CONTENTS

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. THE BEGINNING OF SCIENCE 600 BCE–1400 CE
    1. Eclipses of the Sun can be predicted • Thales of Miletus
    2. Now hear the fourfold roots of everything • Empedocles
    3. Measuring the circumference of Earth • Eratosthenes
    4. The human is related to the lower beings • Al-Tusi
    5. A floating object displaces its own volume in liquid • Archimedes
    6. The Sun is like fire, the Moon is like water • Zhang Heng
    7. Light travels in straight lines into our eyes • Alhazen
  3. SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION 1400–1700
    1. At the centre of everything is the Sun • Nicolaus Copernicus
    2. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse • Johannes Kepler
    3. A falling body accelerates uniformly • Galileo Galilei
    4. The globe of the Earth is a magnet • William Gilbert
    5. Not by arguing, but by trying • Francis Bacon
    6. Touching the spring of the air • Robert Boyle
    7. Is light a particle or a wave? • Christiaan Huygens
    8. The first observation of a transit of Venus • Jeremiah Horrocks
    9. Organisms develop in a series of steps • Jan Swammerdam
    10. All living things are composed of cells • Robert Hooke
    11. Layers of rock form on top of one another • Nicolas Steno
    12. Microscopic observations of animalcules • Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
    13. Measuring the speed of light • Ole Rømer
    14. One species never springs from the seed of another • John Ray
    15. Gravity affects everything in the Universe • Isaac Newton
  4. EXPANDING HORIZONS 1700–1800
    1. Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds • Carl Linnaeus
    2. The heat that disappears in the conversion of water into vapour is not lost • Joseph Black
    3. Inflammable air • Henry Cavendish
    4. Winds, as they come nearer the equator, become more easterly • George Hadley
    5. A strong current comes out of the Gulf of Florida • Benjamin Franklin
    6. Dephlogisticated air • Joseph Priestley
    7. In nature, nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes • Antoine Lavoisier
    8. The mass of a plant comes from the air • Jan Ingenhousz
    9. Discovering new planets • William Herschel
    10. The diminution of the velocity of light • John Michell
    11. Setting the electric fluid in motion • Alessandro Volta
    12. No vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end • James Hutton
    13. The attraction of mountains • Nevil Maskelyne
    14. The mystery of nature in the structure and fertilization of flowers • Christian Sprengel
    15. Elements always combine the same way • Joseph Proust
  5. A CENTURY OF PROGRESS 1800–1900
    1. The experiments may be repeated with great ease when the Sun shines • Thomas Young
    2. Ascertaining the relative weights of ultimate particles • John Dalton
    3. The chemical effects produced by electricity • Humphry Davy
    4. Mapping the rocks of a nation • William Smith
    5. She knows to what tribe the bones belong • Mary Anning
    6. The inheritance of acquired characteristics • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
    7. Every chemical compound has two parts • Jöns Jakob Berzelius
    8. The electric conflict is not restricted to the conducting wire • Hans Christian Ørsted
    9. One day, sir, you may tax it • Michael Faraday
    10. Heat penetrates every substance in the Universe • Joseph Fourier
    11. The artificial production of organic substances from inorganic substances • Friedrich Wöhler
    12. Winds never blow in a straight line • Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis
    13. On the coloured light of the binary stars • Christian Doppler
    14. The glacier was God’s great plough • Louis Agassiz
    15. Nature can be represented as one great whole • Alexander von Humboldt
    16. Light travels more slowly in water than in air • Léon Foucault
    17. Living force may be converted into heat • James Joule
    18. Statistical analysis of molecular movement • Ludwig Boltzmann
    19. Plastic is not what I meant to invent • Leo Baekeland
    20. I have called this principle natural selection • Charles Darwin
    21. Forecasting the weather • Robert FitzRoy
    22. Omne vivum ex vivo – all life from life • Louis Pasteur
    23. One of the snakes grabbed its own tail • August Kekulé
    24. The definitely expressed average proportion of three to one • Gregor Mendel
    25. An evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs • Thomas Henry Huxley
    26. An apparent periodicity of properties • Dmitri Mendeleev
    27. Light and magnetism are affectations of the same substance • James Clerk Maxwell
    28. Rays were coming from the tube • Wilhelm Röntgen
    29. Seeing into the Earth • Richard Dixon Oldham
    30. Radiation is an atomic property of the elements • Marie Curie
    31. A contagious living fluid • Martinus Beijerinck
  6. A PARADIGM SHIFT 1900–1945
    1. Quanta are discrete packets of energy • Max Planck
    2. Now I know what the atom looks like • Ernest Rutherford
    3. Gravity is a distortion in the space-time continuum • Albert Einstein
    4. Earth’s drifting continents are giant pieces in an ever-changing jigsaw • Alfred Wegener
    5. Chromosomes play a role in heredity • Thomas Hunt Morgan
    6. Particles have wave-like properties • Erwin Schrödinger
    7. Uncertainty is inevitable • Werner Heisenberg
    8. The Universe is big… and getting bigger • Edwin Hubble
    9. The radius of space began at zero • Georges Lemaître
    10. Every particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart • Paul Dirac
    11. There is an upper limit beyond which a collapsing stellar core becomes unstable • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
    12. Life itself is a process of obtaining knowledge • Konrad Lorenz
    13. 95 per cent of the Universe is missing • Fritz Zwicky
    14. A universal computing machine • Alan Turing
    15. The nature of the chemical bond • Linus Pauling
    16. An awesome power is locked inside the nucleus of an atom • J Robert Oppenheimer
  7. FUNDAMENTAL BUILDING BLOCKS 1945–PRESENT
    1. We are made of stardust • Fred Hoyle
    2. Jumping genes • Barbara McClintock
    3. The strange theory of light and matter • Richard Feynman
    4. Life is not a miracle • Harold Urey and Stanley Miller
    5. We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) • James Watson and Francis Crick
    6. Everything that can happen happens • Hugh Everett III
    7. A perfect game of noughts and crosses • Donald Michie
    8. The unity of fundamental forces • Sheldon Glashow
    9. We are the cause of global warming • Charles Keeling
    10. The butterfly effect • Edward Lorenz
    11. A vacuum is not exactly nothing • Peter Higgs
    12. Symbiosis is everywhere • Lynn Margulis
    13. Quarks come in threes • Murray Gell-Mann
    14. A theory of everything? • Gabriele Veneziano
    15. Black holes evaporate • Stephen Hawking
    16. Earth and all its life forms make up a single living organism called Gaia • James Lovelock
    17. A cloud is made of billows upon billows • Benoît Mandelbrot
    18. A quantum model of computing • Yuri Manin
    19. Genes can move from species to species • Michael Syvanen
    20. The soccer ball can withstand a lot of pressure • Harry Kroto
    21. Insert genes into humans to cure disease • William French Anderson
    22. Designing new life forms on a computer screen • Craig Venter
    23. A new law of nature • Ian Wilmut
    24. Worlds beyond the solar system • Geoffrey Marcy
  8. DIRECTORY
  9. GLOSSARY
  10. CONTRIBUTORS
  11. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  12. COPYRIGHT
  1. Contents
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