OK, but just OK
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This is really 3.5, but there is no 3.5 star rating
OK, but I was expecting something a bit more sophisticated than a recap of the sort of 'just so' history of science that I read as a teenager. Gribbin bunches together biology, chemistry, and physics as basically the same sort of thing, but this really will not do.
The problem is that he dismisses, at the beginning, the peripatetic method as misguided. But something like the peripatetic method is central to theoretical physics, in fact is what makes it epistemologically so disconcerting (see Bertrand Russell's article on the philosphical implications of general relativity in the Britannica; to be read in parallel with his dismissal of Anselm's argument in his History of Western Philosophy). Gribbin even recounts counterexamples to his baconian idea of science - e.g. Galileo's argument about hailstones - without noticing that they complicate his story.
He chickens too, at the end, with his discussion of evolution, by finishing his story before Hamilton and the game theorists arrived to develop a convincing theoretical physics of biology, parallel to the way Pauling and co developed a theoretical physics of chemistry.
I also thought it was a pity - this is not a criticism, just a remark, though maybe related to the above comments - that, after starting by using Ptolemy's thesis that the planets must move in circles, because circles are perfect, as an example of 'how elegance does not necessarily lead to truth', he does not finish by observing that the current theory starts from the idea that planets move in (even more perfect) straight lines; it is just that our understanding of 'straight line' has become a bit more sophisticated in the meantime.
The prose could have been better.
I did learn some interesting things though. I learned that Michael Faraday was a *much* greater physicist than I thought. I also learned (though I would be interested to compare and contrast a French version of the same story) that the history of science seems mostly to be located in the triangle defined by Oxford, Cambridge and London.
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Excellent, a definitive history of scientific developments
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This book is not for people with a passing interest in science but one for all those that are passionate about it. The average person has retained only the most basic, and in most cases apocryphal stories of scientific discoveries and breakthroughs from their schooldays. Archimedes and his overflowing bath, Newton and his apple and Galileo and his telescope. This book however is very detailed and wonderfully researched. All the major scientific milestones are covered in great depth. You learn more about both the giants of science but also of those that history has not honoured perhaps as it ought to, Robert Hooke is the best example. It is a marvellous tome principally because the author is genuinely enthusiastic about not only science but writing about it. Anyone claiming to have a serious interest in science needs this book. Highly recommended.
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Overly concerned with places and dates
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Having read other works by the auther and been suitably impressed I was looking forward to this book to learn abou the history of such an important subject. However I found it rather tedious, I was expecting more science then history and as such was dissapointed. There's no doubt the auther has set himself a consiberable task by trying to cover the history of such a huge and diverse field, but each section about the various scientists follows exactly the same pattern of where they where born, where they went to school, etc. unfortunately there was a lack of interesting detail and historical analysis of some scientists, particulary the most important ones.
The book also ends before any mention of recent scientific breakthroughs, particularly string theory in theoretical physics.
Also the science of mathematics is hardly mentioned.
I think the books main proble is that it ties to do too much, if it was four times larger or over four volumes; each volume covering a specific branch of science (physics, maths, biology, chemistry) it may have succeded in it's task.
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An Excellent Place To Start Discovering Science
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Despite considering myself to be rather well informed on science, upon reading this book I realised that I knew very little about even the most basic things such as why the sky is blue or just who made what discovery and when. This is a great place to start if you want to start answering those questions. The story of how science, a term only really relevant to 1500's onwards when people really did begin to study and experiment rather than just suggesting and hypothesising, has developed.
In the early chapters we are given a generous summary of the lives and scientific work of such historical figures as Copernicus and Galileo. However as the book enters the 19th and 20th centuries and the pace of scientific discovery speeds up it becomes a little too crowded to be so detailed, a fact that the author himself acknowledges. As such some scientists have only their work discussed and sometimes only briefly, with no background on their lives being provided. This is a slight frustration but is understandable and the book does not claim to provide a detailed biography of all its characters. I found some of the sections more interesting than others, but obviously a history of science needs to cover a variety of scientific disciplines. Fans of astronomy or physics may need to labour through the parts on chemistry or genetics. But in general it moves from topic to topic quick enough to keep the reader interested and not get bogged down in a particular section of the scientific story. What is also apparent from the book is that great discoveries, for example the theory of evolution by means of natural selection by Darwin, and the development of calculus by Newton were also developed almost independently by others. The suggestion here is that the increasing flow of scientific knowledge from generation to generation that really gained momentum from 1543 onwards, meant that such breakthroughs became inevitable. Only rarely does a particular individual... a genius... make a genuine breakthrough that pushes science forward by generations. Already after reading this book I am eager to read more on the topics and historical figures it covered. It has certainly been a stepping stone for further research into the world of science and of equal importance an enjoyable and interesting read. I would certainly recommend it to the general reader, especially those people who like me are seeking to reintroduce themselves to the world of science many years after last fiddling with a Bunsen Burner and dissecting worms at school!
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almost everything in one book
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five centuries or so of history of science in a single volume, that is an accomplishment. The author seems to prefer some scientists instead of others and give more details for those that he probably likes most and overlooks others. So the coverage is not equal. Having said that, he puts the scientific discoveries in context and makes the all story (500 years circa)an interesting discovery in itself. What is not about: it's not a history of medicine, nor a history of machines. Physics (and a little bit of chemistry) and biology seem to be his main subjects (maybe physics more than biology). He keeps the subject very simple and sometimes for the sake of simplicity he omits some details about the scientific discovery itself for which explanations are not provided as for instance what the general theory of relativity or the Kepler's 3 laws say. All in all, it is a beautiful book that I sincerely recommend to the readers.
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