In this engrossing anthology, Carey chooses accounts by scientist themselves - astronomers and physicists, biologists, chemists, psychologists - that are both arrestingly written and clear. Scientists talk about their moments of breakthrough: we look down a microscope with Ronald Ross as he discovers the secret of malaria; we join the workers in Edison's laboratory putting together the first electric light bulb; we watch the construction of the world's first atomic pile. We see how science has changed art: how Newton's Optics flooded eighteenth-century poetry with colour; how the vastness of geological time terrified Tennyson and the Victorians; how modernist writers struggled to adapt to Einstein's relativity. Read Less