Britannica Guide to 100 Most Influential Scientists

by John Gribbin, Encyclopædia Britannica

Who are the most important men and women whose notions and theories have changed the world? When Isaac Newton claimed that he only saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants, he alluded to the long list of geniuses that came before him. The history of science is the story of great discoveries, flashes of intuition that have changed the way people see the world, hard work and arduous calculation in the laboratory. "The Britannica Guide to 100 Most Influential Scientists" is a celebration of the lives and work of the men and women who have changed the way we look at the world, the universe, and ourselves.It includes contributions from top name scientists and writers such James Gleick on Richard Feynman; Michio Kaky on Einstein and Sir Harold Kroton on the Fulleriene (for which he won a Nobel Prize). "The Britannica Guide to 100 Most Influential Scientists" is introduced by John Gribbin. He is the author of nearly 100 popular science books, including the best-selling "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat". He has received awards for his writing both in the United States and in Britain. The holder of a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, he still maintains links with research as a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex, and was a member of a team there that measured the age of the Universe. While still a student, he received the prestigious Annual Award of the Gravity Research Foundation in the United States, the only student, and the first Englishman working in England, ever to receive this award.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Reference, Biography, Physics, Biography Memoir

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.

Reviews

[DrosoPHila · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a selection of brief biographies of the "100 most influential scientists of all time". Men and women (more of the former but a few of the latter) whose names you should know for a pub quiz, right?

Some of the selections are so obvious you can't argue with them - Newton, Darwin, Copernicus, Bacon, Einstein, etc.

Some of the biographees were mathematicians rather than natural scientists (e.g. Ramanujan and Nash) and these I feel should really have gone into a separate book.

Some other selections though are extremely bizarre. Carl Jung who had completely bonkers ideas about humans all being connected through a telepathic aether (woo). Some scientists better known for science communication rather than actual science are included, such as Stephen Jay Gould (whose own incoherent understanding of biology was expressed through popular writing which was generally more confusing than educating), or Fred Hoyle (who backed the wrong horse with regards to the Big Bang and then said some extremely stupid things about evolution).

Yet we're missing other big names. Why no John Dalton? T.H. Morgan? Chomsky? R.A. Fisher? J.B.S. Haldane? Ernst Mayr? G.G. Simpson? If we must include mathematicians, why the slightly random selected few?

Finally, there's more than 100 biographies here because some people are counted together (Watson and Crick, the Curies).

Very little thought seems to have gone into choosing the right biographees, there's no attempt to run a narrative thread through it all to link them all together, and the result is a bit of a disjointed mess.

[Marzena · Rating 1 out of 5]

Someone has to speak up, this book is terrible.

It's been over a month since I started it and even though I tried to get through the boring part, there was only more boring data waiting ahead. I got to the third of it and decided to quit. It could've been my fault for expecting something more 'yay, science is fun, look at all these people!' approach, than the one I was served by Encyclopaedia Britannica. What you get here is a bigger biographical work based on, I assume, the same entry in encyclopaedia. It doesn't sound interesting, let alone fun. I'm afraid only the introduction was worth to be noticed.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good book for an immigrant like me - I got to read a selection that is clearly biased towards value from the "Western World" in which I immigrated myself. The selection is clearly missing on top contributions from distant past or other geographical areas.

[Dustin Tatman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good bathroom book. I read about one scientist a day. It's a little too dry to read more than a few pages at a time.

[Cathy]

Haven't read this, just have it in my library

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice listing of famous scientists. Gives a good idea of who else to read about.