The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science, Including the Original Papers [Hardcover]

I am teaching a history of science survey at the University of Minnesota and picked up this book thinking I could use it to assign some famous original papers to my students with readable and reliable introductions. Boy, was I wrong. Spot-checking the book in my area of expertise, Einstein (which, I may add, is supposedly also one of the author's areas of expertise), I quickly turned up a few howlers so bad as to make this book completely unfit for classroom use. In section 4, on special relatiivty, Lightman calls the Michelson-Morley experiment "one of the most important scientific experiments of all time" and claims that Michelson "was awarded the Nobel prize for his "failure" [to detect the earth's motion through the ether]" (p. 62). In a famous article first published in 1969 and still readily available, Harvard historian Gerald Holton disposed of this myth of the Michelson-Morley experiment ("Einstein, Michelson, and the "Crucial" Experiment." Isis 60 (1969): 133-197. Reprinted in Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein. Rev. Ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 279-370). Lightman appears to be blissfully ignorant of the literature on the history of relativity. Section 1 on Planck is even worse. On p. 3 of his book, he writes, eloquently but even eloquently stated falsehoods are false: "The seemingly smooth flow of light pouring through a window is, in reality, a pitter-patter of individual quanta, each far too tiny and weak to discern with the eye. Thus began quantum physics." In a controversial book first published in 1978, Thomas S. Kuhn argued that Planck did not quantize much of anything and that quantum physics only started with Einstein in 1905 (Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). This book has been hotly debated since among historians of physics, but I do not know of a single serious historian of physics who has Planck introduce light quanta in 1900! Whatever Planck did in 1900, this he did not. Light quanta were introduced by Einstein in 1905 and met with strong resistance for almost 20 years from the rest of the physics community. When Planck recruited Einstein for a post in Berlin in 1913, he, Planck himself, actually noted in his official proposal that Einstein had sometimes gone overboard in his speculations, the light-quantum hypothesis being his prime example (see, e.g., Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein, New York: Viking, 1997, p. 328). As I hope the reader will recognize, these are blunders, not minor mistakes. They go to the heart of the episodes Lightman discusses. And they could easily have been avoided had Lightman taken the trouble of familiarizing himself with some of the most obvious literature in history of physics. If he makes such a hash of the physics stuff he supposedly knows well, one wonders what howlers may be lurking in his introductions to papers outside his (and my) area of expertise. Hence my recommendation: devoutly to be avoided.

If you want an introduction to the major scientific discoveries of this century, this is a good place to start. Of course there are going to be those (as mentioned in other reviews) who dispute some of the claims of the discoverers featured here. That in itself is nothing new since science is nothing if not self-correcting and redefining.

The format is simple - an introduction that includes a short biography and an attempt to set the discovery in its cultural context. Following that is a description of the discovery and the thought process behind its discovery. Accompanying each article is the relevant paper by the actual scientist. One of the best aspects of the book was the explanation of that paper - whethter the approach was theoretical or experimental, how deeply past references were cited, etc. This is a good, solid read - nothing spectacular but a good overview.

I'm surprised that a book like this wasn't published sooner; this book does an excellent job of collecting some of the landmark papers of 20th-century science. It's a shame that, in aiming this book towards a non-scientific audience, Lightman and/or the publishers felt the need to abridge the longer articles; at least it is clear where such abridgments have been made, and citations to the original publications are made.

I have to agree with Mr. Janssen below that there are some significant issues with the background material that Lightman provides. For example, in discussing the Meitner/Frisch paper on nuclear fission, he talks about "isomers" instead of "isotopes." Similarly, in the chapter on neurotransmitters, he refers to individual nerve cells simply as "nerves," saying "nerves do not touch." As one more example, in the chapter on background radiation, Lightman describes "that surreal meeting" that took place in 1965, apparently referring back to an earlier event in that chapter; nothing in the chapter, however, indicates why it could be called "surreal."

[On the other hand, in Lightman's defense, he does *not* claim that Planck proposed quanta of light; he simply uses light as an intuitive example of the quanta of energy Planck did propose.]

I can't enthusiastically recommend this book, but it's probably worth borrowing from the library.