When myth meets reality, myth usually wins, if only because it is more convenient, more beautiful and familiar. Nevertheless, the English historian of science John Waller is ready to defend the truth — contrary to many years of stereotypes. Based on hard facts, Waller debunks many of the established notions.
When myth meets reality, myth usually wins, if only because it is more convenient, more beautiful and familiar. Nevertheless, the English historian of science John Waller is ready to defend the truth — contrary to many years of stereotypes. Based on hard facts, Waller debunks many of the established notions. It turns out that the great biologist Louis Pasteur sometimes passed off the ideas of his students as his own, the Nobel Prize winner in physics Robert Milliken in the fight against the adherents of the «electromagnetic ether» rigged the data of his experiments, the physicist Arthur Eddington bravely adjusted the results of his observations to a ready-made theory. And that is not all! John Snow was not the «father of epidemiology». Gregor Mendel did not write about the mechanisms of heredity. “I did not mean to slander science with this book,” the author warns critics of potential opponents. “I just wanted to speak out against a simplified attitude towards it, against attempts to give the discoveries of previous years an excessive halo of romanticism.” You might think that there is so much romanticism in today’s life …
Hummingbird, ALPHABETIC ATTICUS, 416 p.