Science Book by Singh, Simon -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

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BOOK CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE BEGINNING OF SCIENCE 600 BCE–1400 CE

Eclipses of the Sun can be predicted • Thales of Miletus Now hear the fourfold roots of everything • Empedocles Measuring the circumference of Earth • Eratosthenes The human is related to the lower beings • Al-Tusi A floating object displaces its own volume in liquid • Archimedes The Sun is like fire, the Moon is like water • Zhang Heng Light travels in straight lines into our eyes • Alhazen

SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION 1400–1700

At the centre of everything is the Sun • Nicolaus Copernicus The orbit of every planet is an ellipse • Johannes Kepler A falling body accelerates uniformly • Galileo Galilei The globe of the Earth is a magnet • William Gilbert Not by arguing, but by trying • Francis Bacon Touching the spring of the air • Robert Boyle Is light a particle or a wave? • Christiaan Huygens The first observation of a transit of Venus • Jeremiah Horrocks Organisms develop in a series of steps • Jan Swammerdam All living things are composed of cells • Robert Hooke Layers of rock form on top of one another • Nicolas Steno Microscopic observations of animalcules • Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Measuring the speed of light • Ole Rømer One species never springs from the seed of another • John Ray Gravity affects everything in the Universe • Isaac Newton

EXPANDING HORIZONS 1700–1800

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds • Carl Linnaeus The heat that disappears in the conversion of water into vapour is not lost • Joseph Black Inflammable air • Henry Cavendish Winds, as they come nearer the equator, become more easterly • George Hadley A strong current comes out of the Gulf of Florida • Benjamin Franklin Dephlogisticated air • Joseph Priestley In nature, nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes • Antoine Lavoisier The mass of a plant comes from the air • Jan Ingenhousz Discovering new planets • William Herschel The diminution of the velocity of light • John Michell Setting the electric fluid in motion • Alessandro Volta No vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end • James Hutton The attraction of mountains • Nevil Maskelyne The mystery of nature in the structure and fertilization of flowers • Christian Sprengel Elements always combine the same way • Joseph Proust

A CENTURY OF PROGRESS 1800–1900

The experiments may be repeated with great ease when the Sun shines • Thomas Young Ascertaining the relative weights of ultimate particles • John Dalton The chemical effects produced by electricity • Humphry Davy Mapping the rocks of a nation • William Smith She knows to what tribe the bones belong • Mary Anning The inheritance of acquired characteristics • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Every chemical compound has two parts • Jöns Jakob Berzelius The electric conflict is not restricted to the conducting wire • Hans Christian Ørsted One day, sir, you may tax it • Michael Faraday Heat penetrates every substance in the Universe • Joseph Fourier The artificial production of organic substances from inorganic substances • Friedrich Wöhler Winds never blow in a straight line • Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis On the coloured light of the binary stars • Christian Doppler The glacier was God’s great plough • Louis Agassiz Nature can be represented as one great whole • Alexander von Humboldt Light travels more slowly in water than in air • Léon Foucault Living force may be converted into heat • James Joule Statistical analysis of molecular movement • Ludwig Boltzmann Plastic is not what I meant to invent • Leo Baekeland I have called this principle natural selection • Charles Darwin Forecasting the weather • Robert FitzRoy Omne vivum ex vivo – all life from life • Louis Pasteur One of the snakes grabbed its own tail • August Kekulé The definitely expressed average proportion of three to one • Gregor Mendel An evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs • Thomas Henry Huxley An apparent periodicity of properties • Dmitri Mendeleev Light and magnetism are affectations of the same substance • James Clerk Maxwell Rays were coming from the tube • Wilhelm Röntgen Seeing into the Earth • Richard Dixon Oldham Radiation is an atomic property of the elements • Marie Curie A contagious living fluid • Martinus Beijerinck

A PARADIGM SHIFT 1900–1945

Quanta are discrete packets of energy • Max Planck Now I know what the atom looks like • Ernest Rutherford Gravity is a distortion in the space-time continuum • Albert Einstein Earth’s drifting continents are giant pieces in an ever-changing jigsaw • Alfred Wegener Chromosomes play a role in heredity • Thomas Hunt Morgan Particles have wave-like properties • Erwin Schrödinger Uncertainty is inevitable • Werner Heisenberg The Universe is big… and getting bigger • Edwin Hubble The radius of space began at zero • Georges Lemaître Every particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart • Paul Dirac There is an upper limit beyond which a collapsing stellar core becomes unstable • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Life itself is a process of obtaining knowledge • Konrad Lorenz 95 per cent of the Universe is missing • Fritz Zwicky A universal computing machine • Alan Turing The nature of the chemical bond • Linus Pauling An awesome power is locked inside the nucleus of an atom • J Robert Oppenheimer

FUNDAMENTAL BUILDING BLOCKS 1945–PRESENT

We are made of stardust • Fred Hoyle Jumping genes • Barbara McClintock The strange theory of light and matter • Richard Feynman Life is not a miracle • Harold Urey and Stanley Miller We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) • James Watson and Francis Crick Everything that can happen happens • Hugh Everett III A perfect game of noughts and crosses • Donald Michie The unity of fundamental forces • Sheldon Glashow We are the cause of global warming • Charles Keeling The butterfly effect • Edward Lorenz A vacuum is not exactly nothing • Peter Higgs Symbiosis is everywhere • Lynn Margulis Quarks come in threes • Murray Gell-Mann A theory of everything? • Gabriele Veneziano Black holes evaporate • Stephen Hawking Earth and all its life forms make up a single living organism called Gaia • James Lovelock A cloud is made of billows upon billows • Benoît Mandelbrot A quantum model of computing • Yuri Manin Genes can move from species to species • Michael Syvanen The soccer ball can withstand a lot of pressure • Harry Kroto Insert genes into humans to cure disease • William French Anderson Designing new life forms on a computer screen • Craig Venter A new law of nature • Ian Wilmut Worlds beyond the solar system • Geoffrey Marcy

DIRECTORY GLOSSARY CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COPYRIGHT

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