in the modern
equation form). The most inspired aspect of his work was unifying the
gravitational pull we experience on the surface of the Earth with the force
that keeps the Earth in orbit around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth.
To be able to achieve this remarkable feat, Newton made wide use of his
new mathematical technique, the method of fluxions, though in a move that
probably makes the content even harder to grasp, as much of the book as
possible makes use of traditional geometric arguments. In making
calculations on the effects of gravity, in the main part of the book Newton
stuck to a description of what happens, rather than a hypothesis of why it
happens. To emphasise this, he wrote a famous phrase in the Principia,
‘Hypotheses non fingo’ (‘I frame no hypotheses’), though it has been
pointed out that the word ‘fingo’ had negative connotations and seems to
suggest that his opponents, who did try to explain how gravity worked,
were just making things up.

Isaac Newton
PHILOSOPHÆ NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, JOSEPH STREATER, 1687

Interior pages showing Newton’s geometric approach despite his use of calculus to derive his laws. Below,
proposition XXXIV looks at the hourly variation of the inclination of the lunar orbit.
John Quartley
A MEETING OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN CRANE COURT, ENGRAVING, 1878

An engraving of a Royal Society meeting in the early eighteenth century at Crane Court, London with
Isaac Newton presiding: includes the mace, granted to the Society by Charles II.

Newton’s force of gravity acted at a distance, with a force that depended

only on the mass of the two bodies involved and the inverse square of the
distance between them. How one thing influenced another at a distance was
something he claimed not to care about – though in reality he did have a
theory. This strange remote force led to some of his contemporaries, such as
the Dutch natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens, being scathing about the
idea, calling the action at a distance ‘occult’, in the sense of being hidden
and inexplicable.
However, Newton’s mathematics worked, and the book opened up a
major aspect of physics, becoming an essential for anyone working in the
field. As we have seen, for example, the eighteenth-century French
mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet wrote a French translation
and commentary of Principia that was published after her death in 1759
(see here).

Nature, organised
The Principia contains many diagrams, though it is a work where the text is
of primary importance. We tend to think of natural history as a more visual
aspect of science than physics, but what was arguably the first truly
scientific book in natural history is purely a matter of words. It is Systema
Naturae (The System of Nature), first published in 1735, written by
Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné. Appropriately known by the Latin
version of his name, Linnaeus, he was born in Råshult in 1707. In a way,
Linnaeus was a hangover from the past. Not only was this one of the last
major science titles to be written in Latin, but the central feature of the book
was the use of Latin in two-part names to identify species (such as the
familiar Homo sapiens) – a system known as binomial nomenclature.
Martin Hoffman
CAROLUS LINNAEUS, OIL ON CANVAS, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Portrait of Carl Linnaeus in Lappish dress.

Systema Naturae ran to 12 editions (with an extra posthumous version),

starting as a small collection of organisms and working up in increasing
quantity and structure until, by the tenth edition, with the full title Systema
naturæ per regna tria naturæ, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species,
cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis (System of nature through
the three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and
species, with characters, differences, synonyms, places), Linnaeus had
included the two-part (binomial) Latin structure for a whole range of
animals as well as plants. The long title gives a feel for the importance of
the book. As well as popularising the two-part Latin species name, which
already existed but was not commonly used, it gave a whole hierarchal
structure (taxonomy) to the ‘kingdoms’ of nature, which Linnaeus divided
into animals, plants and (strangely to us now) minerals.
The basic approach taken by Linnaeus is still in use today, although his
taxonomy has changed over time; we now have, for example, a higher level
than ‘kingdom’ – the ‘domain’, which is split into archaea, bacteria and
eukarya, with the multi-celled eukaryates then divided into kingdoms such
as animals, plants and fungi. Admittedly Linnaeus’s is not the only
approach – his top-down structures are now rivalled by cladistics, which
takes a bottom-up approach, forming groups based on common ancestors, a
method that was first considered around the start of the twentieth century,
but has really blossomed with the ability to make DNA comparisons.

Carl Linnaeus
SYSTEMA NATURAE, JOANNIS WILHELMI DE GROOT, 1735

The title page of the first edition and one of the classification diagrams from the Linnaeus book.
Carl Linnaeus
SYSTEMA NATURAE, GABRIEL NICOLAUS RASPE, 1773

An avian illustration from a German translation of the twelfth edition of Systema. This edition was the
last to be produced by Linnaeus.
George Ehret Dionysius
METHODUS PLANTARUM SEXALIS IN SISTEMATE NATURAE DESCRIPTA, WATERCOLOUR, 1736

Original watercolour artwork for one of Linnaeus’s plant catalogues, showing the sexual system of
classification.

Without such technology, Linnaeus was only able to categorise animals

and plants on visual similarities, which inevitably led to significant errors.
This particularly occurred in plants, which he grouped together according to
the number of stamens (the pollen-producing parts), even though this
proved not to have any significance as a way of structuring species.
Nevertheless, his tables and structural details of around 10,000 species
proved the starting point of modern zoological and botanical studies.
Although the Systema Naturae is without doubt Linnaeus’s masterpiece,
he produced a number of other books, notably in botany, from his early
Flora Lapponica (Plants of Lapland) from 1737 – written while still a
student, where he first made use of his names and structures – to Species
Plantarum (Species of Plants) published in 1753, his most comprehensive
catalogue of plant species.
Carl Linnaeus
SPECIES PLANTARUM, LAURENTII SALVII, 1753

The title page of the first edition of Linnaeus’s plant catalogue.

Modern chemistry emerges

If Linnaeus brought order to the world of natural history, it would be the
French chemist Antoine Lavoisier who performed the same function for
chemistry. Where Robert Boyle’s work was on the cusp between alchemy
and chemistry, Lavoisier was arguably the first truly modern chemist. Born
in Paris in 1743, the aristocrat would die on the guillotine during the French
Revolution. His book Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, Présenté dans un
Ordre Nouveau et d’après les Decouvertes Modernes (Elements of
Chemistry in a New Systematic Order following Modern Discoveries),
published in 1789, provided the foundations of chemistry as we now know
it.
One essential achievement of the book was to move away from the
phlogiston theory, which was a logical scientific theory that just happened
to be wrong. The idea was that flammable bodies contained a substance
called phlogiston, which was used up as they burned. What we now know
to be oxygen (the name that Lavoisier gave to the gas) was called
dephlogisticated air, meaning it was capable of absorbing phlogiston from a
flammable substance, allowing it to burn.
Although the British natural philosopher Joseph Priestley had effectively
noted the existence and action of oxygen, it was from this phlogiston-
related viewpoint. Lavoisier turned the model on its head, regarding oxygen
as an element in its own right that combined with other elements in the
combustion process. The Traité Élémentaire de Chimie pulled together his
ideas and those of a few contemporaries, giving a number of elements their
familiar names, exploring a more quantitative approach to chemistry and
giving the first approximation to a modern formula for a chemical reaction.
These were early days for chemistry, so there were inevitably some
errors. Of the 33 elements that Lavoisier identified (out of a total of 92
found naturally on the Earth), 23 were correct – though not always carrying
their now-familiar names. Nitrogen, for example, was called azote,
approximately meaning ‘no life’ as it did not support living things. Oxygen
meant ‘acidifying’, as it was wrongly thought to be an essential part of
acids, while hydrogen, also named by Lavoisier, meant ‘water making’.
Among the mistakes in his list of supposed elements were light, caloric (an
imaginary fluid thought to carry heat) and a number of compounds such as
lime (calcium oxide).
Antoine Lavoisier
TRAITÉ ÉLÉMENTAIRE DE CHIME, CUCHET, 1789

Illustrations of contemporary chemical laboratory equipment from Lavoisier’s important chemistry text.
Leonhard Euler
LETTRES À UNE PRINCESSE D’ALLEMAGNE, BARTHÉLEMY CHIROL, 1775

Illustration covering a wide range of topics from optics to eclipses in this edition of Euler’s 1768 title.
Leonhard Euler
LETTRES À UNE PRINCESSE D’ALLEMAGNE, BARTHÉLEMY CHIROL, 1775

A further range of diagrams illustrating the range of topics covered in Euler’s early popular science work,
based on his letters to Friederike Charlotte, princess of Anhalt-Dessau.

Although not widely influential, one eighteenth-century publication is of

great interest now, as it recognised that women too could have an interest in
science. It may seem condescending to have a science book that was
explicitly ‘for women’ as this was – but it was a step unlikely to even have
been conceived by writers before this time, who would have assumed their
audience was uniformly male. The book in question was Lettres à une
Princesse d’Allemagne sur divers Sujets de Physique et de Philosophie
(Letters to a German Princess, On Diverse Subjects in Physics and
Philosophy), published in 1768. The princess in question was Friederike
Charlotte, princess of Anhalt-Dessau, one of the nieces of the king of
Prussia, and the book pulled together a series of letters written to the
princess by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, born in Basel in 1707.
The Lettres was effectively a popular summary of the latest thinking in
science, and when it was translated into English in 1795 by one Henry
Hunter, it became a bestseller.
Although certainly patronising, Hunter’s introduction to the translation
at least showed how opinions were changing: ‘The improvement of the
female mind; an object of what importance to the world! I rejoice to think I
have lived to see female education conducted on a more liberal and
enlarged plan. I am old enough to remember the time when well-born
young women, even of the north, could spell their own language but
indifferently, and some, hardly read it with common decency [...] They are
now treated as rational beings, and society is already the better for it.’
For the moment, though, such books, and women who were prepared to
face the potential stigma of entering what was universally regarded as a
man’s world, were few and far between. It would not be until late in the
nineteenth century that significant progress would be made in gender
equality.

The poetic naturalist

As we move towards the end of the eighteenth century, a familiar family
surname crops up, which we will return to in the next chapter: Darwin. In
this case, we are dealing with Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the
better-known Charles, born in Elston, Nottinghamshire in 1731. Erasmus
Darwin was a physician, but his interest in natural philosophy went much
deeper than medicine, and as a member of the Lunar Society of
Birmingham (so called because the group met when there was a full Moon,
to make it easier to see their way when returning home) he was part of an
elite group of natural philosophers and industrial giants from the English
Midlands that also included Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Josiah
Wedgwood.
In terms of pure scientific importance, Darwin’s most significant title
was Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, from 1794. This was primarily
a medical and anatomical text, but its interest now is in the early ideas of
evolution that it contains. Darwin suggested that mammals and other warm-
blooded animals could all have had a single common ancestor, a simple
organism he referred to as a filament. He also prefigured Lamarck’s ideas of
animals passing on modifications due to their environment to their offspring
(see here).
Erasmus Darwin
ZOONOMIA, JOSEPH JOHNSON, 1796

The title page of Zoonomia, two years after original publication.

Erasmus Darwin
THE POETICAL WORKS OF ERASMUS DARWIN, JOSEPH JOHNSON, 1806

Plates of illustrations accompanying a coloured edition of the poem ‘The Loves of the Plants’ in a
collection of Darwin’s poetical works from 1806. The poem was originally published in 1789 as the
second part of The Botanic Garden.

However, another of Darwin’s works, The Botanic Garden, which

predated Zoonomia by three years, reached a wider audience. We’ve already
seen one scientific poem with a lasting impact – Lucretius’s ‘De Rerum
Natura’ (see here). The Botanic Garden consisted of a pair of poems which
were designed to make scientific ideas more approachable to the audience
of the period. The first of these, ‘The Economy of Vegetation’, despite the
name, features a significant amount on mining and the inventors of the day,
even taking the opportunity to castigate the slave trade and to support the
French and American revolutions. The second poem, ‘The Loves of the
Plants’, paints a broader scientific picture, from the creation of the cosmos
to the essentials of botany (including the sexual nature of plants, considered
rather risqué at the time) and again includes some hints of evolutionary
theory.

The dark vision of Malthus

Neatly closing off the eighteenth century, published as it was in 1798, is a
book by the English clergyman Thomas Malthus, who was born in the
village of Westcott in 1766. An Essay on the Principle of Population is in a
class of book now sometimes called futurology, which has proved highly
influential even though futurology titles are usually wildly incorrect.
Originally published anonymously, Malthus’s book foresaw a dire future
for humanity, based on a difference in the rate at which population and food
production could be expected to grow. The limited scientific content of the
book was in its use of mathematical approaches to these growth rates, and
its economic assessment of the impact of population changes on wages and
inflation. The concept Malthus put forward was that population would
double every 25 years, while the rate of production of food would only rise
by a number of percentage points each period, meaning that population
would spiral far beyond our ability to produce enough food and starvation
would set in.
Arguably, the biggest influence of the book was to emphasise limited
population data, resulting in the introduction of ten-yearly censuses in Great
Britain (which in turn influenced a number of other countries to do so). In
the economic part of the book, Malthus argued that growing population
would also make labour too readily available, driving down wages, adding
poverty to the famine caused by overpopulation.
We can be grateful that the doom-laden predictions of Malthus have not
come to pass, primarily because of the benefits reaped from science and
technology. Malthus ignored the impact of science and technology in
transforming food production, expanding the job market and in making
birth control available. Despite this flaw in his theories, Malthus’s book is
important. It was one of the first science books for a general audience to use
statistics, and also one of the first to attempt to bring science into the last
remaining area of application, human behaviour. As the nineteenth century
dawned, there was new hope, as science and technology transformed
everyday life. Like all periods of transition, there were difficulties, and it
might have seemed initially that Malthus’s predictions were coming true.
But in the century when the word ‘scientist’ was first coined, the best was
yet to come.

Thomas Malthus
AS ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION, JOSEPH JOHNSON, 1798

The title page of Malthus’s gloomy prognostications alongside an 1851 George Cruikshank etching
showing an imagined future London as Malthus’s vision became reality.

OceanofPDF.com
3
MODERN CLASSICAL
VICTORIAN STABILITY
B Y THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, science was becoming a more professional
business, and science books were an expected and established part of the
academic sphere. It was in 1834 that the word ‘scientist’ was coined
(preferred, thankfully, over suggestions of sciencer, scientician and
scientman), drawing a parallel with the likes of artist, economist and atheist.
Until this period ‘natural philosophers’ were often wealthy amateurs or
more general philosophers, engaging in science as a part-time indulgence.
The development of scientist as a profession was, however, a gradual
process. When Michael Faraday joined the Royal Institution in London – an
organisation he would eventually head up – in 1813, becoming an assistant
to leading light Humphry Davy, his position was more that of a servant than
an equal. (In fact, when Faraday accompanied Davy on a European tour,
Davy expected him to act as a part-time valet.)
Initially, professional scientists formed a second tier alongside the
amateur natural philosophers. Their relationship was not dissimilar to the
cricket teams of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: largely
amateur but including a (working-class) professional to improve their game.
More of the most important books we will encounter during this period
were written by amateurs than by professionals.

Mr Atom
Despite the prevalence of amateurs, one of the first important science books
in the nineteenth century was written by one of the new professional class.
John Dalton (like Faraday) had no university education, but became a
working scientist through personal drive. Dalton was born in Eaglesfield in
the northern English county of Cumberland in 1766. Dalton, also like
Faraday, came from a poor family, but even had he been wealthy, he would
have been unable to attend university in England as places were still
restricted to members of the Church of England, and Dalton was a Quaker.
Dalton was paid to teach, not to undertake research, but to all intents and
purposes his scientific work was his main job, with the teaching merely a
means to make ends meet. Like most of the scientists of the period, Dalton
had wide-ranging interests, from the behaviour of gasses, via meteorology,
to the causes of colour-blindness (Dalton was himself colour-blind, and for
a while the condition would be known as Daltonism). However, there is no
doubt that Dalton’s scientific claim to fame was his work on atomic theory,
first published in a series of essays in 1802.
At the time, atoms were still a subject of debate. In fact, they would not
be fully accepted until the twentieth century, when a paper by Einstein gave
very strong evidence for their existence. Some scientists accepted that
atoms were real; others – probably the majority – felt that they were a
useful accounting technique but didn’t represent real entities, while a few
still felt that atoms were philosophically objectionable. Dalton was strongly
in the realist camp and put forward a model of the nature of matter using
what was largely Lavoisier’s chemistry (see here), based on the existence of
atoms and of compounds formed by combining them.
William Henry Worthington
JOHN DALTON OF MANCHESTER, ENGRAVING, CA. 1823

Engraving of John Dalton after an oil painting by Joseph Allen.

Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson
LIBRARY OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, AQUATINT, 1809

An aquatint of the library of the Royal Institution, Albermarle Street, London.

John Dalton
A NEW SYSTEM OF CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY, PART II OF II, ROBERT BICKERSTAFF, 1810

A plate from part II of Dalton’s book showing some of his proposed molecular structures and the boiling
points of differing concentrations of compounds.
John Dalton
A NEW SYSTEM OF CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY, PART II OF II, ROBERT BICKERSTAFF, 1810

Plates from part II of Dalton’s book showing his symbols for elements, some suggested molecular
structures and his ideas on crystalline solids.
John Dalton
TABLE OF ELEMENTS, 1808

A diagram created to accompany Dalton’s lectures on atoms and atomic weights showing the relative
weights he ascribed to the atoms and his icons for the elements.

Often a new way of looking at what is already known can give insights.
Dalton’s breakthrough inspiration was that each atom of an element had a
distinct mass. He made the mass of hydrogen (the lightest element) 1 and
assigned to the others multiples of this, for example, azote (nitrogen) was 5,
oxygen 7 and phosphorus 9. These relative masses were (somewhat
confusingly) referred to as atomic weights, the term that is still most
commonly used. When two elements reacted to form a compound, the result
was that their atoms combined to form molecules with the combined atomic
weight of the two. In a flurry of papers from 1802 to the publication of his
book A New System of Chemical Philosophy in 1808, Dalton circulated and
expanded on his theory, providing elegant tables of the elements, each of
which he identified with a unique symbol.
Dalton’s work had its limitations. It was based on his own experiments,
which used poor-quality instruments, even by the standards of the day. As a
result, his atomic weights were often incorrect. Furthermore, from his
original theory that all atoms had a mass that was a multiple of the mass of
hydrogen, he never made the much greater leap to the idea that all atoms
were made up of multiples of hydrogen-like components (as is the case).
This was probably because Dalton always referred to the ratios of atomic
weights as, say, ‘nearly 7:1’ – he didn’t think these ratios were exact, and
because he was sure that atoms were spheres of different sizes, his mental
model of them did not fit well with the idea that all atoms were constructed
from hydrogen-like building blocks.
Like Lavoisier, Dalton failed to spot that some compounds – lime, for
example – weren’t elements, and he also miscalculated the number of atoms
in molecules, usually assuming there was one atom of each element: he
thought that water was HO, for example, rather than the now familiar H2O,
and he missed that oxygen came as a two-atom molecule. Dalton also
refused to accept the simpler text-based symbols we use today, which were
introduced by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, and already in use
before Berzelius’s most significant book, his 1808 Läroboken i Kemien
(Chemistry Textbook). Instead, Dalton insisted on using his own pretty
looking, but hard to remember, icons for each element.
Despite these flaws, we have to remember that Dalton was a pioneer in
his field – and so not likely to get everything right – and was working
without the support of a university or the high-quality instruments a rich
amateur scientist of the period could have obtained. He was also working at
a time when some of the elements, such as oxygen and nitrogen, were still
relatively newly discovered. His book brought to the world of chemistry a
new rigour and method.

The ultimate birdwatcher

Books like Dalton’s were still primarily aimed at other natural philosophers,
but the nineteenth century also saw the gradual appearance of books that
would not only appeal to scientists, or even those with an interest in
science, but to a wider audience. A prime example of this is Audubon’s
Birds of America, which at the time was seen much as we might today
consider a coffee-table book of images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Although the book’s original images were made for a scientific purpose,
their primary appeal to the wider public was in their visual beauty – there
probably had not been an equivalent book since Hooke’s Micrographia.
With a remarkable mixed heritage, Birds of America was written by a
Haiti-born Frenchman who had American citizenship (despite being an
illegal immigrant), and it owed its existence to the enthusiasm of a British
audience. Published in 1827, it featured 435 prints, each hand-coloured, and
contained a remarkable array of birds on its huge 99 x 66-cm (39 x 26-inch)
plates. Shortly after his arrival in America in 1803, John James Audubon
started to take an interest in the wide range of American birds. Not only did
he observe them and paint them, he learnt taxidermy and set up a natural
history museum that included a wide range of American native species,
both birds and other animals. Audubon’s day job was as a merchant, but his
enthusiasm for natural history gradually took over more and more of his
life.
Unlike many involved in science at the time, Audubon was not
independently wealthy. When, for example, his latest venture of a flour mill
went under in 1819, Audubon was bankrupted and sent to debtors’ prison.
Even so, by 1820, he was once again on the road, painting birds, with a
grand plan in place of putting together a collection of images of all the birds
of North America. By the time he reached Philadelphia in 1824 he had
accumulated over 300 images and hoped to make a book from them – but
couldn’t find a publisher.
John James Audubon
BIRDS OF AMERICA, R. HAVELL & SON, 1827

Plate 53 from the original ‘double elephant’ folio of hand-coloured aquatints, showing painted buntings
engraved by Robert Havell junior, who printed the book with his father, Robert Havell senior.
John James Audubon
BIRDS OF AMERICA, R. HAVELL & SON, 1827

Plates 217 and 386 from the original ‘double elephant’ folio of hand-coloured aquatints showing a
Louisiana heron and a white heron.
 On the recommendation of a friend, Audubon travelled to England, and
finally found the enthusiastic audience he required (in part inspired by his
exotic, backwoodsman persona) and the funding to publish his great work.
The whole book was not produced at once. Instead, subscribers would
receive five prints at a time in a tin box. Like most books of the time, the
single pages would then be bound by the buyers themselves, with a cover
added to match their libraries. The book cost a phenomenal amount to print;
even at that time, to buy a full set of all 435 prints would have cost around
$1,000 – equivalent to around £20,000 or $26,000 in modern terms. A
complete Birds of America sold at auction in 2010 for £6.5m ($10.3m).
Only relatively few copies of the full-sized edition were produced, but a
smaller 25.3 x 15.8-cm (10 x 6.25-inch) version had a far wider circulation.
Although the illustrations were issued separately, there was also a five-
volume text to accompany them, written by Audubon in collaboration with
the Scottish natural historian William MacGillivray. This was published
independently to avoid having to provide free copies of the expensive
illustrations to the British Crown Libraries, which as the UK national
library receives copies of all British publications.
Scientific manufacture
In the modern sense, Birds of America did little to advance science. It was
purely a matter of data capture, with no theoretical use made of that data.
Yet it provided a unique view of the avian natural history of North America,
and stood out for the way in which its visual splendour turned a
scientifically inspired publication into an object of desire for ordinary
citizens. A totally different, but highly influential book, was published just
five years later. Here it was not the pictures, but the theory, that was central
to its success. The author, Charles Babbage, wanted to bring science to the
business of manufacturing.
We now remember Babbage, born in London in 1791, for his work on
early mechanical computers. However, his computers were never
completed, and he did not write an influential book on the subject. The
closest we come to this was more in the form of a paper, the 1842 Sketch of
the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage (with additional notes
by Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace). This was a piece written in French
by the Italian general and mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea, which
was translated and doubled in length with notes by Ada King, the Countess
of Lovelace, who worked with Babbage on the way his mechanical
computer could be programmed.
However, Babbage did not spend all his time on calculating engines. He
also considered ways to apply mathematical and organizational principles to
the workplace. A much-expanded version of his approach would become a
branch of applied mathematics in its own right (called operational research)
in the 1940s, when it was first applied to wartime problems and later to
business. Babbage made one of the first attempts to bring science to the
operations of the business world.
His book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures was
published in 1832. In researching it, Babbage put time into observing what
went on in factories and realised that skilled workers were spending a
considerable amount of their time on unskilled labour. He suggested that
dividing up tasks, so that the skilled workers could concentrate on their
skills, would result in greater efficiency. Babbage was also one of the first
to look at breaking down costs to understand the profitability of a business
and to examine the benefits of profit-sharing.
CHARLES BABBAGE, CA. 1860

A relatively elderly Babbage in an undated photograph.

Charles Babbage
DIFFERENCE ENGINE NO. 2, 1847

Technical drawing of Babbage’s Difference Engine number 2, his mechanical calculator, which was partly
constructed but abandoned as he went on to design his more advanced Analytical Engine.

The dramatic changes in industry of the time were taking place in large
part as a result of the introduction of the steam engine. But, initially, the
science behind this transformative technology was sketchy at best. The
book that would change that was written by a young French engineer, who
would sadly be dead of cholera by the age of 36. This was Nicolas Léonard
Sadi Carnot, born in Paris in 1796. Carnot effectively began the branch of
physics later known as thermodynamics with his 1824 book Réflexions sur
la Puissance Motrice du Feu et sur les Machines Propres a Développer
cette Puissance (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines
Fitted to Develop that Power).
Although Carnot was working with a soon-to-be-outmoded model of
heat as a fluid called ‘caloric’ that could pass from body to body, he realised
that the efficiency of an engine driven by heat, such as a steam engine,
depended on the difference in temperature between the hot part and the cold
part of the engine, and so laid the groundwork for one of the central laws of
physics: the second law of thermodynamics. At its simplest, this law states
that heat moves from a hotter to a colder body, but its more sophisticated
form, involving the concept of ‘entropy’, the measure of disorder in a
system, would have implications for everything from information theory to
the end of the universe.
From Carnot’s viewpoint, though, the important aspect of his work was
to find ways to improve the workings of steam engines. The engines of the
time were highly inefficient, using very little of the energy that was
produced in burning their fuel and wasting the rest as heat. Réflexions was
largely ignored at the time – it would only be in the second half of the
nineteenth century that it would really begin to have influence. Unlike
Babbage, Carnot did not move in the right circles.

Charles Babbage
ON THE ECONOMY OF MACHINERY AND MANUFACTURES, CHARLES KNIGHT, 1832

The title page of Babbage’s book on organizing manufacture alongside James Nasmyth’s painting of his
own steam hammer, erected in his foundry near Manchester in 1832.
Sadi Carnot
RÉFLEXIONS SUR LA PUISSANCE MOTRICE DU FEU, BACHELIER, 1824

The title and interior pages from Carnot’s book that marked the beginnings of thermodynamics,
including a table of specific heats of gases. Housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

A good friend of Babbage’s also published some significant works at

around the same time. This was John Herschel, the son of the man who
discovered Uranus, William Herschel. John, born in the English town of
Slough in 1792, allegedly inspired Babbage’s computer work. The story
goes that Babbage was helping Herschel painstakingly construct a table of
numbers, when he cried out, ‘My God, Herschel, how I wish these
calculations could be executed by steam!’ Herschel wrote a number of
important astronomical titles, notably A Treatise on Astronomy, and
(amusingly, given Babbage’s complaint) produced a major update of his
father’s astronomical catalogues.
However, John Herschel’s most significant book was A Preliminary
Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which was an attempt to
give a more modern synthesis of the scientific method than the earlier work
of Bacon and others. Strictly, this wasn’t a book in its own right but
appeared in 1831 as part of Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia. This
publication was not, as it sounds, a single encyclopaedia, but rather a
curated library of titles, of which Herschel’s was volume 14 of 133.

Shaping the modern world

The visual élan that was so central to the success of Birds of America would
also be significant in a work that made important advances in scientific
theory in the world of geology. In writing Principles of Geology, the
Scottish geologist Charles Lyell was aiming at an academic audience, and
yet the three-volume book proved a hit with the wider public, in part
because of its illustrations. Lyell, born into a wealthy family near
Kirriemuir in Angus in 1797, trained as a lawyer, but within a few years
was occupied full-time by his interest in geology. He cemented his place in
the field with the publication of Principles of Geology, which came out a
volume at a time between 1830 and 1833.
Looking at the topic with modern eyes, geology does not seem like a
subject that is likely to inspire much interest in the public. However, at the
time, geology was a controversial field of significant public interest, worthy
of newspaper headlines. This was because the latest theories, supported and
expanded by Lyell, overthrew the long-held ideas on the age of the Earth,
based on biblical calculations. The central idea espoused by Lyell was
known as ‘uniformitarianism’, originally developed by the Scottish
geologist James Hutton. Up until this time, it was accepted that the Earth
had been shaped by a series of catastrophes, such as the biblical flood,
forming its current geography with a timescale calculated from the
genealogical lists in the book of Genesis, starting from Noah, based on
estimated lifespans. This put the date of the creation of the Earth at 4004
BCE. By contrast, uniformitarianism made it clear that the mountains and
valleys formed by very gradual, continuous processes, which would have
taken millions of years to complete.
Charles Lyell
PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY, JOHN MURRAY, 1832

The frontispiece to volume two of Lyell’s influential work, showing the region around Mount Etna in
Sicily. The book was published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833.
Charles Lyell
PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY, JOHN MURRAY, 1830

Interior pages from volume one of three, published between 1830 and 1833. Lyell’s description of the
impact of the 1783 Calabrian earthquake demonstrates his use of illustrations to engage the reader.

Lyell made the details of this theory widely available in Principles of

Geology, inspiring a young Charles Darwin (see here) to think about the
implications of these geological timescales for biological species. Not only
was Darwin given a copy of the first volume of the book, he was asked by
Captain Robert Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle – the ship on which he made his
famous voyage – to help look for geological formations for Lyell. Later,
Darwin and Lyell would become friends.
It is worth noting the full title of Lyell’s book: Principles of Geology:
being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by
reference to causes now in operation. A significant inspiration for the new
approach referred to in the title was to take note of the movements of the
Earth’s surface caused by the likes of volcanoes and earthquakes and
consider the long-term implications of such shifts and displacements.
As the discipline of geology advanced, uniformitarianism alone would
prove unsatisfactory. One of the main criticisms at the time was evidence of
what we now call mass extinctions in the fossil record, which was gradually
becoming understood. These mass extinctions, we now know, are indeed
the result of sudden, catastrophic changes, but are the exception rather than
the rule in shaping the surface of the planet.
Charles Lyell
PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY, JOHN MURRAY, 1833

A range of types of fossilised shell used in helping to comparatively date different geological layers. These
are from Lyell’s third and final volume.
Alexander von Humboldt
KOSMOS, KRAIS & HOFFMANN, 1851

An illustration of the Earth from von Humboldt’s popular title.

Alexander von Humboldt
KOSMOS, KRAIS & HOFFMANN, 1851

A range of illustrations from von Humboldt’s title, demonstrating its mix of geophysical (opposite),
meteorological (top) and astronomical (bottom) material.
Alexander von Humboldt
KOSMOS, KRAIS & HOFFMANN, 1851

Another illustration from Kosmos, showing world times corresponding to midday in Dresden, reflecting
the lack of established time zones, with each city operating on its own time.

While on the subject of geology and geophysics, it is worth mentioning

another book, published a little later, with five volumes coming out between
1845 and 1862. This was Kosmos (Cosmos) by the German scientist
Alexander von Humboldt, born in Berlin in 1769. Like Principles of
Geology, Kosmos was a hugely popular title in its day, having an appeal far
outside the specialists in the area.
Kosmos was based on a series of lectures that Humboldt gave – the
closest the period had to the sweeping multi-part science documentaries we
now see on television. Although strongly influenced by his expeditions,
Humboldt attempted, in Kosmos, to provide a holistic picture of the order
and structure of the universe, reflected in the Earth. It was Humboldt who,
through this book, brought the word ‘cosmos’ into modern usage – until
then it was an obscure Greek word that few would have known. In some
ways, Humboldt’s book had similarities with Bronowski’s The Ascent of
Man (see here), published over a hundred years later. Kosmos brought
together concepts of the order of nature and of human interpretation and
appreciation of beauty. It was both an exploration of the physical universe
and of the history of our attempts to understand and appreciate nature.
Humboldt’s name is probably most frequently associated with his
exploration work. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt explored the
Americas, bringing back many drawings and accounts of his findings on the
flora and fauna (notably an encounter with electric eels) that would find
their way into a range of volumes, including Essai sur la géographie des
plantes (Essay on the Geography of Plants), Ansichten der Natur (Views of
Nature), and his popular Voyage aux Regions Equinoxiales du Noveau
Continent (Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent).
Friedrich Georg Weitsch
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, CA. 1806

A portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, German naturalist and geographer.

The beauty of biology

One of Lyell’s most vocal challengers on uniformitarianism was an early
expert on fossils, who authored an important biology text. His name was
Georges Cuvier, later Baron Cuvier as he was made a life peer by the
French state. Born in Montbéliard near the Swiss border in 1769, Cuvier
was, scientifically speaking, most successful in his work on palaeontology,
which related the limited fossil record known at the time to animals that
were still in existence. But his best-known title was a wide-ranging book
that tried to categorise all animals into a single structure: Le Règne Animal
(The Animal Kingdom).
This four-volume work, published in 1817, could be seen as an
illustrated equivalent of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae with the benefit of
nearly 100 years of additional collected information on animals. This
enabled Cuvier to produce a more accurate taxonomic structure based on
similarities and differences in the animals’ anatomy, with the addition of his
own experiences from palaeontology. Cuvier got a lot right, considering the
crudeness of his method of using visual similarities, though he did have a
few stumbling blocks. As well as rejecting uniform geological changes,
Cuvier could not accept the principle of evolution, even though in his use of
comparative anatomy he made, for example, the connection between the
extinct mammoth and the modern elephant. Whatever its conceptual faults,
however, Le Règne Animal was an impressive effort and a visual delight.

Georges Cuvier
LE RÈGNE ANIMAL, FORTIN, MASSON ET CIE, 1836–49

Some of Cuvier’s elegant illustrations comparing similarities and differences in related species in a later
coloured edition, published 19 years after the original publication in 1817.
 Cuvier’s book was eclipsed in size by an earlier work by another French
nobleman, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Buffon’s massive
Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet
du Roi (General and Particular Natural History, with a description of the
King’s Cabinet) ended up 36 volumes long (another eight were later added),
written over his working life from 1749 to 1804. This was far more a
descriptive work than an attempt to apply a scientific structure to animal
classification and was something of a rag bag. While it included elements of
physics, chemistry and geology as well as natural history, it excluded, for
example, animals other than quadrupeds and birds. This random selection
had something in common with the Cabinet du Roi of the title – the King’s
‘cabinet of curiosities’ that was an unstructured collection of interesting
looking items collected from around the world.
In itself, the Histoire Naturelle probably could not be considered a great
science book (even at the time it was criticised for a florid writing style and
lack of scientific depth, being arguably aimed more to impress the general
reader than the natural philosopher), but it would have a significant impact
on more important scientific writers such as Cuvier, and it was well
illustrated for the time, including nearly 2,000 plates.
Another influential science writer from the period deserving a mention
(even though Cuvier seems to have pretty much ignored him) is Jean-
Baptiste Lamarck. Born in Bazentin in 1744, the French biologist
developed an early (but mistaken) evolutionary theory. Lamarck’s idea was
that, for example, a giraffe might develop a longer neck during its lifetime
as a result of continually stretching to reach for leaves in the trees. This
development, he believed, could then be passed on to the animal’s
offspring. This idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was
central to Lamarck’s most influential book, Philosophie Zoologique ou
Exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire naturelle des animaux
(Zoological Philosophy, or Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of
Animals), published in 1809.
Georges Cuvier
LE RÈGNE ANIMAL, DÉTERVILLE, 1817

Comparisons of skulls and fish in the original edition of Cuvier’s title.

Comte du Buffon
HISTOIRE NATURELLE, IMPRIMERIE ROYALE, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The title page of the second edition of volume one published in 1750 and an illustration of a rhinoceros
from volume four, ca. 1763, housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Lamarck’s concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics would

be killed off by the later theory of natural selection and by advances in the
understanding of genetics. This meant that for a long time, his work was
dismissed. However, modern biology recognises that there are aspects of
epigenetics – the way that genes are repeatedly switched on and off by
external influences – that can be modified by the environment and passed
on to a living thing’s descendants. Although, as we have seen, the basis for
Lamarck’s theory was incorrect, he did at least realise the importance of
both adaptation to the environment and survival of the fittest.
In this sense, Buffon and Lamarck were both ahead of Cuvier in their
ideas, being more supportive of the ideas of the development of species that
would lead to the writing of one of the most influential science books ever
produced. Before turning to Charles Darwin, however, it’s interesting to
look at a book which he himself credited with helping to pave the way for
the acceptance of his theory of evolution by natural selection. The title in
question was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Published in
1844, it was an international bestseller, no doubt helped by the revelation
that Prince Albert was said to have read it aloud to Queen Victoria. The
book was originally anonymous: it was 40 years later that the author was
revealed to be Peebles-born Scottish author and publisher Robert
Chambers.

Robert Chambers
VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, JOHN CHURCHILL, 1844

The title page from the first edition and a table from an 1858 American edition (published by Harper &
Brothers) linking animals with rocks thought to date from a similar period.

Vestiges takes a big-picture approach, starting with the idea of stellar

evolution to show how everything has developed over time from earlier
instances. In its picture of natural and continuous change, Vestiges was at
odds with creationist views, but was nonetheless respectable as it didn’t
have any suggestion of an atheist agenda. Some aspects of the science in the
book were old-fashioned even by the ideas of the time – Chambers
supported both Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired
characteristics and the idea of spontaneous generation, for example, where
living things were thought to emerge from rotting meat and other
substances. But there is no doubt that it had a powerful impact.
Evolving science writing
In 1859, what is probably the best-known science book ever written arrived
on the scene. The book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by
Charles Darwin. Origin of Species was the book that introduced the concept
of evolution by natural selection to the general public. Though, as we have
seen, aspects of the concept itself had been debated for a couple of
generations, it was Darwin who presented the whole picture for the first
time.
This was very much an idea that was in the zeitgeist. With hindsight,
evolution by natural selection may seem obvious. Anyone with an
understanding of the basics of science, presented with the way that genetic
information is passed on from generation to generation would expect that
some offspring would be better suited to survive than others, and those with
the preferred genetic modifications would be the ones to produce further
generations and pass on those adaptations. However, in Darwin’s day, that
genetic model was not available, making the mental leap harder. As we
have seen, though, ideas of evolution were already in the air in Darwin’s
grandfather’s time (see here), and by the time Darwin was working on his
theory others were hot on his heels, notably another English naturalist,
Alfred Russel Wallace, who shared his very similar ideas with Darwin
before Origin of Species was finished, and would jointly publish papers
with Darwin.
Charles Darwin
ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, JOHN MURRAY, 1859

The title page of Darwin’s famous book with the only illustration in the original, a lithographic diagram
by William West of a tree of descent based on degrees of similarity.
FINCHES FROM GALAPAGOS ARCHIPELAGO, 1890

Galapagos finches showing varied beaks from a later publication of Darwin’s Beagle journals (first
published in 1839) alongside a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron from 1868 of Darwin aged 59.
 Born in Shrewsbury, England, in 1809, Darwin originally trained as a
doctor before his interest in natural history pushed his studies aside.
Famously, the event that cemented his position in history was being invited
to be a naturalist and companion of captain Robert FitzRoy on his HMS
Beagle voyage. Lasting almost five years, this epic journey exposed Darwin
to a huge range of wildlife, from the marsupials of Australia to the finches
of the Galapagos Islands. It was Darwin’s observation of these birds and the
way in which they had markedly diverged on neighbouring islands with
different environments, that would prove one of the inspirations for writing
Origin of Species.
It took Darwin over 20 years from first considering the ideas of
evolution (the Beagle returned to England in 1836) to publishing Origin of
Species in 1858. His thinking was advanced by meetings with the likes of
Lyell and with those who had studied fossil bones, such as anatomist and
palaeontologist Richard Owen. One of the reasons the gestation of the book
was so long was that Darwin’s work on evolution was something he used to
fill in time, rather than being his central activity. After writing accounts of
the Beagle voyage (notably Journal and Remarks, published in 1839,
usually referred to as The Voyage of the Beagle) and books on the flora and
fauna he had encountered, Darwin was distracted by a near-obsession with
barnacles. But the arrival of a letter from Wallace that contained an idea
very similar to Darwin’s own firmly pushed Darwin into completing his
masterpiece.
Once published, the book proved popular and, considering how much
debate it still generates in some parts of America, was surprisingly lacking
in controversy in its early days. With time, debates on the topic (not
involving the self-effacing Darwin) became more vocal, most notably after
the infamous Oxford ‘debate’ in 1860. More a discussion than a strict
debate, this involved a number of supporters of Darwin, including Robert
FitzRoy, but has come to be best remembered for the verbal sparring
between a highly vocal Darwin enthusiast, Thomas Huxley, and the bishop
of Winchester, Samuel Wilberforce. Wilberforce asked Huxley if he was
happy to have a monkey or ape as a (great) grandparent (the exact wording
is uncertain as there was no word-for-word account), a jibe Huxley
effortlessly put down.
Surprisingly, there seems to have been less negative reaction still to
Darwin’s follow-up title, published in 1871, The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex. This focused on the human implications of
evolutionary theory and brought in an additional selection mechanism to
natural selection in the form of sexual selection. The lack of negative
reaction seems to have been because, despite the popularity of the book, the
implications of evolution for the origins of humanity had been argued
thoroughly in the previous decade and more. The idea that humans had not
been created as they were, with no antecedent species, had lost the power to
shock. Only the aspect of sexual selection – the idea that animals could
keep changes that would be disadvantageous under natural selection
because they made mating more likely, such as the peacock’s tail – was a
novelty, and was too technical to worry the general reader.
Charles Darwin
THE DESCENT OF MAN, JOHN MURRAY, 1871

Illustrated pages from the first edition of volume two of two, showing the deployment of colouration and
extreme feather structures in sexual selection of birds.

Darwin’s last notable title, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, was

published in 1887, five years after his death. It was originally written for his
children as Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character
and is surprisingly unstuffy for a piece of Victorian writing. Given the way
that Darwin tends to be hero-worshipped (or demonised) today, The
Autobiography is wonderfully self-deprecating in describing his path from
enthusiastic slaughterer of game to amateur geologist and self-taught
naturalist. The book doesn’t cover the Beagle voyage, but rather the way
that Darwin tried to apply the same kind of scientific rigour that Lyell
applied to geology and use Francis Bacon’s approach of collecting facts
without hypothesis, before going further to his ideas on natural selection
and evolution.

Genetics and the scientific paper

One thing Darwin definitely got wrong was his idea of how evolution took
place on the microscopic level, assuming that it involved some kind of
blending of the natures of an animal’s parents. He would have benefited
hugely if he had been able to read Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden
(Experiments on Plant Hybridisation) by Gregor Mendel. Strictly speaking,
this was an academic paper rather than a book, only running to around 50
pages, though it was subsequently published in book form with additional
material.
In effect, Mendel’s work was the missing piece of the jigsaw that Darwin
never found. Gregor Mendel was an Austrian friar, born in 1822 in
Heinzendorf bei Odrau (now in the Czech Republic). By cross-breeding pea
plants with different traits, such as height and flower colour, Mendel
discovered that there were factors that we would now call genes that
determined the way these traits were inherited in future generations. This
was the mechanism necessary for Darwin’s evolutionary theory to work.
Unfortunately for Darwin and his colleagues, Mendel’s work, published
in 1866 in the proceedings of an obscure natural history society, had no
impact until it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century. Since then,
Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden has been criticised as the results are simply
too close to Mendel’s expectations – he may have shaded the results to
match his theory. However, whether or not this was the case, Mendel’s text
deserves a special place in the history of science writing.
Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden reflects the change in the way that
scientists communicated with each other, which accelerated in the
nineteenth century. The idea of scientific papers published in journals grew
out of letters exchanged between scientists. In an age of email and social
media, it’s easy to forget how important letter writing was in past times. A
small illustration of this is that the Post Office in Scotland decided to place
a postbox on the entrance to the scientist James Clerk Maxwell’s country
estate for his use, so large was the flow of correspondence between
Maxwell and his colleagues.
 With the foundation of scientific societies, such as the Accademia dei
Lincei in Rome in 1603 and the Royal Society in London in 1660, these
institutions became hubs for the exchange of scientific information. This
was often in the form of letters, funnelled through the society’s secretary,
but increasingly became focused on their publications. The Royal Society
started the world’s first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions (still
in print today), in 1665, bringing with it the idea of peer review, whereby
other natural philosophers would provide appropriate criticism of the
content before publication.
Gregor Mendel
‘VERSUCHE ÜBER PFLANZENHYBRIDEN’, VERHANDLUNGEN DES NATURFORSCHENDEN VEREINES IN BRÜNN,
1866

The 1866 copy of the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn, which carried Mendel’s
largely overlooked paper.
Baden Powell
A GENERAL AND ELEMENTARY VIEW OF THE UNDULATORY THEORY, JOHN W. PARKER, 1841

Spectral charts (left) from Powell’s experiments which were first published in Philosophical Transactions
before being collected together in a book on the mathematician’s work on optics.
William Herschel
‘ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS RELATING TO THE SIDEREAL PART OF THE HEAVENS’, PHILOSOPHICAL
TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON, VOL. 104, 1814

Image above of nebulae accompanying an article by Herschel in Philosophical Transactions.

Such journals, published both by academic institutions and private

publishing companies, flourished and multiplied. Getting a paper published
in a journal was a far quicker process than completing a book and getting
that to press. So successful were journals that, with time, it became
increasingly difficult to keep on top of the sheer volume of publications.
Some attempt was made through abstracts. The idea was to write a very
short summary of a paper which would be abstracted into a separate
publication, providing a top-level summary of current developments,
enabling someone interested in reading more on a particular topic to then
request the full paper. But it still was all too easy for a paper in an obscure
publication to be overlooked, as Mendel discovered.
As the rate of scientific discovery took off, it became natural to share
ideas via journals, making it less necessary for scientists to go to the effort
of writing books. The peer-to-peer communication of the academic
scientific book would never entirely disappear, but it would become far less
essential for scientists’ work to be recognised.

From logic to anatomy

Writing at the same time as Darwin were two leading mathematicians,
George Boole and John Venn, whose books were highly influential in their
field. They are now largely remembered for a symbolic approach to logic
that is central to the workings of computers and to simple diagrams that
illustrate logical connections. Boole, born in Lincoln in 1815, was the first
into the fray with a book called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on
Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities,
published in 1854. Since ancient Greek times, logic had been a matter of
words, but Boole brought to it the symbolic tools of mathematics. The
result, ‘Boolean algebra’, is at the heart of the way that gates – the
fundamental logical components of computers – work, and is in action
every time we type a search term into a computer.
As for John Venn, born in Hull in 1834, his first important book was The
Logic of Chance from 1866, which was a major work in the development of
the ideas of probability. Venn’s mathematical approach to the probability of
something happening was based on the number of times such an event
would occur if you had a very large number of trials. This was probably
Venn’s more significant contribution to mathematics, although he is better
remembered for Venn diagrams, which first appeared in his 1881 book
Symbolic Logic. These familiar diagrams use shapes to illustrate
relationships in Boolean algebra. Typically, they feature two or more
overlapping circles within a space. Depending on where an item is placed
within the space, the circles it occupies show the logical combination of
properties assigned to it.
Just as Venn diagrams and Boolean searches are familiar terms today, so
too is the title of what remains probably the best-known medical textbook
of all time, Gray’s Anatomy – thanks in part to the popular US television
drama of the same name. First published in 1858, updated versions of
Gray’s Anatomy are still in print.
George Boole
AN INVESTIGATION OF THE LAWS OF THOUGHT, DOVER PUBLICATIONS, 1854

The title page of the book in which Boole introduced Boolean algebra – a notation for the mathematical
representation of logic.
John Venn
THE LOGIC OF CHANCE, MACMILLAN AND CO., 1888

The title page and an illustration of a ‘drunkard’s walk’ or random walk from the third edition of Venn’s
important book on probability, first published in 1866.
Henry Gray
ANATOMY, JOHN W. PARKER & SON, 1858

The title page and coloured anatomical illustrations from Gray’s famous book.

Henry Gray was an English surgeon, born in London in 1827.

Historically, surgeons had been considered very much second-rate to
physicians, members of a profession that began as little more than barbers
with a small amount of ad-hoc practical experience of human anatomy.
However, just as professional science was beginning to take off, so the idea
that the practice of surgery could be given more of a scientific basis was
also coming into vogue. Working with his accomplished illustrator, also a
surgeon, Henry Vandyke Carter, Gray worked through a series of
dissections of human bodies in the process of writing the book. Sadly, Gray
lived only three years from the first publication of the book, contracting
smallpox while treating his own nephew and dying aged just 34. As a result,
the vast majority of the extant copies of Gray’s Anatomy owe as much to
other authors as they do to Gray. However, his name will always be linked
to this definitive medical title.
This was an important period for medical work. Just three years after
Gray’s Anatomy first appeared, another book was published, marking the
work of a man whose observations saved the life of many women in
childbirth. This was Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des
Kindbettfiebers (The Causes, Description and Preventative Treatment of
Childbed Fever) by the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, born in
Buda in 1818. In Europe at the time, the number of women dying of what
we now know were infections of the reproductive tract had shot up. In the
worst cases around four in ten women would not survive the period around
childbirth.
Semmelweis believed that the extremely high levels of mortality were
due to the doctors, who were examining women without handwashing, and
often went from woman to woman in a maternity ward. He recommended
handwashing between examinations using antiseptic, which when applied
drastically reduced the deaths. This wasn’t an entirely new idea – Scottish
doctor Alexander Gordon had written a treatise with the same conclusion as
early as 1795, for example – but it was Semmelweis who systematically
investigated the problem, trying out different approaches at Vienna’s
General Hospital from around 1847.
By the time Semmelweis published his book in 1861, he had excellent
evidence that the increase in fatalities had coincided with the introduction
of regular internal examinations and that doctors washing their hands with a
chlorinated solution made childbirth much safer. Sadly, Semmelweis was
mocked by many in the medical profession and his ideas were initially
largely rejected in continental Europe. He suffered from increasing mental
health issues, dying of an infected wound in an institution in 1865. It would
be decades before Semmelweis’s ideas were fully adopted, though
thankfully many physicians felt there was little harm to be had from the
handwashing, and as a result, infection levels fell rapidly from the 1860s.

The book of the lecture

We started this chapter with a mention of one of the nineteenth century’s
greatest scientists, Michael Faraday. As we have seen, Faraday came from a
poor family; born in London 1791, he started his working life as a
bookbinder’s apprentice and had a limited formal education. Perhaps
because of this, although a number of books bear his name, the majority are
either collections of his scientific papers or write-ups of his popular lectures
from the Royal Institution. One of these, particularly worthy of note as a
landmark example of early popular science, was The Chemical History of
the Candle.
Published in 1861, this consisted of transcripts of six lectures given by
Faraday in 1848, one of his contributions to the annual series of Christmas
lectures for children which Faraday instituted and are still run today.
Faraday’s idea was to use a simple candle as a starting point to look at what
is happening in the flame, the results of burning, the nature of the
atmosphere that allows it to burn and so forth. Faraday even includes in the
book a number of experiments to try at home – the lecture series, as the
Christmas lectures always have, would have featured a wide range of
exciting demonstrations. Although The Chemical History of the Candle was
not initially conceived as a book, the approach taken in its lightness of
touch and consideration of a non-technical audience would set the scene for
the development of more approachable popular science titles in the
twentieth century.
It’s worth mentioning in parallel with Faraday’s work a series of three
titles by an Irish physicist who was also mainly linked with the Royal
Institution: John Tyndall. Born in Leighlinbridge in 1820, Tyndall is now
best remembered for his explanation of why the sky is blue and for
discovering the principle that would be used in fibre optics. But while
Professor of Physics at the Royal Institution, Tyndall, like Faraday, was a
great believer in the popularisation of science.
Leighton Bros
FARADAY AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, CA. 1855

A tinted lithograph after Alexander Blaikley, showing Michael Faraday giving one of the Royal Institution
Christmas lectures to an audience including Prince Albert and his son.
Michael Faraday
THE CHEMICAL HISTORY OF THE CANDLE, HARPER & BROTHERS, 1861

Pages from Faraday’s ‘book of the lecture series’, showing the reduction in pressure as steam condenses
and the collection of carbon dioxide from exhalation.
John Tyndall
SOUND, LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., 1869

First published in 1867, Tyndall’s Sound, like Faraday’s books, was based on his series of lectures at the
Royal Institution.

In three ‘tutorial’ books, collecting material from lectures, Tyndall

covered some of the most significant basic physics topics of the day: heat,
light and sound. His aim was to make these topics approachable. As he says
in the introduction to Sound: delivered in eight lectures from 1867: ‘In the
following pages I have tried to render the science of Acoustics interesting to
all intelligent persons, including those who do not possess any special
scientific culture. … There is a growing desire for scientific culture
throughout the civilised world. The feeling is natural, and, under the
circumstances, inevitable. For a power which influences so mightily the
intellectual and material action of the age, could not fail to arrest attention
and challenge imagination.’ Sound was followed by Heat: a mode of motion
in 1868 and Six lectures on Light in 1873. Although aimed at the general
public, in each case, Tyndall tried as much as was possible to bring out the
latest scientific thinking.

The master of electromagnetism

Michael Faraday in many ways acted as a precursor to one of the greatest
physicists of the nineteenth century that few have heard of. Born in
Edinburgh in 1831, James Clark Maxwell became a professor at the age of
25 and went on to have an impressive career, working both in universities
and during breaks from academia in his home in Scotland. This culminated
with his becoming the Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics in
Cambridge, where he set up the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory before
his untimely death at the age of 48.
In his day, Maxwell was best-known for his work on statistical
mechanics, explaining the actions of gasses through the statistical behaviour
of molecules, as well as for work on the perception of colour, which led to
him producing the colour model still used in colour televisions and
computer screens today. His best-known book at the time was his Theory of
Heat, first published in 1871. This is a textbook, but a relatively
approachable one, spanning the gap between the academic and wider
spheres, as the subtitle (‘Adapted for the use of artisans and students in
public and science schools’) made clear.
However, Maxwell’s greatest work, and the most significant for future
generations, was on electromagnetism. It was Maxwell who identified light
as an electromagnetic wave, and he who, by developing first mechanical
and then mathematical models of electricity and magnetism, was able to
pull the two concepts together to produce a uniform whole, describing the
action of electromagnetism by mathematics that would later be simplified
down to four short equations. For physicists who have grown up with it,
Maxwell’s mathematical modelling method was the natural approach to
take – but for his contemporaries, even great physicists like his Scottish
colleague Lord Kelvin, Maxwell’s abstracted theories were hard to
understand, which was why it would not be until after his death that their
greatness was truly appreciated.
For this reason, it is the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, published
in 1873, two years after Theory of Heat, that is now regarded as by far
Maxwell’s most influential piece of writing. It would continue to be used as
a textbook well into the twentieth century, and was one of the reasons that
Einstein said of Maxwell, ‘There would be no modern physics without
Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations; I owe more to Maxwell than to
anyone.’ Echoing Einstein, American physicist Richard Feynman
commented, ‘From a long view of the history of mankind – seen from, say,
ten thousand years from now – there can be little doubt that the most
significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s
discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.’ And the Treatise was Maxwell’s
definitive word on the subject.

James Clerk Maxwell

TREATISE ON ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, CLARENDON PRESS, 1873
A range of illustrations from Maxwell’s definitive title on electromagnetism, including the lines of force
introduced by Michael Faraday.

At the borders of arts and sciences

With Maxwell as the zenith of nineteenth-century science writing, making
mathematics central to physics in a way that had never been the case before,
it’s timely to take a look at a less earth-shattering title that has nonetheless
had lasting, if quirky appeal. This is Flatland: a romance of many
dimensions by the unimaginatively named Edwin Abbott Abbott. Abbott,
born in London in 1838, spent the majority of his career as a school
headmaster. An ordained priest, he mostly wrote on the English language,
but the slim volume that is Flatland, published in 1884, takes us on a
journey into a two-dimensional world.
Although much of Flatland is a satire on social classes and mores, its
descriptions of the interactions of two-dimensional shapes and the
implications of living in a two-dimensional world, especially when a three-
dimensional object appears in it, help the reader to get a feel for the
mathematician’s approach to dimensions. Abbott even put a toe into the
fourth dimension long before Einstein would use it in his work on relativity.
To the modern reader, Abbott’s writing style is on the dull side, but the
ideas contained in Flatland are still fresh.
Just as physics and maths books were taking steps forward towards the
end of the nineteenth century, biology was also moving on in the hands of a
biologist who took the work of Linnaeus and Cuvier, mixed in Darwin and
brought natural history up to date. This was German scientist Ernst
Haeckel, born in Potsdam in 1834. Although Haeckel was very much a
contemporary of Maxwell in birth, his much longer life allowed him to
publish into the twentieth century.
In some ways, Haeckel typified that insult ascribed to physicist Ernest
Rutherford that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. His great
contribution was primarily one of cataloguing, adding thousands of species
to the Linnaean structure and coining a whole range of new terms from
‘ecology’ to ‘phylum’. Unlike his predecessors, however, Haeckel had
Darwin’s work to build on, so he was able to construct one of the earliest
family trees (literally in the form of a tree and branches) across animal
species. Probably Haeckel’s best-known contribution to biological theory,
which is now disregarded, was recapitulation theory. This was the idea that
embryos pass through the different forms of their ancestral predecessor
species before taking on the current form before birth. Nevertheless,
Haeckel was hugely influential.
As well as being a scientist and philosopher, Haeckel was an
impressively skilled artist, and his best-known work demonstrates not so
much the breadth of his discoveries, but rather the effectiveness of his
illustrations. Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature) started off as sets
of prints published from 1899, ending up in book form in 1904. It contained
just 100 images, devised and structured to put across his ideas on the
relationships between organisms and the importance of structural symmetry
in species. Many of the prints were coloured, and the images, which
typically showed a collection of related organisms, function as much as
works of art as they do as exemplars of natural history. A number of artists
and fabric designers of the period were strongly influenced by the book.
Ernst Haeckel
KUNSTFORMEN DER NATUR, BIBLIOGRAPHISCHEN INSTITUTS, 1899–1904

One of the beautiful illustrations of the marine invertebrate class Ascidiacea, known as sea squirts, from
Haeckel’s collection of prints.
Ernst Haeckel
KUNSTFORMEN DER NATUR, BIBLIOGRAPHISCHEN INSTITUTS, 1899–1904

Images of organisms of the order Desmidiales, a type of green algae from which land plants developed
(left), and Acantharea, radiolarian protozoa with hard mineral skeletons (right).
Ernst Haeckel
KUNSTFORMEN DER NATUR, BIBLIOGRAPHISCHEN INSTITUTS, 1899–1904

More images of Radiolaria (left), showing their jewel-like structures and of Blastoidea, extinct sea animals
similar to sea urchins (right).
JEAN-HENRI FABRE, CA. 1900

A portrait by a French photographer of Fabre at work.

It’s interesting to contrast Haeckel’s highly visual approach with that of

the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, whose books on insects were
also highly popular, not so much for the pictures as for his engaging writing
style. Fabre, born in Saint-Léons in 1823, taught himself entomology and,
without anthropomorphism, managed to give his descriptions of insects and
their lives a kind of biographical style that made them highly approachable
to a wider audience. He wrote a wide range of books, but his best-known
was Souvenirs Entomologiques (Entomological Memories), first published
in 1879 and continuing to be updated for two decades.
The last two decades of the nineteenth century, tipping into the twentieth
century, also saw another example of illustrations from nature being used
both scientifically and as works of art – but the big change here was that the
illustrations were not reproductions of sketches and paintings, but
photographs. The photographer in question was the remarkable
Englishman, Eadweard Muybridge.
Born Edward Muggeridge in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1830,
Muybridge spent most of his working life in America, first in San Francisco
and later in Philadelphia. He started out as a landscape photographer,
acquired notoriety when he murdered his wife’s lover (the jury found him
not guilty as they considered this an appropriate response) and came to
photographic and scientific fame when he devised a mechanism for taking a
series of photographs in rapid succession – using a battery of cameras –
which enabled him to analyse the motion of first horses and then other
animals. In book form, Muybridge’s images were presented as a series of
shots forming a now-iconic look in the history of photography, but he also
put his series of photographs onto spinning discs, which were projected to
provide very short sequences of moving pictures, amongst the first movies
ever seen.

Eadweard Muybridge
ANIMAL LOCOMOTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1887
Boxers and a bucking mule from Muybridge’s stop-motion images; when the boxers were shown
animated at the Royal Institution, the Prince of Wales was reportedly ‘delighted’.
Eadweard Muybridge
ANIMAL LOCOMOTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1887

Eagle in flight, from a range of sequences taken by Muybridge at Philadelphia Zoological Gardens using a
5-centimetre (2-inch) grid against a white cloth backdrop.

Muybridge produced a vast number of photographic series of everything

from wild animals to the beating heart of a turtle and of humans carrying
out various tasks (often naked to show their musculature). Rather like
Haeckel, he started off by selling sets of prints, leading up to the production
of what was, in some ways, his masterpiece, Animal Locomotion. This was
not a book, but rather a collection of photograph prints with a catalogue and
descriptive introductory text. It comprised 781 48 x 61-cm (19 x 24-inch)
photographs, each of which could have as many as 24 images within it. The
full collection sold mostly to institutions at a hefty $600, while there were
also sets of 100 prints in a leather portfolio available for $100.
The reason Animal Locomotion was not published as a book was that in
1887, the technology to reproduce photographs in a book was in its infancy.
However, Muybridge’s work had already found its way into book form, in a
manner that put his whole career at risk. In 1882, while in London on a
successful tour with his moving pictures, he had been due to give a talk at
the Royal Society when he was summoned to account for himself and
shown a book called The Horse in Motion by a J. D. B. Stillman. This
contained engravings based on his photographs – but Muybridge himself
was not mentioned. The book had been put out on behalf of Muybridge’s
former sponsor, railroad magnate and founder of Stanford University,
Leland Stanford. The way that the book did not consider Muybridge worthy
of mention seemed to indicate to the Royal Society’s committee that
Muybridge had been nothing more than a technician, rather than the
inventor of this technology. Muybridge sued Stanford with little success,
but luckily the Stillman book did not sell well, and when Muybridge went
on to produce vastly superior images from his work at the University of
Pennsylvania, his expertise was recognised.
By the end of the century, technology had advanced, and Muybridge was
able to publish two books that brought his works to a much wider public.
These were Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion, published
in the UK in 1899 and 1901 respectively. The photographic quality might
not have been as great as that in Animal Locomotion, but the book form
brought the images and text covering the technology and the scientific value
of the images to a much wider audience. As the Human Figure book
contained a considerable amount of nudity, one review, in The Graphic in
December 1901, thought it wise to warn, ‘It will be understood that the
volume, not being intended virginibus puerisque [literally: for virgins and
for boys] (unless they be full-fledged students) should not be left on the
drawing room table.’

Uncovering the foundations of mathematics and continents

We have seen through the nineteenth century a gradual move from science
books written purely as a means of communication between natural
philosophers to those serving as more of a bridge between the science
community and the general public. Although the public may not have
appreciated the biological message in Kunstformen or the technical
wizardry of Muybridge’s photography, there was no doubt that they could
enjoy the artistry. This did not mean, though, that books that could only be
of interest to a particular field had entirely disappeared.

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

PRINCIPA MATHEMATICA, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1913

The title page of the third volume of Whitehead and Russell’s mathematical tour de force, alongisde
portraits of Whitehead ca. 1925 (left) and Russell in 1927 from Vanity Fair magazine (right).

There were, of course, still textbooks, from those for school-age students
up to postgraduate works. However, the textbook has always been a very
specialist form. And though the majority of scientists exchanged
information with their peers through the form of a scientific paper published
in a journal, sometimes they would set off on an endeavour of sufficient
depth that it required a book to get their ideas across.
Such works included Grundlagen der Geometrie (Foundations of
Geometry) from 1899 by the German mathematician David Hilbert, which
set modern starting points for Euclidean geometry, and, more notably, the
three-volume Principia Mathematica (Principles of Mathematics) by
mathematician Alfred North Whitehead and philosopher Bertrand Russell,
published between 1910 and 1913. The latter book, despite its Latin title
(no doubt a nod to Newton), was written in English – or more realistically
in mathematics, as the purpose was to build the structure of mathematics
from its most basic form, starting from a set of simple assumptions
(axioms) in symbolic logic and constructing as much of the hierarchy of
mathematics from there as was possible.
Perhaps the best-known aspect of this weighty book was the appearance,
on page 379 of the original edition, of the words ‘From this proposition it
will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2.’ It
took 379 pages to get that far. Given this, by the end of the third volume the
authors, not surprisingly, had to admit defeat, realising they could only
cover a tiny fraction of the mathematics of the time. Ironically, by 1931 the
Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel had proved that any system of
mathematics must either be inconsistent or incomplete – such a book could
never in fact be written for the whole of mathematics. Nonetheless,
Principia Mathematica was a landmark book in the philosophy of
mathematics.
Alfred Wegener
DIE ENTSTEHUNG DER KONTINENTE UND OZEANE, FRIEDRICH VIEWEG & SOHN, 1920

The cover of the second edition of Wegener’s (literally) groundbreaking title setting out the concept of
continental drift; his ‘tectonic plate’ theory was not accepted in his lifetime. The first edition was
published in 1915.
 Published two years after the final volume of Principia Mathematica, a
title by German geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener is
particularly interesting for being so far ahead of its time. Wegener, born in
Berlin in 1880, set out a theory in his Die Entstehung der Kontinente und
Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans) that would not be widely
accepted until at least 20 years after his death in 1930. In a way, it’s not
surprising. The central idea of Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane,
first published in 1915, was a remarkable one: that the apparently solid
surface of the Earth in fact consisted of great plates of rock that were
moving with respect to each other.
Alfred Wegener
DIE ENTSTEHUNG DER KONTINENTE UND OZEANE, FRIEDRICH VIEWEG & SOHN, 1920

Images, as they were orientated, from the second edition of Wegner’s book. They show his concept of
how the continents had originally been positioned against each other and drifted apart.
 The starting point of Wegener’s great idea was the way that different
landmasses, such as the Americas set alongside Africa and Europe, seemed
to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that had been split apart. He also noted
similarities in the fossil record between continents now separated by ocean,
as if these landmasses had once been contiguous. Wegener proposed that
the continents very gradually moved relative to each other, so that over
geological time, new continental structures could form and break up.
There were many reasons why Wegener’s theory was not accepted
during his lifetime. Wegener was better known at the time for his work in
meteorology and Greenland expeditions than geology – he died as supplies
ran out under intense Arctic weather on the last of his expeditions. And it
didn’t help that he could not come up with a convincing mechanism for the
movements of the Earth’s surface on such a vast scale. He also
overestimated the rate of continental drift by a factor of 100, which not
surprisingly resulted in a considerable degree of scepticism. Even so, his
book would come to be regarded as a posthumous masterpiece when it was
realised how well his theory matched a growing understanding of the way
the Earth operated.

The absence of women

Before concluding this chapter, we need to revisit the place of women in
science and science writing. A slow revolution was under way during the
nineteenth century, but it’s notable that there were still very few books by
women on science written during this period. We don’t have to look further
than the words of one of the heroes of the nineteenth century, Charles
Darwin, to see why. In his books, notably The Descent of Man, Darwin’s
opinions aligned with the widely accepted view of the period that women
were intellectually inferior (despite Darwin himself getting considerable
assistance in his work from female members of the family). He wrote, ‘If
two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry,
painting, sculpture, music … history, science and philosophy … the two
lists would not bear comparison.’
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
STUDIES IN GENERAL SCIENCE, G. P. PUTNAM AND SON, 1869

The title page of Brown Blackwell’s book, which received a positive response from Darwin who
(somehow) assumed the author was male.

This view was countered by American author Antoinette Brown

Blackwell. She had sent a copy of her first book, Studies in General
Science, to Darwin and received a very positive response, but noticed that
Darwin had assumed she was male. She would respond by writing a book
called The Sexes Throughout Nature in 1875, which directly challenged the
idea of female inferiority. Darwin’s opinion of this is not recorded.
There has been some effort to rescue Darwin’s reputation by noting the
considerable correspondence he had with women who he seemed to treat as
intellectual equals, but this rather sidesteps his damning correspondence
with another American woman, Caroline Kennard. She wrote to Darwin in
1881, shocked to discover that Darwin was being cited as a source of
scientific principles demonstrating the inferiority of women. Mrs Kennard
asked him, ‘If a mistake has been made, the great weight of your opinion
and authority should be righted.’ She was clearly expecting Darwin to
support the concept of equality. Unfortunately, he replied, ‘I certainly think
that women though generally superior to men [in] moral qualities are
inferior intellectually, and there seems to me to be a great difficulty from
the laws of inheritance, (if I understand those laws rightly) in their
becoming intellectual equals of man.’ Darwin’s response seemed to have
been based on the idea that men had been forced to evolve more due to their
traditional roles, while women had been unable to keep up, despite
inheriting some positive traits from the male line.
Darwin also argued that for women to be equal they would have to
become breadwinners, potentially damaging their children and the
happiness of their households. Mrs Kennard wrote back an angry response,
pointing out that in the majority of (lower-class) households women did
work, but were prevented from doing anything other than menial jobs, and
any perceived inferiority was due to their environment and restraints on
what they were allowed to do, not their ability.
Nonetheless, despite the attitudes of Darwin and others, towards the end
of the nineteenth century, science was gradually changing, and barriers were
being broken down. Women were being admitted to study sciences at an
increasing number of universities around the world and would begin to
contribute to science writing. It was a slow process, and many of the great
scientists of the time proved conservative. For example, when James Clerk
Maxwell opened the Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics at
Cambridge in 1874, he was reluctant to allow women into the building.
Ironically, Maxwell’s wife Katherine had been actively involved in some of
her husband’s experimental work, but it seems that having women as
undergraduates was one step too far for Maxwell. Later in the 1870s he
relented and allowed women into the laboratories, though his assistant
William Garnett noted, ‘At last [Maxwell] gave permission to admit women
during the Long Vacation, when he was in Scotland, and I had a class who
were determined to go through a complete course of electrical
measurements during the few weeks when the laboratory was open to
them.’
By the start of the twentieth century, the first female professional
scientists became established. Famously, Marie Curie (see here) became the
first woman to win a Nobel Prize in a science subject in 1903 with the
Physics prize, and she went on to take the Chemistry prize in 1911. (Less
impressively, it’s worth noting that by 2018 there have been only two other
female winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics: Maria Goeppert-Mayer in
1963, and Donna Strickland in 2018.) Progress was slow, however, and if
anything, science publishing would prove even slower to give opportunities
to women writers, with only a handful of notable publications appearing
before the 1970s.
Despite this glacial advance in gender equality, the twentieth century
would bring both a revolution in science and in the way that science books
were written.
DOMESTIC CHEMISTRY CLASS, 1907

Female students at work in a laboratory at Battersea Polytechnic, London.

OceanofPDF.com
4
POST-CLASSICAL
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
I N MANY AREAS OF SCIENCE, notably physics and biology, the close of the
nineteenth century marks the end of what’s usually called the ‘classical
period’. Physics before the twentieth century could be seen as a
constructive process, building from the Renaissance and particularly
making use of the work of Galileo and Newton. But in the twentieth
century, the terrible twins of relativity and quantum theory changed the
outlook on everything.
Relativity showed that concepts that were previously thought of as fixed
and independent – notably time and space – were interwoven and
impossible to separate. Apparently common-sense ideas such as two events
being simultaneous no longer had any meaning. And gravity moved on
from Newton’s mysterious action at a distance to become a more logical but
mind-bending warping of space and time. Equally, quantum physics showed
that light could behave both as a wave and as a particle, that quantum
particles had no location when not interacting with their surroundings, and
that probability was essential for the operation of the universe. Reality
could no longer be considered the clockwork mechanism of Newton’s
vision.
At the same time, biology was transformed from being little more than a
process of cataloguing species, anatomies and behaviours to a complete
science. The process started with evolution, but the driving force in the
twentieth century was genetics – a gradual understanding of the
mechanisms of the genome that would lead to the discovery of the twin
helix structure of DNA – and the incorporation of more and more chemistry
into biology. Molecular biology, the understanding of biological process at
the level of individual molecules and the remarkable molecular machines
found in cells, has become a major component of both general biological
studies and medicine.
 These changes were, of course, represented in the content of science
books of the period, but as we saw in the previous chapter, this was also the
time when science books written for the public began to dominate.

The nature of reality

Some of the earliest twentieth-century physics titles were written by two of
the best-known scientists in history – Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.
Curie, born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867, was not only
one of the very few women to be a science Nobel laureate, but also one of
the even rarer individuals to win two Nobel Prizes: Physics in 1903 and
Chemistry in 1911. The latter achievement came the year after publishing
her book Traité de Radioactivité (Treatise on Radioactivity).
The whole subject of radioactivity had moved on quickly since the
phenomenon was discovered by Henri Becquerel (who shared the 1903
Nobel Prize with Curie and her husband) in the 1890s. The progress can be
seen in the difference between Curie’s doctoral thesis on the subject from
1903, which ran to just 142 pages, and her Traité, containing nearly 1,000
pages in two volumes. As an attempt to pull together all that was known on
the topic, it was widely read in the specialist field, but made little impact
outside it. Things would be very different when it came to anything written
by the second of these big names of early twentieth century science, Albert
Einstein.
Marie Curie
TRAITÉ DE RADIOACTIVITÉ, GAUTHIER-VILLARS, 1910

The frontispiece and title page of volume 1 (of 2) of Marie Curie’s book, rather oddly featuring a picture
of her husband Pierre.
MARIE AND PIERRE CURIE, 1904

The Curies using equipment in their laboratory on Rue Cuvier in Paris.

Marie Curie
TRAITÉ DE RADIOACTIVITÉ, GAUTHIER-VILLARS, 1910

Plates from volume 1 (of 2) showing the action of magnetic fields on the ‘radium rays’ – alpha particles
produced by radium decaying to radon.
Marie Curie
TRAITÉ DE RADIOACTIVITÉ, GAUTHIER-VILLARS, 1910

A plate from volume 2 showing spectra from radium chloride, and radium chloride with a small barium
chloride impurity.

Some modern scientists who are very visible in the media are primarily
communicators who achieved very little in their field before becoming
well-known, but Einstein’s fame was entirely justified. Born in the German
city of Ulm in 1879, Einstein was undistinguished academically until the
year of 1905. At the time, he was working in the Swiss patent office in
Bern, having failed to get an academic post. But in that one year he
published four major papers, one of which would win him the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1921.
In that first burst of output Einstein established the size of molecules (as
a result providing evidence for the existence of atoms), helped lay the
foundations of quantum physics, described the linkage of space and time in
the special theory of relativity and showed that E=mc2. During the
following 12 years he worked on his masterpiece, the general theory of
relativity, showing how matter warped space and time to produce gravity,
and also predicted the existence of gravitational waves and developed the
theory that led to the invention of the laser.
Einstein wrote a number of textbooks, but by this stage his scientific
breakthroughs were communicated to other scientists via academic papers.
However, he also produced a number of books for the general reader, most
notably Über die Spezielle und die Allgemeine Relativitätstheorie,
Gemeinverständlich (On the Special and General Theories of Relativity, A
Popular Exposition), published in 1917 and translated into English in 1920.
There was an astonishing public appetite for Einstein’s theories. His
ideas made front-page headline news in national newspapers around the
world; when he turned up in a city to give a lecture it would sell out with
the rapidity of a modern rock concert. The comments of the leading British
science journal Nature give a flavour of how the book was received:
Albert Einstein
ÜBER DIE SPEZIELLE UND DIE ALLGEMEINE RELATIVITÄTSTEHORIE, (RELATIVITY: THE SPECIAL AND THE
GENERALY THEORY)

(Left) Einstein sent the very first copy of this book, published in 1917 by Friedrich Viewig & Sohn, to
his friend, the physician Hans Mühsam. On the right is the 1920 first edition English translation
published by Henry Holt and Company.

A popular exposition of the doctrine of Relativity and what it implies: for this the
world has been crying since the astronomers announced that the stars had proved it
true. Here is an excellent translation of Einstein’s own book; we hasten to it to know
the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The reviewer on this occasion should be the
man in the street, the man who, with thousands, has been asking, ‘What is Relativity?’
‘What is the matter with Euclid and with Newton?’ ‘What is this message from the
stars?’
ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1921

Einstein photographed on his arrival at New York on his first trip to the United States.

The Nature reviewer also warns that Einstein ‘must needs speak largely
in parables’ as the subject was too technical for the general reader. His
mention of Euclid was not random. Einstein opens his book by reminding
the reader of their likely study of Euclid at school and builds up to relativity
in a manner that, though worded in a friendly fashion, is more like the
systematic approach of a textbook than a modern title intended for the
public. There is no historical or personal context, despite the book being
written by the man who came up with the theory, and it’s not until 26 pages
in that we get a clear example of the implications of the theory, using
railway trains and lightning flashes. Nonetheless, the book was remarkably
popular – in this respect, it prefigured Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of
Time in being more frequently bought than thoroughly read.
A far more approachable and successful exposition of relativity and
other aspects of the modern physics of the time would come from one of
Einstein’s greatest champions, English physicist Arthur Eddington. Born in
Kendal in 1882, Eddington was an astrophysicist, most significantly
developing our understanding of the structure of stars. However, to the
British public he was the star science communicator of the day. Eddington
had been a vocal supporter of Einstein and led an expedition in 1919 to
observe the solar eclipse, providing evidence to support Einstein’s general
theory of relativity.
Shortly after the publication of Einstein’s paper on general relativity,
Eddington obtained some notoriety for his tongue-in-cheek response to a
reporter’s question. Asked if it were true that only three people in the world
understood the theory, Eddington is said to have replied, ‘Who is the third?’
From his books, this seems likely to have been an attempt at humour rather
than a criticism of Einstein’s theories.
Eddington wrote a number of titles for the public, despite academics who
popularised science being frowned on by their peers. His most successful
work was The Nature of the Physical World from 1928, which made use of
material from radio broadcasts and lectures he had given. Part of the appeal
of Eddington’s writing – and a lesson for scientists who came after him that
still is frequently not observed – is that he realised the importance of giving
the reader context. Rather than simply present scientific theories and
observations, he considered the philosophical and even theological
implications – important for the culture of the time. He was also happy to
make literary references and to use humour in getting his message across.
Eddington was one of the first modern scientists who realised how much
better Galileo’s approach to writing science had been than that of Newton.

The immodest mathematician

Eddington kept maths to a minimum in his books for the public, but a title
that came out while Eddington was still active grappled with the hard-to-
handle topic of mathematics full on. As the book’s title, Mathematics for
the Million, makes clear, its English author, Lancelot Hogben, made no
secret of his aspirations to reach the masses. Born in Portsmouth in 1895,
Hogben was a zoologist who took a particular interest in statistics. His aim
was to bring the person in the street up to the level of mathematics of a
secondary-school, or high-school, graduate specialising in the subject.
Lancelot Hogben
MATHEMATICS FOR THE MILLION, GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD, 1936

Mathematics for the Million was an instant hit, with six printings in 1936 alone; this is the fourth
printing.
Sir Arthur Eddington
THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY, 1935

Arthur Eddington’s bestseller was first published in 1928 by Cambridge University Press.

Published in 1936, Mathematics for the Million is one of the strangest

maths books ever written. Unusually for a science book, we know exactly
how it came into being. Hogben was having lunch in the fashionable
Simpson’s in the Strand restaurant in London with American publisher
William Warder Norton. Over lunch, Norton confided to Hogben that there
ought to be ‘a big market for a book that could do for mathematics what
[H.G.] Wells had done for world history in his Outline.’ (Norton was
referring to Wells’s hugely successful popular history title The Outline of
History.)
Norton wasn’t asking Hogben to write this new book, but hoped that he
could persuade the philosopher Bertrand Russell to do so. Hogben played
down Russell, suggesting that he would find it difficult to write down to the
level of the public. But, Hogben was able to reveal, he himself had ‘already
written the book [Norton] wanted’. He had done so during a lengthy stay in
hospital to while away the time, but had not tried to get the book published
because he was a candidate to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and
‘its hierarchy frowned formidably on what they regarded as science
popularisation’. This is somewhat ironic, given that today the Society
awards an annual prize for science books written for the public. But by the
time he met with Norton, Hogben had gained his fellowship and felt safe.
In a distinguished, sometimes downright over-wordy style, Hogben
makes use of the way that maths has been employed in history to introduce
basic principles. So, for example, he brings in geometry by showing the
reader how ancient Egyptian architects might have used it, while
trigonometry is demonstrated by showing how it was used to navigate by
the stars. Although aimed at the general reader, his book is no mere
entertainment. It is full of exercises and is clearly intended as a self-teach
manual. Perhaps its greatest advance was its historical context, and the fact
that Hogben realised it was unnecessary to, say, plough through the whole
of Euclid (as many schoolchildren would continue to do long after this book
was published). He simply gave the essentials of geometry and moved on.
Hogben was a respected scientist, though his book was on a subject well
removed from his day-to-day activities. Strangely, considering that his
mathematical speciality was statistics, this branch of maths only gets a
limited exposure in Mathematics for the Million, probably because it did
not feature heavily in school syllabuses of the time.

Chemical conundrums
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, an American chemist was
making fundamental contributions to understanding the chemical bond, the
mechanisms by which different elements link together to form larger
structures and compounds. Born in Portland in 1901, Linus Pauling was one
of only four people to win two Nobel Prizes – in his case, in Chemistry and
the Peace Prize. His work was foundational in the development of modern
chemistry and molecular biology, the discipline that now dominates biology
with its emphasis on DNA, the chemical processes in cells and the complex
molecular machinery that makes it possible for them to function.

Linus Pauling
THE NATURE OF THE CHEMICAL BOND, CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1939

An advertisement from 1939 for Pauling’s formative title beneath a photograph of him from 1947,
examining a crystal.
 Although in later life Pauling promoted concepts with little scientific
basis, such as his support for vast doses of vitamin C as a counter to colds
and flu, there is no doubt of the huge contribution he made to chemistry.
Pauling was a prolific writer, but most of his books for the general public
were on his more outlandish ideas. The title that ties to his career with most
weight was The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of
Molecules and Crystals from 1939. Based on his 1931 paper that led to his
Nobel Prize, the book also pulled in many of his thoughts on molecular
structure.

Linus Pauling
THE NATURE OF THE CHEMICAL BOND, MANUSCRIPT, 1939

Reference illustration for naphthalene figure supplied by Pauling for his book.
Linus Pauling
THE NATURE OF THE CHEMICAL BOND, CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1960

These pages from the third edition of Pualing’s book (first published in 1939) show the structure of rhe
crystal prussian blue (top) and the dimensions of various molecules (bottom).
 The Nature of the Chemical Bond is a textbook – so an exception to the
kind of books that had a wide influence by the mid-twentieth century – but
it is the very rare example of a textbook that has continued to have
worldwide recognition and in which a scientist covers his own discoveries.
Along with a handful of other titles of the period, the book has more in
common with the work of James Clerk Maxwell and scientists from
previous centuries than the more common influential books of the twentieth
century, increasingly written for the general public.
Strangely, though quantum physics has had far more impact on our lives
than has relativity, there were no books on the subject from the great
quantum physicists such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin
Schrödinger that had any great impact. Perhaps the most significant were
Schrödinger’s My View of the World from 1964 and Heisenberg’s
Encounters with Einstein, published in 1989, 13 years after his death.
However, these were not approachable memoirs, but rather collections of
essays on the scientific method and the impact of science on society,
addressed to an academic audience. Books on quantum theory would not
reach the public gaze until the 1980s. However, one of quantum physics’
big names – Schrödinger – wrote a book that has been widely praised, in a
field outside his own. This was What is Life?, written in English in 1944.
Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887. From
the 1920s he became one of the leading lights in quantum physics, winning
the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. Attacked in his own country because of
his opposition to the Nazi regime, he ended up in Ireland in 1940,
continuing to work in Dublin until his retirement in 1955. Non-physicists
might best associate him with his thought experiment that became known as
‘Schrödinger’s cat’, while physicists remember him for his equation
describing the behaviour of quantum particles. However, What is Life?, as
the name suggests, links physics to biology. Though his book was aimed at
the public, Schrödinger himself remarked that the content could not be
described as popular – it was technical and heavy-going for the ordinary
reader.
Based on a series of lectures Schrödinger gave in Dublin, the book deals
with a key puzzle facing biologists. They were aware by this time that
genetic information was somehow passed on through chromosomes, a
series of microscopic blobs found inside cells. However, it was
Schrödinger, basing his argument on the underlying physics of atoms and
molecules, who suggested that the mechanism for this would have to be a
particular type of molecule, which he described as an ‘aperiodic crystal’.
Most of the crystals we are familiar with, such as diamonds, have a simple,
repeating structure. But Schrödinger proposed that in order to contain
sufficient information, the crystal behind life would have to have a structure
that didn’t repeat – hence the ‘aperiodic’ part. (Think of a book. If it were
like a traditional crystal, it would read something like ABA ABA ABA
ABA.) The molecule playing this part was later identified as DNA, with the
discovery of its aperiodic structure forming the basis of another key book
from the twentieth century, The Double Helix (see here).
Linus Pauling
THE NATURE OF THE CHEMICAL BOND, CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1960

The third edition of Pauling’s book from 1939.

Erwin Schrödinger
WHAT IS LIFE?, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1944

The cover of Schrödinger’s highly influential title.

Behaviour to the fore

As was the case with What is Life?, another important title from this period
took a simplified look at a much more complex phenomenon, but in the
case of Canadian scientist Donald Hebb’s 1949 book, The Organization of
Behavior, the subject was not life in general but the brain. A psychologist,
Hebb was one of the earliest to explore the way that interactions between
neurons in the brain resulted in the behaviours we associate with living
organisms.
Hebb’s biggest contribution to his field was ‘Hebbian learning’, which
showed that when pathways in the brain are used repeatedly they are
strengthened, forming a pattern that results in learning. The big
breakthrough here was the idea that learning resulted in physical changes to
the brain’s structure, something that had not been previously realised. This
was a book aimed at those in the profession, but it was not a textbook in the
conventional sense, more a throwback to the earlier approach of a book
used to share a new scientific idea with peers.
A useful contrast with The Organization of Behavior, in being far more
approachable to the reader, was a book from an author whose achievements
are now sometimes lost in revulsion for his politics (though it’s fair to say
that his titles are significantly less readable now than Arthur Eddington’s, or
even Galileo’s). Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz was born in Vienna in
1903. His speciality, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine at the age of 70, was ethology – like Hebb, Lorenz studied
behaviour, but his subjects were animals.
Lorenz was not alone among scientists in supporting the Nazi regime in
the Second World War. Heisenberg, for example, stayed on to run the
German programme to develop nuclear weapons when many of his
physicist colleagues fled the country. But Lorenz’s war work involved more
than just supporting his country’s war effort. He published material
supporting the racist narrative of the Nazis and worked for the ‘Office for
Racial Policy’.
Despite his politics, Lorenz’s books on animal behaviour were
immensely popular, in particular his 1949 Er Redete mit dem Viehden
Vogeln und den Fischen (He Talked to the Cattle, the Birds and the Fish),
which achieved international fame. The title is better known under its 1951
English title King Solomon’s Ring, a reference to the legend that King
Solomon had a ring enabling him to talk to the animals. In the book, Lorenz
describes how he raised various species at home and what he learned about
their behaviour and psychology as a result. Perhaps the most original
concept he presented was the idea of imprinting – the rapid process in
which newborn animals, soon after birth, learn behaviour directly from their
parents – but the book was also novel in helping the public understand more
about what goes on in an animal’s brain.

Konrad Lorenz
ER REDETE MIT DEM VIEHDEN VOGELN UND DEN FISCHEN (KING SOLOMON’S RING)

Covers of a 1953 English translation published by the Reprint Society London and a 1963 German
edition of Lorenz’s 1949 bestseller on animal behaviour published by DTV Verlag.

Getting philosophical
Books like Schrödinger’s What is Life? and Hebb’s The Organization of
Behavior could be appreciated to some degree by the public, even if they
were probably more valued in hindsight by other scientists. However, some
would argue that they make straightforward reading indeed compared to a
title published in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by the
American Thomas Kuhn, born in Cincinnati in 1922. This was one of the
last significant original scientific books addressed to professionals in the
field, rather than the public.
Kuhn’s book covered the philosophy of science, rather than directly
tackling science itself. To put it into context, we need first to consider
another classic book in the philosophy of science, Logik der Forschung
(The Logic of Scientific Discovery) by Karl Popper. Popper, an Austrian of
Jewish descent born in Vienna in 1902, spent the majority of his academic
life in England, where he moved via New Zealand. His book is now better-
known in the re-written English version he produced in 1959 than the 1934
German original.
Thomas S. Kuhn
THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1970

Cover of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 bestseller in its second edition from 1970.
Karl Popper
LOGIK DER FORSCHUNG (THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY), HUTCHINSON & CO LTD, 1972

Cover of the sixth printing of the English version of Popper’s 1934 German original.

Central to Popper’s understanding of the scientific process was the idea

of being able to falsify a proposition. For him, science could not involve
statements that could not be falsified. The point underlying this was that
science worked not by deduction, which produces absolute truths, but by
induction, which can only at best give us the most likely outcome given
current evidence. The classic example is the black swan. Europeans could
reasonably make the scientific observation that all swans are white birds.
However, this was open to falsification if black swans were discovered,
which they duly were in Australia.
Popper’s philosophy portrayed science as incremental – a little like the
uniformitarian view in geology. Major changes, such as the Copernican
model of the universe, would certainly occur, but Popper believed they
weren’t central to a process of devising new theories, testing them and
looking for opportunities to falsify them. Kuhn, however, struck back with a
clearer catastrophist equivalent – the concept of scientific revolutions, for
which he introduced the term ‘paradigm shift’.
Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions proposed far more
than the not particularly surprising idea that there are sudden shifts in
understanding when major new theories are introduced. In a postmodern
view of science that now seems somewhat dated, Kuhn suggests that
paradigm shifts involve such a major change in the way scientists look at
the world that their words no longer have the same meanings. In his book,
Kuhn emphasised that scientific viewpoints have their sociological element,
being inevitably subjective, and speaks of new paradigms being
‘incommensurable’ with the old. This means that when, say, Newton and
Einstein refer to ‘gravity’, the result of the paradigm shift means they are
not referring to the same thing. According to Kuhn, this is not only in the
sense that the different generations had a changed understanding of the
same reality – Kuhn believed that reality itself is altered in a paradigm shift.
Few real scientists or members of the public accept (or are even aware
of) more than a kind of Kuhn-lite, where revolutions in theory take place
and we see the same universe in a different way – but it would be
impossible to underestimate the impact that Kuhn’s work has had on the
scientific zeitgeist. It transformed the way that we look at the history of
science. The very fact that the book sold over a million copies demonstrates
that, despite being technical, it had a reach that went far beyond
philosophers of science and even scientists to a wider academic market. (If
anything, it received greater appreciation from the humanities than the
sciences.)
The environmental balance
If Thomas Kuhn’s book was to have a huge influence on academia, a title
published in the same year, 1962, was to have an even larger impact on the
world, bringing a relatively new scientific topic to the public eye:
environmentalism. The book would change public policy, raise awareness,
and according to some observers would be indirectly responsible for the
deaths of millions of people. And it was written by a woman.
The author was Rachel Carson. Born in Springdale, Pennsylvanian in
1907, the American marine biologist had already had considerable success
with two books on sea life before publishing Silent Spring in 1962. The title
referred to the impact that the insecticide DDT was having on birds. Carson
suggested that, should the use of DDT continue, there could come a point
where spring was not greeted by birdsong, but by silence.
Rachel Carson
SILENT SPRING, PENGUIN PRESS, 1971

Carson’s title has been constantly in print since publication in 1962. But by the time this Penguin edition
was published DDT use was already in decline.
Rachel Carson
SILENT SPRING (PRIMAVERA SILENZIOSA), GIANGIACOMO FELTRINELLI EDITORE, 1966

An Italian translation of Silent Spring published by Feltrinelli’s Universale Economica imprint.

Part of the appeal of Carson’s writing, compared with the stodgy,

textbook-like work of many science books written for the public before it,
was her near-poetic writing style, typified when she envisaged a bird-free
future: ‘The birds – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them,
puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted.
The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and
could not fly. It was a spring without voices.’

RACHEL CARSON, 1962

A photograph of Carson in the woods near her home, taken as part of a photoshoot for Time magazine.

DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) had proved an extremely

impressive insecticide, which vastly reduced the incidence of the deadly
typhus disease in Europe and had been adopted by the World Health
Organisation as the primary weapon for fighting malaria-carrying
mosquitoes. Yet in the political response to Carson’s book, DDT usage was
widely restricted. In 1963, the year after the book’s publication, the US
president set up an investigation specifically to check out the validity of
Silent Spring’s message. DDT was effectively banned in the US in 1972 and
since then controls have been instigated around the world. DDT is thought
to have saved around 25 million lives since its invention, and some believe
it likely that many more could have been saved had it not been for the
impact of Silent Spring. Malaria still kills over a million people a year,
many of them children.
Ironically, Carson does not suggest that DDT should be taken off the
shelves, but rather that its usage should be carefully targeted. When Silent
Spring was published, DDT was being used profligately as an agricultural
pesticide, and it was this that was causing real problems. The environmental
impact of DDT should not be played down – its ban in the US is thought to
have been a major factor in the recovery of the bald eagle from near
extinction, for example – yet DDT did prove extremely effective when used
in small areas to wipe out disease-carrier concentrations. While this was
continued to some degree, the backlash against the insecticide was so strong
that opportunities to use it before DDT-resistant mosquitoes became more
common were missed.
Despite Carson’s balanced argument, the tenor of the book is emotive,
and comments in it such as, ‘Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down
such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit
for all life? They should not be called “insecticides”, but “biocides”,’ made
Silent Spring a powerful voice against the insecticide.
Without doubt, Silent Spring marks the arrival of a new kind of science
book. A polemic with a message, it was written by a scientist – but on a
topic outside her area of expertise. What Carson contributed was a skill for
storytelling: the ability to produce a narrative that would carry the reader
along – a capability that would soon come to be expected if a science book
were to be considered good quality.
It’s interesting that one of DDT’s great successes was in practically
eradicating the scourge of typhus from Europe, as another much earlier
science title focused on this horrible disease. This was Rats, Lice and
History by the American bacteriologist Hans Zinsser. Born in New York in
1878, Zinsser had isolated the typhus bacterium (not to be confused with
typhoid, which is so named because it is ‘typhus-like’). His 1935 book is
quirky in the extreme. Its subtitle is ‘after twelve preliminary chapters’,
chapters which Zinsser spends darting here and there, always seemingly
about to describe typhus before heading off to consider the nature of
biographies or the lifecycles of the rat and louse.

Hans Zinsser
RATS, LICE AND HISTORY, GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, 1937
The third printing of Zinsser’s book with its unique ‘biography of a disease’ approach, which, despite
Zinsser’s protestations, was definitely popular science.

Zinsser spent time on discussing what a biography was, and asserting

that he was in the business of writing a biography of a disease, because he
was adamant that his book should not be considered popular science. (It
was.) He grumpily remarks, ‘To describe [the work of medical teams]
belongs to technical literature. To attempt to do so in this book would lead
us into “popular science”, a form of production which we detest and have
endeavoured to avoid.’ It’s possible that Zinsser had in mind as ‘popular
science’ the kind of Olympian, condescending title that was common in the
genre in the early twentieth century. Zinsser wanted his book to be different
– to give a human viewpoint, as we have come to expect of a good popular
science title.
As a result, Zinsser ends up straying far and wide, often deploying
distinctive humour, even spending a while discussing the work of T. S.
Eliot. His approach makes Rats, Lice and History an eccentric but novel
read, giving a hint of what might come from taking bolder and more
interesting approaches to communicating science to the masses.

The bongo-playing genius

Carson and Zinsser both put considerable effort into writing for the public.
Strictly speaking, American physicist Richard Feynman never did so, even
though one of his books was a huge popular hit. This was a man that most
physicists hold in awe. Born in New York in 1918, Feynman, like Faraday
and Tyndall before him, achieved his literary success from the publication
of his lectures and talks, rather than from writing books in the conventional
sense.
A Nobel Prize winner for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED)
– which describes the interaction of light and matter at the quantum level –
Feynman’s biggest popular success was the 1985 collection of
autobiographical anecdotes Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!. These
stories were not written down by Feynman, but edited from conservations
with biographer Ralph Leighton. The accuracy of Feynman’s tales, from his
adventures playing the bongos to his safe-breaking activities while working
on the Manhattan Project to design the first atomic bomb, has sometimes
been questioned – but there’s no doubt he told a great story, and gave a
fascinatingly human side to the scientific developments of that period.
Published just three years before Feynman’s death, Surely You’re Joking
was a late entry amongst his books. The same year, he also published his
most effective quasi-popular science book, QED: The Strange Theory of
Light and Matter. Based on a series of public lectures, it starts with a superb
introduction which includes some classic Feynman comments. For
example:

[Y]ou think I’m going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you’re not
going to be able to understand it. Why, then, am I going to bother you with all this?
Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won’t be able to understand what
I am going to say? It is my task to persuade you not to turn away because you don’t
understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it either. This is because I
don’t understand it. Nobody does.
Richard Feynman
THE FEYNMAN LECTURES ON PHYSICS, ADDISON-WESLEY, 1966

A paperback set of Feynman’s ‘red books’ from three years after initial hardback publication. Feynman
(above)lecturing at CERN, Geneva in 1965.

Although the main part of the book gets relatively technical for a popular
title, it does so without resorting to mathematics and with Feynman’s
typical man-of-the-people style. This was also much in evidence when
Feynman was part of the Rogers Commission looking into the causes of the
Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of 1986. Unhappy with the bureaucratic
and heavily controlled approach of the commission, Feynman did his own
evidence gathering, and then, at a televised session of the commission, used
his glass of iced water to cool a section of the rubber O-ring used to seal
joints on the shuttle, demonstrating that O-rings lost flexibility in the cold,
reducing their ability to seal, and so causing the shuttle’s catastrophic
failure.
It is because so much of Feynman’s personality comes through even in a
textbook, that his most influential book is arguably The Feynman Lectures
on Physics, published in 1963. Known amongst physicists as ‘the red
books’ (they were first published with plain red covers), these three
volumes cover his lectures for an undergraduate course given at the
California Institute of Technology. Remarkably, over 1.5 million copies of
this decidedly technical title have been sold in English alone.
When I first came across the red books as a physics undergraduate at
Cambridge in the 1970s, I was swept away, as so many others have been, by
Feynman’s conversational style and his very different way of presenting
much of the material. What he is writing about is not always easy to grasp –
he pulls no punches mathematically – yet the accompanying text is as far as
it is possible to get from a typical dull textbook that simply presents a
collection of facts. Physicists around the world revere the red books like no
other textbook.

Man the ascending animal

Feynman’s highly technical red books are very different from the popularist
work of English author Desmond Morris, but Morris would also prove
highly influential in his own way. Born near Swindon in 1928, Morris was a
zoologist who achieved fame in the UK as the presenter of early television
programmes on nature, notably the 1950s and 1960s series Zoo Time, a
weekly family show that used specimens from Regent’s Park Zoo in
London to explore natural history.
However, Morris’s breakthrough title was not the inevitable ‘book of the
television series’ with which we now get deluged. Instead, it was far more
subversive. The Naked Ape examined the human species from a zoological
viewpoint. Despite the widespread intellectual acceptance since Darwin’s
time that humans were just another ape, Morris’s book went for the gut,
bringing the message home. Coming out in 1967, when the sexual
revolution was still shocking to many, it was also widely considered
subversive because of its open discussion of human sexuality. Bear in mind
that this was only seven years after Penguin Books had been subject to a
public prosecution for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s
Lover. The times might have been a-changing, but not particularly quickly
in conservative England (or, for that matter in the US, where The Naked
Ape was the subject of a court case after being one of a handful of titles
removed from a school library because they were considered ‘anti-
American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy’). The cover of
The Naked Ape alone, featuring the naked backs of a man, woman and
child, would have marked it out as a book that could not comfortably be
consumed in public.
Desmond Morris
THE NAKED APE, CORGI, 1969

First published by Jonathan Cape in 1967 with a neutral black cover, this paperback edition features an
image that was unlikely to do anything to decrease the book’s controversial nature. Above, Desmond
Morris (and friend) on the Zoo Time television show in 1956.
Desmond Morris
THE NAKED APE (EL MONO DESNUDO), CIRCULO DE LECTORES, 1969

A rather less controversial Spanish cover for The Naked Ape.

Desmond Morris
MANWATCHING, TRIAD/PANTHER BOOKS, 1978

This paperback edition was published a year after the hardback Jonathan Cape edition.

A particularly important part of The Naked Ape’s contribution to the

public understanding of evolution is the way that it brings evolutionary
factors into explanations of human behaviour. Evolution had largely been
described to the public as a mechanism for explaining physical change, but
Morris described how human social interaction, sexual behaviour, attitude
to child rearing, urge to explore and tendency to fight could all have been
shaped by evolutionary pressures.
Morris went on to write a whole range of titles, the majority of which
could be seen as sequels to The Naked Ape. Perhaps the most effective was
Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour from 1978. This large-
format, heavily illustrated book carried forward the behavioural theme,
always linking it to evolutionary and biological information, and made the
most of its full-colour illustrations. For example, in one experiment the
reader is shown a pair of apparently identical faces and asked to decide
which is more attractive; it is then revealed that the photograph that would
most frequently be selected had been modified to enlarge the pupils of the
model’s eye, demonstrating a natural reaction to such physical cues. The
success of Manwatching led Morris into a whole series of spin-offs
including Bodywatching, Peoplewatching, Babywatching and the
increasingly unlikely Dogwatching, Catwatching, Horsewatching and
Animalwatching.
In many ways, Manwatching, with its large format and illustrations, feels
like a ‘book of the television show’ – but it wasn’t. Some such books have
been quite successful in their own right, though many feel like the take-
home glossy programme from a night at the theatre. However, one title does
deserve consideration. This was The Ascent of Man from 1973.
Jacob Bronowski
THE ASCENT OF MAN, BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION, 1975

The rather uninspiring cover of Bronowski’s impressive book-of-the-series in an edition issued two years
after it was first published in 1973.
James D. Watson
TEH DOUBLE HELIX, ATHENEUM, 1968

An early copy of Watson’s popular and very personal history of science bestseller, never out of print since.

Written by Polish-English mathematician Jacob Bronowski, born in

Łódź in 1908, the book is pretty much a transcript of his television series,
heavily illustrated in colour. What Bronowski delivers is a celebration of
human achievement (the title is an intentional play on Darwin’s The
Descent of Man), making it clear that the sciences cannot be treated in
isolation, but have to be seen as part of our wider cultural development.
Bronowski shows how science does not only emerge from our culture and
creativity, but how it has also shaped our culture: in many ways, he seems
to suggest, it is science that makes us truly unique as a species.
Bronowski shows that while there is no doubt that Desmond Morris was
right in categorising us as just another ape, our scientific achievements
make the human species very special. He does not give a rose-tinted
viewpoint of humanity’s capabilities – Bronowski lost many of his family in
Auschwitz – yet he is still able to celebrate the remarkable success of the
sciences and their development, intertwined with that of the arts.

The heart of biology

By the time Bronowski was writing, a new book was available that looked
back to a dramatic scientific discovery in 1953. This was The Double Helix,
published in 1968, written by one of the discoverers of the structure of
DNA, James Watson. Like its author, The Double Helix would result in
considerable controversy, yet few would dispute its significance in the
history of science writing.
American molecular biologist James Watson, born in Chicago in 1928,
was one of the four scientists who cracked the structure of DNA in 1953.
Along with Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, Watson
won the race to uncover how the complex molecule DNA acts as a store for
the genetic code. The aperiodic structure predicted by Schrödinger’s What
is Life? (see here) was discovered to exist in the pattern of four chemical
compounds known as bases, which link the double helix structure of DNA
like the rungs of a spiral staircase.
The Double Helix tells the story of the discovery, and, perhaps even
more importantly, it takes the style of science titles further away from that
of a textbook. While Silent Spring was a well-written polemic for the
public, The Double Helix turns the discovery of science into drama. It
brings in personalities, it shows the dark side of science in the desperate
race to get there first, and it puts narrative at the heart of a science book. It
is excellent storytelling. It would take a while, but within two decades of
The Double Helix being published many great popular science writers had
picked up the idea that narrative is as important as content.

James D. Watson
THE DOUBLE HELIX (BIOLOGIE MOLÉCULAIRE DU GÈNE), EDISCIENCE À PARIS, 1968

A French first edition of Watson’s book. James Watson (left) and Frances Crick pose in 1953 with an
early model of the structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.
 Of course, it helped the huge success of the book that Watson was
involved in one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the century. Yet
The Double Helix also highlights the dangers when a scientist writes about
his or her own work. The discovery was shrouded in controversy anyway.
Rosalind Franklin was excluded from the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine, which was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. As it
happens, Franklin died before the prize could be awarded, and it is never
awarded posthumously. But the prize is limited to three recipients, and
some observers suspect that the infamously conservative Nobel committee
would still have chosen to exclude Franklin had she survived.
There was also a dispute between Watson and Crick, working in
Cambridge, and Franklin and Wilkins, working in London. Watson and
Crick produced the theory, but it was Franklin and Wilkins’ work on X-ray
diffraction images of DNA that revealed the structure. In telling the story,
Watson makes no effort to be objective – it is a tale of triumph from
Watson’s perspective. It makes the book interesting reading, but for a more
balanced account it helps to have read contributions from Wilkins (in his
book The Third Man of the Double Helix from 2003) and from Franklin’s
biographers (she died too soon to write her own book) such as Anne Sayre,
whose Rosalind Franklin and DNA was published in 1975 – though the
latter has been criticised by Franklin’s sister for overstating the level of
sexism she faced.

Gustav Eckstein
THE BODY HAS A HEAD, HARPER & ROW, 1969

A first edition cover of Eckstein’s book alongside a photograph of Eckstein in his lab at the University of
Cincinnati, feeding one of his favourite pigeons, Red.
 By the time we reach the end of the 1960s it might seem that the cultural
revolution would have led to a total transformation of writing style from the
stuffy formality of previous ages. This did come, but it took time. A good
example of a transitional work was The Body Has a Head by American
medical doctor and psychologist Gustav Eckstein. Born in Cincinnati in
1890, Eckstein was old enough to have one foot in the past, yet by 1969
when his book came out, he was aware that there was a need for a new
approach.
In his exploration of the physiology of the human body, no one can
accuse Eckstein of being cold and clinical. His writing is full of literary
flourishes, never using one word where a whole phrase could be squeezed
in. Yet despite this, he sometimes manages a dazzling turn of speed. In the
first 20 pages, the reader is transported from the earliest ancient Greek
writers to Descartes describing the body as a machine.
The strange, staccato style Eckstein adopts is sometimes closer to poetry
than prose. This is illustrated well by his first words on the male sexual
role: ‘Into the town comes the swashbuckler, has something to sell. That is
his role, or his illusion. Assault is his physiology.’ There is no doubt that
Eckstein was eccentric. He managed to get a play he wrote performed on
Broadway, which one review described as ‘anti-entertainment’. And visitors
to his lab would be greeted by Eckstein wearing a large, battered straw hat,
worn to protect him from the droppings of the many canaries that flew free
inside.
The Body Has a Head now feels like a period piece. For example, this
book was published just seven years before Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish
Gene, yet genetics receives just three lines of text. Nonetheless, the book
was a big success, because this was a subject that combined great public
interest with little previous coverage. The title was both influential in
exposing the public to the details of human biology and in helping other
scientists and writers to realise how far a science book could deviate from
conventional, clinical and, frankly, dull writing styles.
The best immediate contrast to The Body Has a Head is Le Hasard et la
Nécessité (Chance and Necessity) by the French biologist Jacques Monod,
published in 1970. Born in Paris in 1910, Monod won the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine for his work on the interaction of genes with
enzymes and viruses. Monod was probably best known outside the
scientific field for his humanist views and a philosophy that put science at
the forefront of the interaction between humanity and the world. However,
his book prefigured more familiar titles in English-speaking countries such
as those of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett in exploring the
implications of evolution and genetics, emphasising that evolution does not
have goals, but rather is based on randomness – the ‘chance’ in the title of
the book.
 Monod’s book shows how random mutations were responsible for
creating humanity, rather than any deistic guidance. He also strongly refutes
the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism, which he explains
misunderstands evolution, seeing it as a mechanism for higher levels of
existence to emerge from lower. Monod is clear that the randomness of the
evolutionary process meant that it’s perfectly possible to evolve a ‘lower’
level of existence. While the science in this book is good, Monod’s vision is
of a cold, purely scientific viewpoint that encourages a move from
democracy to technocracy. Monod was way ahead of Eckstein in his
science, but lacked Eckstein’s ability to address the humanity of his readers.
Jacques Monod
LE HASARD ET LA NÉCESSITÉ, EDITIONS DU SEUIL, 1970

The first edition cover of Monod’s book (emphasising his 1965 Nobel Prize) alongside a rather stiffly
posed photograph of Monod from the same year.
Crystal balls
The middle of the twentieth century was a period of upheaval in science and
also in science writing. The year 1970 saw the publication of what would be
by far the most influential title in a genre that straddles science, history,
politics and economics: futurology. Since ancient times humanity has
sought to predict the future. While original attempts depended on the occult,
with no scientific basis, the development of probability and statistics have
enabled us to make our best guesses about the way systems might develop.
We will discover in the next chapter that such attempts will always be
limited by aspects of chaos (see here). But this has not stopped a large
number of popular books being published attempting to describe humanity’s
destiny.
Such titles were not new in 1970. There was a significant fad, for
example, around the end of the nineteenth century for books describing a
future world of technology, and H. G. Wells would put forward his own
‘future history’ in the 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come. But such
titles were fiction. Although modern attempts at futurology are equally
fictional from a scientific viewpoint, they have gained traction as serious
works, thanks principally to Future Shock.
Alvin Toffler
FUTURE SHOCK, RANDOM HOUSE, 1970

The first edition cover of Toffler’s bestseller, which made him a media star, alongside a photograph of
Toffler in New York from the following decade.
 This was the work of Alvin Toffler, a New York-born writer and
‘futurist’, whose biggest impact was probably popularising the term
‘information overload’. Future Shock sold over 6 million copies and was
lapped up widely. Central to the book was the idea that the rapidity of
change since the Industrial Revolution was overwhelming to humans (a
message that worked better in a science-fiction novel inspired by Toffler’s
book, John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider). Like the output of many
soothsayers of the past, however, the contents of Toffler’s book don’t stand
up to modern scrutiny. He imagined, for example, a throwaway society
where women would wear one-use paper dresses. There was no prediction
of the green ideas that have transformed attitudes to disposability. At the
time of writing, single-use plastic is being demonised: Toffler expected
disposable products to continue to increase in popularity.
It’s not that Toffler got everything wrong – he was probably strongest on
information technology, which was something of a specialty – but the
impact of the book demonstrates powerfully the general direction of science
writing, which has moved from emphasising the details of science to
putting them into context. For Toffler and those who followed with other
futurological titles, the context was not the past, or even the present, but the
future.

The genetic revolution

As a result of the work on DNA and discoveries of the action of sections of
DNA strands called genes – corresponding to the hereditary information
predicted by Mendel’s work over 100 years previously (see here) – the
public’s interest in genetics soared during the 1970s (something that Toffler
also didn’t foresee). And never more so than with the publication of The
Selfish Gene by English zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1941, Dawkins is now probably better known
as a strident atheist, whose 2006 book The God Delusion has become a
worldwide phenomenon. However, it’s hard to remember now how much
impact The Selfish Gene had when it was published in 1976. The concept in
the title is overdramatised – Dawkins suggests that genes are selfish in the
sense that from their ‘viewpoint’, living organisms are nothing more than a
vehicle for ensuring the survival of the gene. However, what proved
important about the book was that it revived and changed the discussion on
evolution.
As we have seen, there was surprisingly little negative reaction
following the publication of Darwin’s books. But by bringing evolution to
the fore, Dawkins helped bolster the anti-evolutionary feelings in religious
groups by combining scientific theories with his abrasive brand of atheism.
Ironically, for some years Dawkins held the post of Professor for Public
Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Without doubt, his books,
such as The Selfish Gene, did improve public understanding of science, yet
Dawkins probably did significantly more damage to understanding with his
confrontational style.
Even so, The Selfish Gene gave the public one of the earliest descriptions
of a genetic view of evolution (now the standard way to look at it), rather
than from the viewpoint of species. Species are arbitrary labels, devised for
convenience of fitting with the kind of structure that was developed by
Linnaeus (see here). Genes are actual physical distinctions. And by taking
the genetic viewpoint, Dawkins was also able to examine the implications
for our tendency to provide more social support for close biological
relations in whom we have the closest genetic investment.
Of significantly less importance (though it was praised at the time), the
book also introduced the word ‘meme’ – a term Dawkins invented to
suggest that ideas and behaviours can be described in an equivalent way to
genes. As they are passed from person to person, he suggested, ideas evolve
in a similar way to biological organisms (though much quicker). Now the
concept is not taken so seriously, and the word has been repurposed to
describe images with witty captions, which are spread on social media.
Richard Dawkins
THE SELFISH GENE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1976

Reminiscent of a science-fiction novel cover of the period, the first edition of Dawkins’ bestseller seems
designed to cover up its origins from Oxford University Press – an academic publisher.
James Lovelock
LE NUOVE ETA’ DI GAIA (GAIA), BOLLATI BORINGHIERI EDITORE, 1991

A rather elegant Italian edition from 12 years after Gaia’s first publication in 1979, alongside a 1980
photograph of Lovelock in his Cornish garden with the fluorocarbon detector he invented.
 The Selfish Gene was highly influential on public attitudes in some
countries, though it isn’t quite clear why it was described as the most
influential science book of all time in a 2017 poll by the UK’s Royal
Society. As we have seen, exactly what constitutes a science book has
changed through the years, but it’s hard to believe that some earlier science
books with a much longer-lasting impact have not been more influential
than The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins has sometimes been accused of taking the joy out of nature. He
countered this effectively in his 1998 title Unweaving the Rainbow, one of a
range of books that followed The Selfish Gene. The title refers to the poet
John Keats’ argument in his poem Lamia:

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Keats suggests that by explaining and hence ‘unweaving’ the rainbow,

Newton and other philosophers make the wonderful dull. As others, notably
Richard Feynman, have made clear, scientists argue the reverse. Science
does not stop us appreciating the beauty of nature, but we can add to this
the insight that understanding brings. This was Dawkins’ message in
Unweaving the Rainbow.

From Gaia to Gödel

While Dawkins was enthusiastic not to overlook the beautiful, it’s likely he
would not have been comfortable with some of the spiritual implications
that have been loaded onto a book published in 1979, a few years after The
Selfish Gene. This was Gaia by James Lovelock, an independent English
scientist born in Letchworth in 1919. Gaia covers an environmental theme
– but takes in a far bigger picture. Admittedly, Lovelock does not avoid the
potential for his book being considered spiritual by giving it the name of the
Greek goddess of the Earth. But his ‘Gaia hypothesis’ is purely scientific.
 Lovelock came up with the Gaia principle while working on instrument
design for NASA. His career had been anything but conventional. He
couldn’t afford to go to university after school and studied in the evening
until he had raised enough money to begin a chemistry degree. He went on
to undertake medical research during the Second World War, which led to a
PhD in medicine. After this, he experimented successfully on lowering the
body temperature of rodents to freezing point and then reanimating them,
before working for NASA on instruments used in planetary exploration.
Lovelock has never had a university affiliation, preferring to work on his
own, in the manner of a natural philosopher of an earlier generation.
When Lovelock was developing ideas for detecting life on Mars for
NASA during the 1960s, he began to construct the Gaia hypothesis. This
theory suggests that the whole of the Earth – both its living and non-living
parts – acts as a self-regulating system, that could be likened to a single
living being, just as the independent cells of the body act together to form a
single organism.
When Gaia was published, it won a lot of support from
environmentalists, who liked the message that the we are part of a larger
whole, though they did not necessarily think through the implication of a
self-regulating system where, for example, living species were not
important per se. The hypothesis drew significant criticism from scientists
(including Dawkins), who pointed out that the Earth didn’t have the
feedback mechanisms that an organism has between its parts.
While it’s possible to argue the pros and cons of Gaia as a scientific
theory, there is no doubt that the book Gaia had a large impact on both
environmentalism and enthusiasm for environmental sciences. It seems
likely that both sides of the argument were too extreme – it is probably an
exaggeration to describe the Earth as an organism, but the opponents of
Gaia overlooked genuinely useful observations on self-regulating systems,
which they struggled to understand.
Published the same year as Gaia was a book that probably rivals Stephen
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time for the proportion of readers who have
started but never managed to complete it. Written by Douglas Hofstadter, an
American professor of cognitive science born in New York in 1945, Gödel,
Escher, Bach is a sweeping fusion of ideas on what its subtitle describes as
‘An Eternal Golden Braid’. It has been equally applauded for its depth of
thinking and criticised for being near-incomprehensible.
 The very title tells the reader that this is no ordinary science book. We
get the names of a mathematician who proved that no system of
mathematics can be complete (Gödel), an artist whose work is regularly
used to illustrate ideas of symmetry in maths and physics lectures (Escher),
and a musician who was known for his mathematical approach to
composing (Bach). If Bronowski brought us the fusion of science and
culture in The Ascent of Man, then Hofstadter takes us deeper into the
melding of the disciplines in exploring the nature of knowledge and
systems.
Although the work of the three title characters is featured, the book is not
an attempt to find crossovers but rather pulls all areas of human thought
together to try to understand how our mental processes work. It explores
where the ability to think comes from in the collection of cells that makes
up a brain. As a piece of writing, it’s arguable that Gödel, Escher, Bach is
unnecessarily complex in its structure and more than a little self-aware of
its own cleverness. Hofstadter plays around with narrative flow, presents
different discussions and puzzles and does very little to help the reader get
the message.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Gödel, Escher, Bach, looking back
on it, is how its communication style fits into the wider development of
science book writing. We have seen how, since the time of Newton, science
books have moved from being technical communications between
practitioners, to becoming a voice from on high where experts deign to
communicate to lesser beings, typical of the early twentieth century,
through to the kind of engaging narrative that was just starting to emerge in
the 1970s. These newer authors understood how to communicate well –
something that had been lacking from the training and experience of the
earlier academic writers.
By contrast, Hofstadter deliberately obscures his message, turning a
science book into something that is best considered a work of art that
happens to have scientific content. In this respect the book is highly
unusual. It’s not a form that works well to communicate science, but
remains of interest as a piece of writing. Perhaps the only other title that
came close to succeeding with this approach was Infinite Jest, the 1996
novel by American author David Foster Wallace. Although this is more
clearly fiction, it also plays with the form of the novel and brings in aspects
of science and the mathematics of infinity.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH, PENGUIN, 1984

A Penguin edition from five years after the original publication of the book that fascinated and bemused
in equal measures.

By the end of the 1970s, science books by female authors were still
relatively uncommon. In both science and science writing, a major
structural change had yet to take place. On my wall I have my Cavendish
Laboratory Part II Students photograph from 1975, showing all the students
starting the final year of an undergraduate natural sciences degree
specialising in physics at Cambridge University. Of around 200 students,
perhaps half a dozen are female. Similarly, in the US in the 1970s, fewer
than 15 per cent of students in physics, maths, computer science and
engineering were female. The causes of this disparity have been much
discussed, but it seems likely there was still a strong cultural assumption
that some disciplines were more ‘suited’ to female talents and some to male
– an assumption that has lagged well behind data disproving it.
Things were significantly better in the biological sciences (in the 1970s,
for example, around 40 per cent of US biology undergraduates were female
and the figure is now closer to 60 per cent), but given that science writers
tend to be either working scientists or have science degrees, it is not entirely
surprising that the vast majority of science books before 1980 were written
by men. Thankfully, though, this was about to change, as we shall see in the
next chapter.
OceanofPDF.com
5
THE NEXT GENERATION
TRANSFORMING UNDERSTANDING
A S SCIENCE WRITING moved into the 1980s, it continued to evolve. The
public’s attitude to science was changing, from reverence to a mix of
fascination and scepticism. The importance of science was greater than
ever, and the public wanted better to explore the context and subtext of
scientific discoveries. Many of the best books written in the period covered
by this chapter – from 1980 to the modern day – have been the work of
science writers, rather than working scientists. Where the previous chapter
closed with a book that seems designed to make its message more obscure,
this period has seen accessible science gradually come to the fore. Science
books have grown up.

Interpreting quantum physics

The move to making science approachable did not mean, however, that
science writing would entirely avoid obscure subjects (or even obscure
presentations). Some of the old school were still active, and none more so
than rebel physicist, David Bohm. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in
1917, Bohm specialised in quantum physics. He could have been one of
America’s leading scientists, but despite his contribution to the Manhattan
Project, his left-wing political views made him a target of Senator
McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Bohm moved to
Brazil in 1951, and later to Israel, before settling in the UK.
For physicists, Bohm’s most important book was his textbook The
Special Theory of Relativity from 1965, yet his most original book, and one
that reached a more eclectic audience, came later in life. This was
Wholeness and the Implicate Order from 1980. The book builds on Bohm’s
unusual interpretation of quantum theory to give a mixed physical and
philosophical view of the workings of the universe as a whole.
 Quantum physics is the only area of science where there is a significant
focus on interpretations. The basics mathematics of quantum theory is
stunningly precise at predicting the behaviour of electrons and atoms,
molecules and photons. Richard Feynman observed that it was so accurate
it was like predicting the distance from New York to Los Angeles to the
width of a human hair. But the theory says nothing about what actually
happens inside a quantum system. The physics is a black box where we put
the numbers in, turn the handle and get a correct result out, but with no idea
why these results emerge.
Ever since the early days of quantum theory, physicists have come up
with interpretations that try to explain what is going on. The original, and
still probably most used, is the Copenhagen interpretation, named after the
home city of founding quantum physicist Niels Bohr. It says there is
nothing but probability before a particle is observed – there is no underlying
reality. Often described as ‘shut up and calculate’, this approach did not
satisfy everyone. David Bohm picked up on the work of French quantum
physicist Louis de Broglie, suggesting that each particle had a real (if
unknowable) location, and had an associated ‘pilot wave’ which guided its
movement.
The problem with Bohm’s theory, and the reason that it has never been
widely accepted, is that it requires everything everywhere to have
immediate influence on the rest of the universe. For his interpretation to
work, the universe has to be an interconnected whole, transcending the
lightspeed limit of Einstein’s special relativity. It was this that led Bohm to
write Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which put forward the idea that
there are two levels of reality: explicate reality, the level we usually
xperience; and implicate reality, which underlies everything and links
everything together, and is responsible for still unexplained phenomena
such as consciousness. Bohm’s ideas are even harder to penetrate than those
of Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach (see here) but there is no
doubt that this was an influential book, reaching well beyond the physics
community.
Bohm’s title does not explore the nature of quantum physics itself, a
topic that was relatively infrequently touched on until the following century.
Feynman’s book QED (see here), for example, only covered a relatively
small subset of the topic. However, English science writer John Gribbin
gave quantum physics a new appeal in 1984 with his best-known book, In
Search of Schrödinger’s Cat. Like Desmond Morris and Richard Dawkins,
Gribbin started his life as a working scientist, but became an extremely
prolific science writer, continuing to the present day. The cat in question is
the poor hypothetical animal that appeared in the Austrian physicist’s
thought experiment back in 1935.

David Bohm
WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER, ROUTLEDGE & KEAGAN PAUL, 1980

A first edition of Bohm’s title with a cover that makes no concessions to the reader.

John Gribbin
IN SEARCH OF SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT, BANTAM BOOKS, 1984

Quantum physics had very limited popular exposure before Gribbin’s book.
 The idea of Schrödinger’s cat was to highlight the oddity of a concept
called superposition. This says that a quantum particle that could be in one
of two possible states will not be in either state until observed; instead, it
exists purely as probabilities of each possibility. In the case of the cat,
Schrödinger envisaged an experiment where a detector released poison gas
into a box when a quantum particle decayed. When this happened, the cat in
the box would die. But before the particle was observed, it would be in a
superposition of both decayed and not-decayed states – meaning that until
the box was opened, the cat would be neither dead nor alive.
In practice, this was a throw-away concept that doesn’t deserve the
attention that has been given to it – but the image of the dead-or-alive cat
proved popular and Gribbin cleverly hangs his book on it, even though he
covers far more of quantum physics. Gribbin’s is one of the earlier
examples of what might now be considered the standard framework for a
popular science book. It explains the science – in this case quantum physics
– largely without using mathematics, but with a considerable amount of
analogy, and it puts the science into context, giving it a significant amount
of human interest by including some history of science too, telling us about
the people who developed the theory and how they came up with their
ideas. In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat is the archetypal approachable
popular science book.

Confusion in the brain

Something that comes through strongly in the influential texts since 1980 is
the dominance of two fields: physics and human science. Schrödinger’s Cat
was followed up in the next year by a classic human science title, The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Written by English neurologist Oliver
Sacks, the book plays on our human interest in the suffering of others,
exploring the cases of a number of Sacks’ patients.
Oliver Sacks
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT, SUMMIT BOOKS, 1985

Despite being a collection of unconnected essays, Sacks’ book struck a chord with readers thanks to his
storytelling ability.

Unlike most successful science books, this 1985 title is a collection of

unconnected essays, each exploring a different case study. The studies cover
individuals suffering from a range of conditions, including the visual
agnosia of the title story (an inability to visually recognise objects), the
inability to remember anything that has happened since the end of the
Second World War, and the experience of twin autistic savants. Sacks uses
storytelling surprises to keep the reader engaged, such as in his account of
the reactions of the inhabitants of a ward for the mentally ill to a televised
speech, where the elements that the individuals took from the speech were
totally different, informed by their conditions.
There is a danger that a book like this becomes the literary equivalent of
a freak show. This was even more of a risk with the 2004 title Mutants by
evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi, which showed how we are all genetic
mutants, using as examples historical extremes of human mutation who
were exhibited and vilified. Leroi manages to avoid the freak-show effect
by keeping human development as the focus of the book, rather than the
mutants. It’s harder to get away from the individuals in Sacks’ book,
because here the disorders themselves are his topic. Even so, Sacks
manages to use his case studies to explain aspects of the functioning of the
brain without blatant exploitation. The result was a bestselling title that
appealed to a much wider public than a normal medical text.
Oliver Sacks
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT (EL HOMBRE QUE CONFUDIÓ A SU MUJER CON UN
SOMBRERO), 1991

A Spanish edition published by Muchnik Editores.

Armand Leroi
MUTANTS, PENGUIN, 2005

A US Penguin edition of the UK original published in 2004 by HarperCollins.

Science stories and scientific legends

As we have seen, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, James Watson,
wrote a popular book in 1968. The Double Helix (see here) took a story-
and biography-driven approach that would come to typify the best
American popular science titles, in contrast to European equivalents that
tended to be driven more by the science. Typifying this ‘human-interest
story’ approach was a book published in 1987 called Chaos: Making a New
Science – the first book by a mainstay of US popular science, James Gleick.
James Gleick
CHAOS, VIKING PENGUIN INC., 1987

A dramatic cover suggestive of fractal patterns from the first edition of Gleick’s successful story-driven
approach to a mathematical topic.

Born in New York, Gleick remains unusual in popular science circles in

having an arts background rather than a science degree. This no doubt
contributed to his use of the distinctive story-driven approach seen in the
opening of Chaos: ‘The police in the small town of Los Alamos, New
Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 about a man seen prowling in the dark,
night after night, the red glow of his cigarette floating along the back
streets. He would pace for hours, heading nowhere in the starlight that
hammers down through the thin air of the mesas.’ It might have been the
opening of a noir detective novel. If the staid old ‘authority preaching to the
masses’ approach of popular science had been pushed aside by the likes of
Watson and Gribbin, it was now totally shattered.
Another impressive aspect of Gleick’s book was that it made popular
maths acceptable. Up to this point, mathematics had been a practical
subject, either taking the reader through a method and examples, or being
an unfortunate adjunct to science that made popular titles harder to read. In
Chaos, Gleick showed that, done right, maths could be as appealing as the
other sciences. It remains the hardest topic to make accessible, yet Chaos
would make it possible for a range of other popular maths books to do well.
Gleick’s topic, the development of chaos theory, was timely. Chaos in
mathematical terms is not the inchoate mess implied by the general usage of
the word. Chaotic systems obey clear rules. However, interactions between
parts of the system are so disruptive that the tiniest change in the way a
process starts can have a big influence on its progress. This is why weather
forecasting is so difficult. In fact, chaos theory began when American
meteorologist Edward Lorenz decided to re-run an early computerised
forecast. The process took hours, so rather than start it at the beginning, he
used the values from a printout made after the program had run for some
while. However, the computer missed a couple of decimal places off the
printout compared to the values it used internally, and the tiny fractional
change totally altered the forecast.
At the time Gleick wrote the book, chaos theory seemed about to
transform the way that mathematics was used in science, and Gleick was
able to make it sound impressively important (it’s no surprise that in the
movie Jurassic Park, made just a few years after Chaos came out, Jeff
Goldblum’s sceptical character Dr Ian Malcolm was an expert in chaos
theory). As it happens, that early promise fizzled out. Awareness of the
impact of chaotic systems has been hugely important, but the direct
applications that Gleick’s book foresaw have not come to pass. Even so,
Chaos remains a great read and, crucially, took the development of science
writing to the next level.
The following year, a book was published that had a huge impact on the
popular science market and would make its author a media star. The book
was A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Interestingly, in contrast
to Chaos, the book’s approach is that of an authority speaking from on high
– though Hawking softens this by adding a few personal comments and
touches (added during repeated edits as the publisher tried to make the book
more accessible).
The famous English physicist worked on highly esoteric aspects of black
holes and cosmology, yet his personality and his management of his
debilitating medical condition won over the public. A Brief History of Time
became the bestselling popular science title in modern history, until it was
eclipsed 15 years later by Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly
Everything (see here). Despite the title, Hawking’s book tells the reader
very little about time itself. Instead, it starts with the way that relativity
intertwines space and time, then goes on to cover cosmology.
Stephen Hawking
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (DAL BIG BANG AI BUCHI NERI), 1988

The first edition cover of Hawking’s bestseller published by Bantam Press, alongside an Italian translation
published by Rizolli in the same year that reverses title and subtitle to make this From the Big Bang to
Black Holes.
Stephen Hawking
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (EINE KURZE GESCHICHTE DER ZEIT DIE SUCHE NACH DER URKRAFT DES
UNIVERSUMS), ROWHOLT, 1988

The first German edition of this popular science classic where the subtitle has become ‘the search for the
primal force of the universe’, alongside a photograph of Stephen Hawking from the 1980s.
 A Brief History of Time is not a long book, which may make it seem odd
that it has such a reputation for being far more frequently bought than read.
In reality, many purchasers may well at least have started it, as Hawking
eases the reader in gently with a warm story of a scientist (possibly the
philosopher Bertrand Russell) giving a lecture on astronomy, only to be told
by an old lady in the audience, with shades of Terry Pratchett, that the world
was a flat plate on the back of a giant tortoise.
Hawking took note of his publisher’s repeated warning that every
equation included halves the number of readers. But the book lacks context
and narrative, and I suspect many readers gave up when Hawking got onto
the relativistic concept of light cones, which can confuse more than they
explain. It feels odd to describe A Brief History as a great science book,
given so many readers have given up on it – the essence of a great science
book is its ability to communicate science with the desired audience, in
which requirement this title clearly fails. However, what Hawking’s book
did was to bring popular science to the attention of publishers, impressing
them by its sales, and its transformation of the popular science market has
enabled far more effective books to published.

The TV effect
It’s arguable that the success of A Brief History also encouraged a short
flowering of high-quality science programming on television, which would
themselves have spin-off books. There has always been a difficult balance
in presenting television science. Early attempts were, like early popular
science books, very much about an authority lecturing the audience. But
television also produced lowest-common-denominator shows, which spent
most of their time on pretty images and hand-waving statements with little
coverage of the science itself.
The exception to this has been natural history, which lends itself to
effective visual presentation more than any other scientific topic. As a
result, for example, of the success of British naturalist and broadcaster
David Attenborough’s many series, such as Life on Earth and Blue Planet,
we have seen a number of visually pleasing books. It’s arguable, though,
that these titles – large format and heavily illustrated – aren’t true science
books. Where a science book covers far more, in much greater depth, than a
documentary, these ‘book of the series’ titles simply follow the structure of
the show and illustrate the episodes in it. And because these programmes
don’t usually have the sophistication of scripting of Bronowski’s The Ascent
of Man (see here), the result is limited as science writing.
Natural history apart, only a handful of television series have had much
literary impact. Carl Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos series in the US produced a very
popular spin-off book, though its history of science was distinctly weak,
claiming that nothing happened between the fifth and the fifteenth
centuries, which is clearly untrue. Meanwhile, in the years following the
publication of A Brief History of Time, the BBC’s Horizon programme had
one major written success. This was a spin-off from the show The Proof,
presented by English science writer Simon Singh. Despite using the same
research as the television show, Singh’s 1997 book on the same subject,
Fermat’s Last Theorem, was excellent, because it acted as a standalone title
in its own right, rather than as a coffee-table ‘book of the series’, containing
far more than the documentary ever could.

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH WITH MOUNTAIN GORILLAS, 1979

A scene in Rwanda, on location for the BBC television series Life on Earth.
David Attenborough
LIFE ON EARTH, COLLINS/BBC BOOKS, 1991

Spin-off title from the popular television series.

Simon Singh
FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM (LE DERNIER THÉORÈME DE FERMAT)

The first edition of Singh’s excellent 1997 mathematical title published by Fourth Estate, alongside a
1998 French translation published by JC Lattès.
 Singh achieves something of a miracle with this title. Not only is
Fermat’s Last Theorem about the frequently inaccessible topic of maths, it
covers a particularly obscure aspect of it. Yet by providing an effective
narrative, Singh makes the topic fascinating – and as a result he had the
UK’s first ever number-one non-fiction bestseller with a maths title. The
theorem in question shows that it isn’t possible to have three positive
integers, each cubed or raised to (the same) greater power, where adding
two together made the third. Not earth-shattering mathematics. But what
has intrigued mathematicians since the seventeenth century is the way that
the theorem was teasingly announced.
In 1637, French amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat scribbled
something in the margin of a copy of Arithmetica by the third-century
Greek philosopher Diophantus (see here), which contained an early version
of algebra. Diophantus was discussing a similar (solved) problem applied to
the squares of numbers. Fermat noted that he had proved it was impossible
to do this for cubes and higher powers. ‘I have discovered a truly
marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain’, he
noted.
Ever since, attempts have been made to find Fermat’s ‘proof’, strictly a
conjecture (as he gave no proof), but universally referred to as Fermat’s last
theorem. Remarkably, it was not until 1994 that the theorem was actually
proved by English mathematician Andrew Wiles, using 100-plus pages of
mathematics that were far beyond anything Fermat would have understood.
(It is generally thought that Fermat was, at best, over-confident.) In his
book, Singh takes this idea and builds it into a satisfying story, mixing the
history of the concepts involved, from the earliest days of algebra to Wiles’s
epic solution.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, W.W. NORTON & COMPANY. 2017

Popularity from presenting television shows helped Tyson, an astronomer, to gain a wider audience for
his explanation of the basics of astrophysics.
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
WHY DOES E=MC2?, DA CAPO PRESS, 2010

Although Cox had significant success with spin-off books from his television shows, his best titles have
been standalone books going into far more depth, such as this one co-authored by Forshaw.

While we’re in the area of books linked to television science shows, two
notable, more recent ventures include the reboot of Cosmos, presented by
American astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, and a number of UK science
series presented by physicist Brian Cox. Although these inevitably spawned
associated coffee-table books, far more interesting were the titles that both
presenters put out in their own right on the back of their television
exposure. For Tyson, the best example was the 2017 Astrophysics for
People in a Hurry, while Cox has co-authored a number of titles with
physicist Jeff Forshaw, notably Why Does E=mc2? from 2010 and The
Quantum Universe from 2012.
Where Tyson continues to write at the level of the television show, but
adds more content, Cox takes the bolder step of writing books that require
considerable effort to read. As a result, they really reward the reader by
giving more depth to the physics than would normally be found in such a
title. In both cases, though, what we have here are examples of modern
science books by scientists – not covering their own tiny specialist area in
technical detail as a scientist of a previous generation might have done, but
introducing the general reader to the broader field.

Human stories and the innocent abroad

Science and technology go hand in hand, never more so than when
determining longitude – the east-west position of a location on the Earth – a
process that was inextricably tied to advances in astronomical science. This
became increasingly important from the fifteenth century as long sea
journeys were made. In essence, given that the position of the Sun at a
particular time in the sky indicates the longitude of the observer, the
essential requirement was to accurately fix the time, compared with a
known location.
Astronomical attempts to solve the problem – an important enough
puzzle that the British government in 1714 offered a significant reward for
its solution – used observations such as the positions of the moons of
Jupiter as celestial timepieces. However, the ultimate effective approach
was to devise a clock that could survive long sea voyages and still keep
accurate time. This was not easy, as most accurate clocks of the period used
pendulums, useless on a rocking ship.
Describing the solution to this problem was Longitude, published in
1995 by American science writer Dava Sobel. Sobel has specialised in titles
exploring the history of science through the viewpoint of an individual
character. (Her other best-known title, Galileo’s Daughter from 1999, uses
Galileo’s relationship with his illegitimate daughter Virginia to explore his
work.) Longitude tells the story of English clockmaker John Harrison, his
attempts to beat the longitude challenge, and his fight with the authorities
reluctant to pay him his due.
Like the best popular science, Sobel’s work gives plenty of information
about the problem of measuring longitude and the methods of discovering
it, but does so in a way that leads the reader along using the story of
Harrison’s life and work. Harrison was no overnight success – it took him
many years to perfect his shipboard chronometer, and even when he did so,
the British Board of Longitude was reluctant to award him the £20,000
prize, which the accuracy of his clocks should have won. This was a huge
amount of money at the time – the equivalent in 2018 of around £2.8
million ($3.5 million) in purchasing power, or a remarkable £35.5 million
($45 million) in terms of labour value (based on what the average wage of
the time would buy).
John Harrison
THE MOVEMENT OF H.4, INK ON PAPER, CA. 1760–72

The movement of H.4, one of the series of longitude chronometers designed and drawn by John
Harrison, described in Dava Sobel’s Longitude.
Dava Sobel
LONGITUDE, FOURTH ESTATE, 1996

The first UK edition of Sobel’s 1995 title on Harrison’s struggles to win the Longitude Prize, described on
the cover as ‘the greatest scientific problem of his time’.
Bill Bryson
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, BLACK SWAN, 2004

First published in 2003, this accessible guide to science is now the highest-selling popular science book in
the twenty-first century.

Harrison eventually got the majority of the prize money from the Board,
which was topped up when he was 80 by the British parliament after
Harrison petitioned them at the suggestion of King George III. What Sobel
demonstrates is the importance of context for the general reader – she
brings the science and technology alive through the circumstances of the
lives of those involved in its development.
This approach is fine when looking back at how a scientific or
technological breakthrough was made in the past, and such historical
context is also very important when explaining the latest scientific
breakthroughs. But with new developments, it can also help if the scientists
involved in the discovery are interviewed in the process of writing the book.
The most extreme example of this approach is Bill Bryson’s A Short
History of Nearly Everything from 2003, in which Bryson takes on the role
of the ignorant but curious everyman, interviewing a string of scientists to
discover more about different topics. The result was the bestselling modern
science book yet to be published.

Three physics heavyweights

The success of Bryson’s book did not mean that such lightweight overviews
would come to dominate the field. Entirely different in almost every regard
was Lee Smolin’s important physics title from 2006, The Trouble with
Physics. Smolin is an American theoretical physicist regarded by some as a
maverick. Not only is the book written by an expert, it focuses on one
specific area of science – string theory – and provides an analysis which,
while approachable by the general reader, does not pull any punches.
Smolin gives the reader a good summary of string theory, the leading
attempt to unify the two central but incompatible aspects of physics,
quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. However, the power of
his book is in communicating to the general reader the worrying aspects and
flaws of string theory. All too often, science books for the public smooth
over problems and present as fact what is no more than hypothesis. But
Smolin opens up a can of worms that the physics community would have
preferred to keep hidden. Smolin’s was not the only book to do this –
another physicist, Peter Woit, produced a more technical book on the same
subject with the catchy title Not Even Wrong in the same year – but
Smolin’s has had the bigger impact because of its accessibility.
Smolin shows how the physics community has been beguiled by the
elegance of string theory. Since the 1980s, many physicists have built their
careers on this theory, and so have been highly reluctant to consider any
other possibility. And yet the theory makes no useful predictions that can be
tested. Smolin shows how much the focus on string theory has suppressed
original thinkers and prevented the development of alternative theories.
Equally meaty in its contribution to an understanding of science, but
focusing more on cosmology, was From Eternity to Here by American
physicist Sean Carroll, published in 2010. This was, in many ways, what
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time should have been for its title to be
accurate. As we have seen, one thing that Hawking’s book did not help
with, frustratingly, was the nature of time itself. Carroll does this for us in a
book that goes into considerably more depth than Hawking’s, dealing with
aspects of thermodynamics, relativity and quantum theory, yet managing to
be significantly more comprehensible.
Lee Smolin
THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, 2006

Smolin’s book takes on the underlying problems of the influential string theory in physics.
Sean Carroll
FROM ETERNITY TO HERE, ONEWORLD PUBLICATIONS, 2015

First published in 2010, Sean Carroll’s first popular title gives a lucid exploration of the physicist’s view of
time.

That the public has an appetite for science if it is presented right was
demonstrated impressively in 2014 with the reception of another physics
book, also written by a physicist, Carlo Rovelli’s Sette brevi lezioni di fisica
(Seven Brief Lessons in Physics). Hugely popular in Italy, Rovelli’s book
was one of the very few modern science books written in a language other
than English that has gone on to be a worldwide bestseller. It is easy to see
why Rovelli’s book became such a breakout success. It is very short, made
up of seven essays stitched together and has spread the word about physics
to a wide audience.
There seem to be three reasons for the book’s success. While Rovelli
does not do much in terms of bringing in the stories of those involved in
science, he gives the book a human touch that is reminiscent of works like
Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (see here). Rovelli makes use of a
highly poetic prose style and imbues the text with his own personality.
Secondly, the shortness of the book itself can be seen as a benefit for those
who find science titles hard going. And finally, the presentation of the book
is expensive and sophisticated.
Carlo Rovelli
SETTE BREVI LEZIONI DI FISICA (SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS IN PHYSICS)

The original Italian edition (above) published in 2014 by Adelphi Edizione, alongside the elegant English
translation (right) published by Allen Lane in 2015.
 Like Carroll and Smolin, Rovelli knows his topic well. An active
physicist, he works in one of the most dramatic areas of the field, the
attempt to develop a theory of quantum gravity. Since Einstein, the two
main aspects of physics have been quantum physics (the physics of the very
small, which determines how almost everything we directly experience
works) and the general theory of relativity (the physics behind gravity).
Although gravity influences everything, it is such a relatively weak force
(billions of billions times weaker than electromagnetism) that its main
effect is on big things, such as stars and galaxies.
Although both theories are very successful, they are not compatible.
They cannot be brought together. This is because gravity is not quantised –
it doesn’t deal with the universe in terms of small discrete chunks the way
quantum theory does. So ever since the 1930s, attempts have been made to
come up with a theory of gravity that is quantised and can be unified with
the rest of quantum physics. The leading contender for this is string theory
which, as we have seen, is still worked on by many physicists. But as
Smolin showed, string theory may never provide a useful scientific
structure. However, there are alternative theories.
The leading competitor is currently loop quantum gravity – and it is this
field that Rovelli works in. In Sette brevi lezioni, Rovelli gives a series of
sketches of key developments in, for example, cosmology and quantum
gravity, but he gives a distorted view of the importance of loop quantum
gravity. This theory may indeed come to supplant string theory, but as yet it
isn’t as well supported. The benefit of this kind of book is likely to be that
some readers will be inspired to get hold of more in-depth titles and begin
to appreciate science more.

Getting the topic right

Making more people aware of science and technology, given the impact of
both on our lives, is crucial. This is why it’s heartening that in Germany the
numbers two and three slots for the most successful non-fiction books
published between 2005 and 2015 went to titles by Eckart von
Hirschhausen, a German medical doctor and television presenter. Most
notable of the two was Die Leber wächst mit ihren Aufgaben (The Liver
Grows with its Tasks), which addresses quirky scientific questions from the
influence of acupuncture on cars (explaining the placebo effect) to the way
that holes in cheese make you fat.
As we have seen, books like Hirschhausen’s focusing on human science,
along with those that cover physics and cosmology, have dominated the
field of science book writing. Other areas of science have been relatively
neglected. It’s interesting to speculate why, for example, chemistry has had
very little science writing dedicated to it.
 A senior editor at one of the UK’s leading science publishers, Oxford
University Press, suggested that it can be hard for chemistry titles to appeal
to the public. Jeremy Lewis commented in an interview with the author: ‘I
do think chemistry is under-represented in popular science. When you go to
the bookstore, the small science section usually has an even smaller
chemistry shelf. I think chemistry tends to just fly more under the radar
when there are “sexier” breakthroughs in disciplines like physics and
biology – topics such as quantum theory and gene editing.’ According to
research undertaken in 2015 for the Royal Society of Chemistry report
Public Attitudes to Chemistry, ‘People struggle to imagine how chemistry
affects their everyday lives and regard chemists as lacking in agency: they
do not recognize how chemists are involved in the end product of their own
work.’
It seems that unless a popular science book is particularly well written, it
needs to either appeal to personal interest (for example, health or
psychology) or to be about something fundamental and dramatic, as is
usually the case with physics and cosmology. It might seem that maths
doesn’t fit this general rule, but even this relatively inaccessible topic can
be popular when it mixes stories of the peculiarities of mathematicians with
the fundamental oddities of mathematics. The personal element is obviously
there, for example, in Fermat’s Last Theorem, in its description of Andrew
Wiles’s work. It was also important in the success of my own bestselling
maths book from 2003, A Brief History of Infinity, which has a topic –
infinity – that naturally engages curiosity, but also focuses on the
mathematicians involved in developing our ideas of infinity.

Immortal lives
However, it is biology (mostly human) and physics that continue to
dominate more recent influential titles. A significant example is Rebecca
Skloot’s 2010 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot is an American
science writer whose medical-themed titles make use of strong storytelling
to bring science to the public. The intriguing-sounding title refers to a
cervical cancer patient, Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951. Cells taken from
Lacks’ tumour were used to set up an important medical research tool
known as an immortal cell line.
 Usually, our cells cannot split and form new cells indefinitely, as they
have built-in controls that track the number of splits that have occurred
using a system called telomeres, which operate rather like a reel of tickets:
the telomeres shorten as the cells divide and eventually kill their ability to
do so. But in some cancer cells this restriction is permanently removed.
Lacks’ cells were the first such immortal cell line to be created, making
them hugely important in the history of cellular medicine. The cells, known
as HeLa, have been used to research both cancer and AIDS and are still
going strong. Over 20 tonnes of Lacks’ cells have now been grown.
What made Skloot’s book (which has sold well over a million copies) so
popular was the human interest. She covered Lacks’ life, and the shock to
her family, who did not discover the existence of the HeLa cell line until the
1970s. This did not prevent Skloot from also exploring the life and work of
the scientists involved and the importance of the work for medical science,
but the book emphasises once more the benefit of bringing humanity into
the kind of science book that has dominated the field in the last 100 years –
a book that helps the general public discover and engage with science.
Rebecca Skloot
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, 2010

An Australian first edition published by Picador (left) and an American edition by Crown Publishers
above a scanning electron micrograph of HeLa cancer cells derived from the sample taken from Lacks in
1951.
 A small example of the significance of the HeLa line can be seen in
Professor Mark Pallen’s engaging 2018 book, The Last Days of Smallpox,
which tells the story of the eradication of the smallpox disease and the
circumstances of an outbreak in Birmingham, England, after its eradication.
The book notes that the virus samples taken from the carrier in this outbreak
showed ‘unusual behaviour when grown on layers of cultured human cells
known as HeLa cells’. Henrietta Lacks’ story continued to have resonance
in a disease outbreak on a different continent.
Origin stories
As we have seen, science writing has tended to be dominated by English-
language titles, which end up translated into other languages – English is
now the international language of science, with the vast majority of
important scientific papers published in English. Only occasionally does a
science book published first in another language make it into English.
Perhaps the most unusual example of this is itsur Toldot Ha-enoshut (A
Brief History of Mankind, titled Sapiens in English), published in Hebrew
in 2011 by Yuval Noah Harari.
Harari is anything but a typical popular science author – as a historian he
has no science background. His field comes through more strongly in
Sapiens than in his follow-up books, which stray even further from his area
of expertise. In Sapiens, he effectively gives a history of the entirety of
human existence, but with a genetic context that makes it clear this is
intended to be popular science. Harari’s follow-up title, The History of
Tomorrow (published in English as Homo Deus) attempts futurology, the
always difficult and rarely consistently scientific attempt to predict the
future. These books have been international successes, but in the history of
science writing they are more significant for their unusual progression from
a second language into English than for their content, as the science in these
books is widely considered weak by professionals in the field.
A useful contrast, delivering high-quality science, is English biologist
Nick Lane’s impressive title on the origins of life, The Vital Question,
published in 2015. What Lane does so well here is to make it clear just how
complex the cellular machinery is inside organisms with complex cells (like
us). Perhaps even more impressively, Lane takes on the biggest biological
question of them all: how life started.
Until recently it had been thought that life started in a primeval soup of
organic material, perhaps spurred on by the energy of lightning strikes.
However, Lane shows how this approach is incompatible with what we now
know of the conditions on the early Earth and puts forward an alternative
theory, based primarily on water and carbon dioxide. He also explores the
way in which getting from simple cells to complex cells is as much a leap
as getting started in the first place. Both steps appear to have happened only
once, perhaps making life a much rarer phenomenon in the universe than is
often thought.
 If Lane gives us our best modern answer to where life came from, a 2018
title from English chemist Peter Atkins took things even further by trying to
explain how the universe as a whole came into being. Conjuring the
Universe is a slim volume, but takes on a mind-bending aspect of science as
Atkins explores how it is possible to create a whole universe from scratch.

Noah Harari
KITSUR TOLDOT HA-ENOSHUT (A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND)

First pubished in 2011 by DVIR, this is the 2013 updated edition alongside the 2014 English translation
published by Vintage.

If we imagine the universe starting from nothing much at all, Atkins

shows how many of the basic laws of physics emerge from what he
describes as indolence and anarchy. The first of these is shorthand for the
principle of least action, which says that the universe takes the easiest route
in terms of use of energy and so on. Throw in the mathematics of symmetry
devised by one of the world’s greatest female mathematicians, Emmy
Noether, and Atkins is able to deduce many of the basic principles of
physics with a mellifluous writing style that makes it easy to go along with
his arguments.
Atkins also goes further to suggest that some of the familiar constants of
nature don’t really exist. For example, the speed of light is one of the most
important constants, with an exact value of 299,792,458 metres per second.
(It’s exact because the metre is defined from this value.) But Atkins points
out that the apparent constant is simply a matter of our choice of units – if,
as it’s perfectly possible to do, we render such a constant in its most ‘pure’
unitless state, it effectively vanishes away. All in all, this book stirs up the
reader’s ideas of what the fundamentals of the universe involve.
Nick Lane
THE VITAL QUESTION, PROFILE BOOKS, 2016

The paperback edition from Lane’s book on the origins of life, first published in hardback in 2015.
Peter Atkins
CONJURING THE UNIVERSE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018

A surprisingly concise exploration of the origins of the universe.

Driving science forward

Although the majority of the authors included in this chapter are male, since
the 1990s far more science books have been written by female authors,
reflecting a lessening (though not eradication) of the gender bias we have
seen throughout this book, both in terms of scientists and science writers.
This whole topic became itself a subject of an important science book
published in 2017, Angela Saini’s Inferior.
A British science journalist who has largely worked in radio, Saini really
manages to dig into the illogic and bias that has dogged science. Inferior
explores a gender bias in science that far exceeds imbalances in many other
professions and that is sometimes even defended by (older male) scientists
as being the natural order. As we have seen, the idea that women’s brains
were different and less capable of scientific work was common before the
twentieth century and was even shared by Charles Darwin (see here).
Saini demonstrates how social scientists in the twentieth century
perpetuated ideas that mistakenly underlined a gender difference that for
some traits is not there at all, and for others is so small that it has no
significant impact on our abilities. It might seem that in the twenty-first
century it should no longer be necessary to make these points. You only
have to look at the society portrayed in a drama set in the 1960s, such as
Mad Men, to see how much we’ve moved on. Yet, there are still
unnecessary gender distinctions being made, and in some areas of science,
there remain strong advocates for theories that should have been left with
the Victorians.
Angela Saini
INFERIOR, 2017

The intentionally controversial pink of Saini’s UK first edition published by Fourth Estate, alongside the
US first edition published by Beacon Press.
Stuart Firestein
IGNORANCE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012

A serious but approachable exploration of how science is undertaken and how we mistake its role.

As well as challenging our gender stereotypes, modern science writing

has also given us important titles that question the nature of science itself
and how we undertake it, in a way that is far more realistic than some of the
earlier titles. One very significant book in this respect was Stuart Firestein’s
Ignorance, published in 2012.
Subtitled ‘How It Drives Science’, Ignorance turns the common public
understanding of science on its head, pointing out that it is not the facts that
we know that are important, but rather the gaps in our knowledge, because
it is these that drive science forward. Firestein comments: ‘Working
scientists don’t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don’t
care all that much for facts. It’s not that they discount or ignore them, but
rather that they don’t see them as an end in themselves. They don’t stop at
the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out.’
This distinction between our imagined ideas of the work of scientists and
what actually happens in the lab and the theory office is brought ably into
the spotlight by German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder in her 2018 title
Lost in Math (the book was first written in English and subsequently
translated into her native German as Das hässliche Universum: Warum
unsere Suche nach Schönheit die Physik in die Sackgasse führt).
Lost in Math is a powerful analysis of problems in the modern approach
to physics. Until the twentieth century, experimenters made observations
and undertook experiments, while theoreticians then looked for theories to
explain these observations, which could then be tested against further
experiments. Now, particularly in particle physics, it’s more the case that
physicists dream up whole rafts of theory supported only by mathematics,
much of which can never be experimentally confirmed. What can be
checked is often so expensive to work on that only a very small number of
possibilities can be examined.
It’s the maths that is in the driving seat, which surely is wrong. As
Hossenfelder points out, string theory works best if the cosmological
constant, a value that numerically reflects the rate of expansion or
contraction of the universe, is negative. Unfortunately, the constant is
actually positive, but most string theorists spend their time working with a
negative cosmological constant. It makes for more beautiful mathematics –
but has nothing to do with our universe.
Hossenfelder repeatedly comes back to two measures used to test
theories: beauty, which is a subjective phenomenon, and naturalness, which
appears more scientific as it involves numbers, but relies on a bizarre
confidence that values in nature that are dimensionless (for example, ratios
of masses) should be Goldilocks-like in not being too big or too small, but
should be located around the value of 1. The physicists she interviews for
the book (nearly all of them male), often cling onto these measures without
being able to justify them, other than saying that everyone else likes them
too.
Like Lee Smolin (see here), Hossenfelder shows that clinging to theories
past their sell-by date is not surprising, because physicists are people too. If
you’ve spent most of your career on a theory, you don’t give it up easily.
And if hundreds of other people are working on that theory, surely it must
have some substance behind it? Hossenfelder points out that in a period of
about a year after the Large Hadron Collider at CERN produced data that
looked interesting but turned out to be a statistical fluctuation, 500 papers
were published exploring this non-event theoretically, many published in
top journals.

Sabine Hossenfelder
LOST IN MATH (DAS HÄSSLICHE UNIVERSUM), 2018
This title from German physicist Hossenfelder was first published in English by Basic Books before the
author’s German translation later the same year, published by S. Fischer.

Lost in Math is a science book for a new age where readers are less
bound by authority. This is an approach that has always benefited science.
The motto of the UK’s Royal Society is Nullius in verba, roughly
translating as ‘Take no one’s word for it’. In practice, the approach taken in
science is closer to the Russian proverb quoted by US President Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s, ‘Trust but verify’. For a long time, the general public
was spoon-fed the latest theories without any attempt to qualify uncertainty.
But now, we are getting more science writing that helps the reader to
question theories to gain a deeper understanding.
This is not a matter of being anti-science. The best such questioning
comes from scientists themselves. But it gives the reader a better, more
sophisticated picture of what science is all about.
There has never been more emphasis on the importance of public
engagement. We need both to encourage a deeper interest in science and to
counter anti-scientific views that can go hand in hand with some types of
politics. Getting the public interested in science both helps to recruit new
scientists of the future and spreads an understanding of why an area of
scientific research deserves funding. The best science books continue to do
this, but are now able to give us a deeper, more realistic understanding of
science. And surely that is a good thing.
OceanofPDF.com
150 GREAT SCIENCE BOOKS
Works discussed in this book ordered by date of first publication:

1. Edwin Smith papyrus (1600 BCE)

2. Hippocrates Hippocratic Corpus (fifth/fourth century BCE)
3. Aristotle History of Animals (fourth century BCE)
4. Aristotle Physics (fourth century BCE)
5. Archimedes The Sand-Reckoner (third century BCE)
6. Euclid Elements (ca. 290 BCE)
7. Anon Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (ca. 200 BCE)
8. Titus Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura (first century BCE)
9. Ptolemy The Almagest (ca. 150 CE)
10. Diophantus Arithmetica (third century CE)
11. Brahmagupta Brāhmasphuṫasiddhānta (628 CE)
12. Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar
fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala (ca. 820 CE)
13. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq Al-Ashr Makalat Fi’l’ayn (ninth century)
14. Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham Kitãb al-Manã ir (tenth/eleventh
century)
15. Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham Mizan al-Hikmah (tenth/eleventh
century)
16. ibn Sīnā al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (eleventh century)
17. Bhaskara Siddhānta Śiromaṇī (twelfth century)
18. Fibonacci Liber Abaci (1202)
19. Roger Bacon De Mirabile Protestate Artis et Naturae (1250)
20. Roger Bacon Opus Majus (1266–1267)
21. Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks (1452–1519)
22. Peter Bienewitz Astronomicum Caesareum (1540)
23. Nicolaus Copernicus De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543)
24. Andreas Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)
25. Sebastian Münster Cosmographia (1544)
26. Gerolamo Cardano Ars Magna (1545)
27. Georgius Agricola De Re Metallica (1556)
28. Rafael Bombelli Algebra (1572)
29. William Gilbert De Magnete (1600)
30. Johannes Kepler De Stella Nova (1606)
31. Johannes Kepler Astronomia Nova (1609)
32. Galileo Galilei Sidereus Nuncius (1610)
33. Johannes Kepler Harmonices Mundi (1619)
34. Francis Bacon Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620)
35. Johannes Kepler Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627)
36. William Harvey Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis (1628)
37. Galileo Galilei Dialogo Sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (1632)
38. René Descartes Discours de la Méthode (La Géométrie) (1637)
39. Galileo Galilei Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due
Nuove Scienze (1638)
40. Nicolas Culpeper The English Physitian (Complete Herbal) (1652)
41. Robert Boyle New Experiments Physico-Mechanical (1660)
42. Robert Boyle The Sceptical Chymist (1661)
43. Gerolamo Cardano Liber de Ludo Aleae (1663)
44. Robert Hooke Micrographia (1665)
45. Otto von Guericke Experimenta Nova (1672)
46. Alain Manesson Mallet Description de L’Univers (1683)
47. Isaac Newton Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
48. Isaac Newton Opticks (1704)
49. Carl von Linné Systema Naturae (1735)
50. Émilie du Châtelet Institutions de Physique (1740)
51. Comte de Buffon Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804)
52. Carl von Linné Species plantarum (1753)
53. Leonhard Euler Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne (1768)
54. Antoine Lavoisier Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (1789)
55. Erasmus Darwin The Botanic Garden (1791)
56. Erasmus Darwin Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794)
57. Thomas Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
58. Jöns Jacob Berzelius Läroboken i Kemien (1808)
59. John Dalton A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808)
60. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Philosophie Zoologique (1809)
61. Georges Cuvier Le Règne Animal (1817)
62. Sadi Carnot Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu (1824)
63. John James Audubon Birds of America (1827)
64. Charles Lyell Principles of Geology (1830–1833)
65. John Herschel A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy (1831)
66. Charles Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture
(1832)
67. Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)
68. Alexander von Humboldt Kosmos (1845–1862)
69. George Boole An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are
Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854)
70. Henry Gray Anatomy (1858)
71. Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species (1859)
72. Michael Faraday The Chemical History of the Candle (1861)
73. Ignaz Semmelweis Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des
Kindbettfiebers (1861)
74. Gregor Mendel Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (1866)
75. John Venn The Logic of Chance (1866)
76. John Tyndall Sound: delivered in eight lectures (1867)
77. John Tyndall Heat: a mode of motion (1868)
78. Antoinette Brown Blackwell Studies in General Science (1869)
79. James Clerk Maxwell Theory of Heat (1871)
80. Charles Darwin The Descent of Man (1871)
81. James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873)
82. John Tyndall Six Lectures on Light (1873)
83. Antoinette Brown Blackwell The Sexes throughout nature (1875)
84. Jean-Henri Fabre Souvenirs Entomologiques (1879)
85. John Venn Symbolic Logic (1881)
86. Edwin Abbott Flatland (1884)
87. Charles Darwin The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1887)
88. David Hilbert Grundlagen der Geometrie (1899)
89. Eadweard Muybridge Animals in Motion (1899)
90. Eadweard Muybridge The Human Figure in Motion (1901)
91. Ernst Haeckel Kunstformen der Natur (1904)
92. Marie Curie Traité de Radioactivité (1910)
93. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell Principia Mathematica
(1910–1913)
94. Alfred Wegener Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1915)
95. Albert Einstein Über die Spezielle und die Allgemeine
Relativitätstheorie, Gemeinverständlich (1917)
96. Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
97. Karl Popper Logik der Forschung (1934)
98. Hans Zinsser Rats, Lice and History (1935)
99. Lancelot Hogben Mathematics for the Million (1937)
100. Linus Pauling The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939)
101. Erwin Schrödinger What is Life? (1944)
102. Donald Hebb The Organization of Behavior (1949)
103. Konrad Lorenz Er Redete mit dem Viehden Vogeln und den Fischen
(1949)
104. Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
105. Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
106. Richard Feynman The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963)
107. Desmond Morris The Naked Ape (1967)
108. James Watson The Double Helix (1968)
109. Jacques Monod Le Hasard et la Nécessité (1970)
110. Alvin Toffler Future Shock (1970)
111. Gustav Eckstein The Body Has a Head (1970)
112. Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man (1973)
113. Anne Sayre Rosalind Franklin and DNA (1975)
114. Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976)
115. Desmond Morris Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour
(1978)
116. Douglas R. Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)
117. James Lovelock Gaia (1979)
118. David Bohm Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
119. Carl Sagan Cosmos (1980)
120. John Gribbin In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (1984)
121. Richard Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
(1985)
122. Ralph Leighton Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
123. Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
124. James Gleick Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)
125. Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988)
126. Werner Heisenberg Encounters with Einstein (1989)
127. David Attenborough Life on Earth (1992)
128. Dava Sobel Longitude (1995)
129. Simon Singh Fermat’s Last Theorem (1997)
130. Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
131. Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
132. Brian Clegg A Brief History of Infinity (2003)
133. Maurice Wilkins The Third Man of the Double Helix (2003)
134. Armand Leroi Mutants (2004)
135. Lee Smolin The Trouble with Physics (2006)
136. Eckart von Hirschhausen Die Leber wächst mit ihren Aufgaben
(2008)
137. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw Why Does E=mc2? (2010)
138. Rebecca Skloot The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
139. Sean Carroll From Eternity to Here (2011)
140. Yuval Noah Harari itsur Toldot Ha-enoshut (‘Sapiens’ in English)
(2011)
141. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw The Quantum Universe (2012)
142. Stuart Firestein Ignorance (2012)
143. Carlo Rovelli Sette Brevi Lezioni di Fisica (2014)
144. Nick Lane The Vital Question (2015)
145. David Wootton The Invention of Science (2015)
146. Angela Saini Inferior (2017)
147. Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017)
148. Peter Atkins Conjuring the Universe (2018)
149. Sabine Hossenfelder Lost in Math (2018)
150. Mark Pallen The Last Days of Smallpox (2018)
OceanofPDF.com
150 GREAT SCIENCE BOOKS
Works discussed in this book ordered by author name:

1. Edwin Abbott Flatland (1884)

2. Georgius Agricola De Re Metallica (1556)
3. Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham Kitãb al-Manã ir (tenth/eleventh
century CE)
4. Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham Mizan al-Hikmah (tenth/eleventh
century CE)
5. Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar
fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala (ca. 820 CE)
6. Anon Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (ca. 200 BCE)
7. Archimedes The Sand-Reckoner (third century BCE)
8. Aristotle History of Animals (fourth century BCE)
9. Aristotle Physics (fourth century BCE)
10. Peter Atkins Conjuring the Universe (2018)
11. David Attenborough Life on Earth (1992)
12. John James Audubon Birds of America (1827)
13. Charles Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture
(1832)
14. Roger Bacon De Mirabile Protestate Artis et Naturae (1250)
15. Roger Bacon Opus Majus (1266–1267)
16. Francis Bacon Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620)
17. Jöns Jacob Berzelius Läroboken i Kemien (1808)
18. Peter Bienewitz Astronomicum Caesareum (1540)
19. Bhaskara Siddhānta Śiromaṇī (twelfth century CE)
20. Antoinette Brown Blackwell Studies in General Science (1869)
21. Antoinette Brown Blackwell The Sexes throughout nature (1875)
22. David Bohm Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
23. Rafael Bombelli Algebra (1572)
24. George Boole An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are
Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854)
25. Robert Boyle New Experiments Physico-Mechanical (1660)
26. Robert Boyle The Sceptical Chymist (1661)
27. Brahmagupta Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (628 CE)
28. Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man (1973)
29. Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
30. Comte de Buffon Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804)
31. Gerolamo Cardano Ars Magna (1545)
32. Gerolamo Cardano Liber de Ludo Aleae (1663)
33. Sadi Carnot Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu (1824)
34. Sean Carroll From Eternity to Here (2011)
35. Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
36. Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)
37. Émilie du Châtelet Institutions de Physique (1740)
38. Brian Clegg A Brief History of Infinity (2003)
39. Nicolaus Copernicus De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543)
40. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw Why Does E=mc2? (2010)
41. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw The Quantum Universe (2012)
42. Nicolas Culpeper The English Physitian (Complete Herbal) (1652)
43. Marie Curie Traité de Radioactivité (1910)
44. Georges Cuvier Le Règne Animal (1817)
45. John Dalton A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808)
46. Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species (1859)
47. Charles Darwin The Descent of Man (1871)
48. Charles Darwin The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1887)
49. Erasmus Darwin The Botanic Garden (1791)
50. Erasmus Darwin Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794)
51. Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976)
52. Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
53. René Descartes Discours de la Méthode (La Géométrie) (1637)
54. Diophantus Arithmetica (third century CE)
55. Gustav Eckstein The Body Has a Head (1970)
56. Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
57. Albert Einstein Über die Spezielle und die Allgemeine
Relativitätstheorie, Gemeinverständlich (1917)
58. Euclid Elements (ca. 290 BCE)
59. Leonhard Euler Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne (1768)
60. Jean-Henri Fabre Souvenirs Entomologiques (1879)
61. Michael Faraday The Chemical History of the Candle (1861)
62. Richard Feynman The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963)
63. Richard Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
(1985)
64. Fibonacci Liber Abaci (1202)
65. Stuart Firestein Ignorance (2012)
66. Galileo Galilei Sidereus Nuncius (1610)
67. Galileo Galilei Dialogo Sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (1632)
68. Galileo Galilei Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due
Nuove Scienze (1638)
69. William Gilbert De Magnete (1600)
70. James Gleick Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)
71. Henry Gray Anatomy (1858)
72. John Gribbin In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (1984)
73. Otto von Guericke Experimenta Nova (1672)
74. Ernst Haeckel Kunstformen der Natur (1904)
75. Yuval Noah Harari itsur Toldot Ha-enoshut (‘Sapiens’ in English)
(2011)
76. William Harvey Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis (1628)
77. Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988)
78. Donald Hebb The Organization of Behavior (1949)
79. Werner Heisenberg Encounters with Einstein (1989)
80. John Herschel A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy (1831)
81. David Hilbert Grundlagen der Geometrie (1899)
82. Hippocrates Hippocratic Corpus (fifth/fourth century BCE)
83. Eckart von Hirschhausen Die Leber wächst mit ihren Aufgaben (2008)
84. Douglas R. Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)
85. Lancelot Hogben Mathematics for the Million (1937)
86. Robert Hooke Micrographia (1665)
87. Sabine Hossenfelder Lost in Math (2018)
88. Alexander von Humboldt Kosmos (1845–1862)
89. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq Al-Ashr Makalat Fi’l’ayn (ninth century CE)
90. ibn Sīnā al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (eleventh century CE)
91. Johannes Kepler De Stella Nova (1606)
92. Johannes Kepler Astronomia Nova (1609)
93. Johannes Kepler Harmonices Mundi (1619)
94. Johannes Kepler Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627)
95. Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
96. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Philosophie Zoologique (1809)
97. Nick Lane The Vital Question (2015)
98. Antoine Lavoisier Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (1789)
99. Ralph Leighton Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
100. Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks (1452–1519)
101. Armand Leroi Mutants (2004)
102. Carl von Linné Systema Naturae (1735)
103. Carl von Linné Species plantarum (1753)
104. Konrad Lorenz Er Redete mit dem Viehden Vogeln und den Fischen
(1949)
105. James Lovelock Gaia (1979)
106. Titus Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura (first century BCE)
107. Charles Lyell Principles of Geology (1830–1833)
108. Alain Manesson Mallet Description de L’Univers (1683)
109. Thomas Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
110. James Clerk Maxwell Theory of Heat (1871)
111. James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873)
112. Gregor Mendel Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (1866)
113. Jacques Monod Le Hasard et la Nécessité (1970)
114. Desmond Morris The Naked Ape (1967)
115. Desmond Morris Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour
(1978)
116. Sebastian Münster Cosmographia (1544)
117. Eadweard Muybridge Animals in Motion (1899)
118. Eadweard Muybridge The Human Figure in Motion (1901)
119. Isaac Newton Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
120. Isaac Newton Opticks (1704)
121. Mark Pallen The Last Days of Smallpox (2018)
122. Linus Pauling The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939)
123. Karl Popper Logik der Forschung (1934)
124. Ptolemy The Almagest (ca. 150 CE)
125. Carlo Rovelli Sette Brevi Lezioni di Fisica (2014)
126. Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
127. Carl Sagan Cosmos (1980)
128. Angela Saini Inferior (2017)
129. Anne Sayre Rosalind Franklin and DNA (1975)
130. Erwin Schrödinger What is Life? (1944)
131. Ignaz Semmelweis Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des
Kindbettfiebers (1861)
132. Rebecca Skloot The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
133. Simon Singh Fermat’s Last Theorem (1997)
134. Edwin Smith papyrus (1600 BCE)
135. Lee Smolin The Trouble with Physics (2006)
136. Dava Sobel Longitude (1995)
137. Alvin Toffler Future Shock (1970)
138. John Tyndall Sound: delivered in eight lectures (1867)
139. John Tyndall Heat: a mode of motion (1868)
140. John Tyndall Six Lectures on Light (1873)
141. Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017)
142. John Venn The Logic of Chance (1866)
143. John Venn Symbolic Logic (1881)
144. Andreas Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)
145. James Watson The Double Helix (1968)
146. Alfred Wegener Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1915)
147. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell Principia Mathematica
(1910–1913)
148. Maurice Wilkins The Third Man of the Double Helix (2003)
149. David Wootton The Invention of Science (2015)
150. Hans Zinsser Rats, Lice and History (1935)
OceanofPDF.com
INDEX

A
Abbott, Edwin 178
abjads 26
Accademia dei Lincei 168
Agricola, Georgius 96, 97
Al-Ashr Makalat Fi’l’ayn 62, 63, 64
al-Haytham 62, 65
al-Khwārizmī 8, 9, 60
Al-kitāb al-mukhtasar fī ḥisāb al-gabr wa’l-muqābala 8, 9, 60, 67
alchemy 35, 121, 126, 133
Algebra 98
algebra 10, 60, 61, 98, 170
Algoritmi de numero Indorum 61
Almagest, The 54, 59, 66
alphabets 26
al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb see Canon of Medicine
anatomy 50, 86, 108, 161, 172
Animal Locomotion 183, 185
Animals in Motion 185
aperiodic structure 204, 219
Archimedes 6, 8, 46
Aristarchus of Samos 9
Aristotle 37, 38, 54, 62, 76, 86, 103, 116, 118, 123
Arithmetica 61
Ars Magna 98
Ascent of Man, The 161, 228, 240
Astronomia Nova 102, 103
Astronomicum Caesareum 92, 93, 94
astronomy 39, 54, 86, 90, 100, 114, 153, 169
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry 242, 243
Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers, Die 172
Atkins, Peter 252
atomic weights 146
atoms 39, 41, 121, 142, 144, 146
Attenborough, David 240
Audubon, John James 147
Autobiography of Charles Darwin, The 168
Avicenna 62
B
Babbage, Charles 150, 153
Bacon, Francis 99, 100, 103, 168
Bacon, Roger 16, 70, 80, 86, 98
Becquerel, Henri 194
Berzelius, Jöns Jacob 147
Bhāskara 66, 67
Bienewitz, Peter 92, 93, 94
Big Bang theory 55
biology 161, 178, 194, 204, 219, 229, 250
Birds of America 147
block printing 12, 14, 15
Body Has a Head, The 220, 221
Bohm, David 232
Bombelli, Rafael 98
Book of Alchemy, The 35
books 10
binding 19
codex 10, 36, 47
copying 10, 36
covers 18, 150
printing 12, 14, 15, 108
scrolls 10, 12, 31, 36
Boole, George 170, 171
Botanic Garden, The 138, 247
Boyle, Robert 120, 133
Brahe, Tycho 103
Brahmagupta 60, 66
Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta 60
Brief History of Infinity, A 250
Brief History of Time, A 18, 199, 228, 237, 246
Bronowski, Jacob 161, 218, 228, 240
Brown Blackwell, Antoinette 190
Brunner, John 223
Bryson, Bill 237, 245, 246
Buffon, Comte de 162, 163

C
Canon of Medicine 62, 65
Cardano, Gerolamo 96, 98
Carnot, Sadi 152
Carroll, Sean 246
Carson, Rachel 208
Challenger Space Shuttle 215
Chambers, Robert 164
Chaos 235
Chemical History of the Candle, The 174, 175
chemistry 121, 133, 174, 201, 249
clay tablets 26, 30
Clegg, Brian 250
codex 10, 36, 47
Columbus, Christopher 76, 77
Complete Herbal 111
compounds 122, 136, 142, 146, 147
Conjuring the Universe 253
continental drift theory 187, 188
Copenhagen interpretation 232
Copernicus, Nicolaus 86, 90, 99, 100, 116
Cosmographia 88, 90, 93, 117
Cosmos 240, 243
Cox, Brian 242, 243
Crick, Frances 219, 220
Culpeper, Nicolas 111
cuneiform 26, 30
Curie, Marie 191, 194
Cuvier, Georges 161, 163

D
Dalton, John 142, 144
Darwin, Charles 137, 155, 164, 165, 190, 255
Darwin, Erasmus 137, 247
Davy, Humphry 142
Dawkins, Richard 221, 224, 227, 228
DDT 209, 211
De Humani Corporis Fabrica 108
De Magnete 103, 107
De Mirabile Protestate Artis et Naturae 80
De Re Metallica 96, 97
De Rerum Natura 50, 138
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium 77, 86, 90
De Stella Nova 101, 102, 103
Democritus 41
Descartes, René 119
Descent of Man, The 167, 190
Description de L’Univers 91, 93
Dialogo Sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo 116
Diamond Sutra, The 12
Diophantus 61, 241
Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Scienze 117
Discours de la Méthode 191
disease 211, 252
DNA 133, 201, 204, 219
Double Helix, The 204, 218, 219, 235
Du Châtelet, Émilie 16, 17, 128

E
Eckstein, Gustav 220, 221
Eddington, Arthur 199, 200
Edwin Smith Papyrus 31
Einstein, Albert 142, 178, 198, 233, 249
Eleatic School 38
electromagnetism 176
Elements 41, 86
elements 133, 136, 145, 146, 147
Encounters with Einstein 204
engineering 46, 96
English Physitian, The 111
Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, Die 187, 188
environmentalism 208, 223, 227
Epicurus 50
Er Redete mit dem Viehden Vogeln und den Fischen 206
Essay on the Principle of Population, An 138
ethology 206
Euclid 41, 86, 199
Euler, Leonhard 135, 136
evolution 137, 161, 162, 164, 215, 217, 221, 224
Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis 111
Experimenta Nova 123

F
Fabre, Jean-Henri 182
Faraday, Michael 142, 174, 175
Fermat’s Last Theorem 241, 243, 250
Feynman Lectures on Physics, The 214, 215
Feynman, Richard 178, 213, 232, 233
Fibonacci 61, 66
Firestein, Stuart 256
FitzRoy, Robert 155, 166, 167
Flatland 178
Forshaw, Jeff 242, 243
Franklin, Rosalind 220
From Eternity to Here 246
Future Shock 222
futurology 138, 222, 252

G
Gaia 226, 227
Galen 50, 54, 62
Galileo Galilei 16, 39, 114, 243
Garnett, William 191
gender issues 59, 136, 190, 254
see also women in science
genetics 164, 168, 194, 221, 224
DNA 133, 201, 204, 219
geology 17, 96, 154, 188
Géométrie, La 119
geometry 8, 30, 41, 119, 126, 127, 186
Gilbert, William 103, 107, 108
Gleick, James 235
Gödel, Escher, Bach 228, 229, 233
Gödel, Kurt 188
Goeppert-Mayer, Maria 191
gravity 103, 117, 126, 128, 194, 249
Gray, Henry 172
Gray’s Anatomy 170, 172
Gribbin, John 233
Grundlagen der Geometrie 186
Guericke, Otto von 122
Guild Book of the Barber Surgeons of York, The 34

H
Haeckel, Ernst 178
Harari, Yuval Noah 252, 253
Harmonices Mundi 103
Harrison, John 243
Harvey, William 111
Hasard et la Nécessité, Le 221, 222
Hawking, Stephen 18, 199, 228, 237, 246
Heat: a mode of motion 176
Hebb, Donald 205
Heisenberg, Werner 204, 206
herbal medicine 111
Herschel, John 153, 169
hieroglyphics 26, 27
Hilbert, David 186
Hippocrates et al 32, 36, 50, 62
Hippocratic Corpus 32, 33, 36
Hirschhausen, Eckart von 249
Histoire Naturelle 162, 163
History of Animals 41
Hofstadter, Douglas R. 228, 229
Hogben, Lancelot 200
Hooke, Robert 122, 123, 124, 126, 147
Hossenfelder, Sabine 256
Human Figure in Motion, The 185
Humboldt, Alexander von 157, 161
Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq 62, 63, 64
Hunter, Henry 136
Huxley, Thomas 167
Huygens, Christiaan 128
Hypatia 59

I
ibn Sinā 62
ideograms 26
Ignorance 256
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The 250
In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat 233
Inferior 254
Infinite Jest 228
infinity 117, 228, 250
information overload 108, 223
Institutions de Physique 17
Invention of Science, The 76
Investigation of the Laws of Thought, An 170, 171
Ishango bone 24, 25

J
Jurassic Park 237

K
Keats, John 224, 227
Kennard, Caroline 190
Kepler, Johannes 100
King Solomon’s Ring 206
Kitāb al-Manā ir 62
itsur Toldot Ha-enoshut 252, 253
Kosmos 157, 161
Kuhn, Thomas 207, 208
Kunstformen der Natur 178

L
Lacks, Henrietta 250
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 137, 162, 164, 165
Lane, Nick 252, 254
language 16, 27, 90, 117, 126, 128, 252
Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia 153
Large Hadron Collider 256
Läroboken i Kemien 147
Last Days of Smallpox, The 252
Latin see language
Lavoisier, Antoine 133, 134, 142, 147
Leber wächst mit ihren Aufgaben, Die 249
lectures 174, 176, 213
Leonardo da Vinci 46, 62, 80, 108
Leroi, Armand 234
Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne 135, 136
Leucippus 41
Lewis, Jeremy 249
Liber Abaci 61, 66
Liber de Ludo Aleae 98
Library of Alexandria 36
light 62, 126, 136, 176, 213
Linné, Carl von (Linnaeus) 128
Logic of Chance, The 170, 171
Logik der Forschung 207
Longitude 243, 244, 245, 246
loop quantum gravity 249
Lorenz, Konrad 206
Lost in Math 256
Lovelace, Ada 150
Lovelock, James 226, 227
Lucretius Carus, Titus 50, 138
Lunar Society of Birmingham 137
Luther, Martin 87
Lyell, Charles 17, 154, 166, 168

M
magnetism 103
Mallet, Alain Manesson 91, 93
Malthus, Thomas 138
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The 234
Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour 217
maps 17, 77, 78, 88, 157
mathematics 58, 66, 96, 98, 126, 170, 186, 188, 200, 228, 237, 253, 256
Mathematics for the Million 200
Maxwell, James Clerk 17, 168, 176, 190, 204
medicine 31, 32, 50, 54, 62, 111, 172, 211, 250
memes 224
Mendel, Gregor 168
Micrographia 122, 124, 147
Mizan al-Hikmah 62
molecules 198, 204
Monod, Jacques 221, 222
Morris, Desmond 215
moveable type 12, 14, 27
Münster, Sebastian 88, 90, 93, 117
music of the spheres 103
Mutants 234
Muybridge, Eadweard 18, 182
Mysterium Cosmographicum 100, 101

N
Naked Ape, The 215
natural history 128
Naturalis Historia 50
Nature of the Chemical Bond, The 201, 205
Nature of the Physical World, The 199, 200
Nazi regime 204, 206
New System of Chemical Philosophy, A 144, 146
New Experiments Physico-Mechanical 121
Newton, Isaac 6, 16, 17, 41, 120, 122, 126, 194
Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art 58, 59
Noether, Emmy 253
Not Even Wrong 246
Notebooks 80
Notes of the Jade Hall 14
Novum Organum Scientiarum 99
numbers 8
Hindu/Arabic 60, 61, 67, 68
zero 60, 67

O
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture 150, 152
On the Origin of Species 165
Opticks 126
optics 62, 86, 126
Opus Majus 70
Organization of Behavior, The 205
Outline of History, The 201
Owen, Richard 166

P
Pallen, Mark 252
paradigm shifts 208
particle physics 256
Pauling, Linus 201, 205
Pepys, Samuel 122
Philosophie Zoologique 164
philosophy of science 98, 207
phlogiston theory 133
Physics 38
physics 117, 152, 194, 213, 229, 246, 253, 256
see also quantum physics
pictograms 26, 30
Pliny 50
Popper, Karl 207
Powell, Baden 169
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, A 153
Priestley, Joseph 133, 137
Principia Mathematica 16, 17, 126, 186, 188
Principles of Geology 17, 154
printing press 12, 14, 15, 108
probability 170, 232
Ptolemy 52, 54, 66, 90
Public Attitudes to Chemistry 250
Pythagoras 30, 32, 45, 58, 66, 67

Q
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter 213, 215, 233
quantum physics 194, 198, 204, 213, 232, 247, 249
Quantum Universe, The 243

R
radioactivity 194
Rats, Lice and History 211
Reagan, Ronald 257
recapitulation theory 178
Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu 152
Règne Animal, Le 161, 163
relativity 194, 198, 233, 247
Rosalind Franklin and DNA 220
Rovelli, Carlo 247
Royal Institution 142, 143, 174, 176, 183
Royal Society 17, 99, 122, 126, 128, 168, 170, 185, 257
Russell, Bertrand 186, 188, 201, 240
Rutherford, Ernest 41, 178

S
Sacks, Oliver 234
Sagan, Carl 240
Saini, Angela 254
Sand-Reckoner, The 6, 8, 47
Sapiens 252, 253
Sayre, Anne 220
Sceptical Chymist, The 120
Schrödinger, Erwin 204, 205, 219
Schrödinger’s Cat 204, 234
scientific journals 17, 168, 170, 186, 256
scientific papers 16, 21, 168, 186, 252
scrolls 10, 12, 31, 36
Selfish Gene, The 221, 224, 225
Semmelweis, Ignaz 172
Sette Brevi Lezioni di Fisica 247
Sexes Throughout Nature, The 190
Shape of Things to Come, The 222
Shockwave Rider 223
Short History of Nearly Everything, A 237, 245, 246
Siddhānta Śiromaṇī 66, 67
Sidereus Nuncius 114, 115, 116
Silent Spring 208
Singh, Simon 240, 241
Six Lectures on Light 176
Skloot, Rebecca 250
smallpox 252
Smolin, Lee 246, 247, 249, 256
Sobel, Dava 243, 245, 246
Sound: delivered in eight lectures 175, 176
Souvenirs Entomologiques 182
Species Plantarum 132, 133
statistics 138, 176, 200, 201, 222
steam engines 152, 153
Strickland, Donna 191
string theory 246, 247, 249, 256
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The 207, 208
Studies in General Science 190
superposition 234
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! 213
Symbolic Logic 170
Systema Naturae 128, 133

T
Tabulae Rudolphinae 103, 104
tally system 24, 25
Tartaglia, Niccolò 98
tectonic plate theory 187, 188
telescope 116
television series 215, 218, 240, 243
Thales of Miletus 6, 7, 32
Theory of Heat 17, 176
thermodynamics 152, 153, 247
Third Man of the Double Helix, The 220
Thurneisser, Leonhard 35
Toffler, Alvin 223
Traité de Radioactivité 194
Traité Élémentaire de Chimie 133, 134
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism 176
Trouble with Physics, The 246, 247
Tyndall, John 174, 175, 176
typhus 211
Tyson, Neil deGrasse 242, 243

U
Über die Spezielle und die Allgemeine Relativitätstheorie, Gemeinverständlich 198
uniformitarianism 154, 155, 161
Unweaving the Rainbow 224, 227

V
vacuum 41, 123
Venn, John 170, 171
Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden 168
Vesalius, Andreas 108
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 164
Vital Question, The 252, 254

W
Wallace, Alfred Russell 166, 167
Wallace, David Foster 228
Watson, James 218, 219, 235
Wegener, Alfred 187, 188
Wells, H.G. 201, 222
What is Life? 204, 205, 219
Whitehead, Alfred North 186, 188
Wholeness and the Implicate Order 232
Why Does E-mc2? 242, 243
Wilberforce, Samuel 167
Wiles, Andrew 241, 243, 250
Wilkins, Maurice 219, 220
Woit, Peter 246
women in science 59, 136, 190, 220, 229
see also gender issues
Wooton, David 76
writing 6, 26

Z
zero 60, 67
Zinsser, Hans 211
Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life 137

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PICTURE CREDITS

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DISCLAIMER: The names, trademarks and logos of the named individual and
publishers profiled in this book are the property of their respective owners
and are used solely for identification purposes. This book is a publication of
Quarto Publishing plc and it has not been prepared, approved, endorsed or
licensed by any other person or entity.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BRIAN CLEGG With MAs in Natural Sciences from Cambridge

University and Operational Research from Lancaster University, Brian
Clegg is a full-time science writer with over 30 titles published from A Brief
History of Infinity (2003) to The Quantum Age (2015), and most recently
Professor Maxwell’s Duplicitous Demon (2019). He has also written for a
range of publications from the Wall Street Journal to BBC Science Focus
and Playboy magazines. He lives in Wiltshire, England where he edits the
book review site Popular Science.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For Gillian, Rebecca and Chelsea

With thanks to Elizabeth Clinton, Tom Kitch, Claire Saunders, Kate

Shanahan and all at Quarto involved in this book. Particularly thanks to
Simon Singh and John Gribbin amongst the many science writers whose
work has fascinated me.

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First published in the UK and North America in 2019 by
Ivy Press
An imprint of The Quarto Group
The Old Brewery, 6 Blundell Street
London N7 9BH, United Kingdom
T (0)20 7700 6700
www.QuartoKnows.com

© 2019 Quarto Publishing plc

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Digital edition: 978-1-78240-879-6

Hardcover edition: 978-1-78240-878-9

This book was conceived, designed and produced by

Ivy Press
58 West Street, Brighton BN1 2RA, UK

PUBLISHER David Breuer

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Cover image: Science Photo Library/Paul D Stewart

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