Greg's Reviews > The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science, Including the Original Papers

The Discoveries by Alan Lightman

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2379275
's review
Apr 07, 12

bookshelves: non-fiction, science
Read from March 04 to April 07, 2012

This was pretty good. I think it is easy to forget how much that is now considered pretty basic scientific knowledge, such as hormones, were pretty much unknown at the beginning of the 20th century. In general, despite being highly cut down, the actual papers were a bit too technical for me to do more than skim (though that was usually interesting), other than for the biological papers, but the difference in styles was something that struck me, especially as there is so little variation in modern papers - pretty much all of them are in the passive voice, and although the order of sections may vary, they will generally go abstract, introduction, methods, results and conclusion. Here, not only was there more variation in presentation, there was a lot more in style, both of the "I decided to do this" kind, and how the results were promoted, some people saying "well, this might be important", others being much bolder and basically saying "Hey world, I just chaged you forever"

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