Search Results

“... Are your teeth false? The uranium in each of them may brighten your smile with about ten times the radiation you get from the natural background, from cosmic rays attacking from above and radon and its decay products attacking from below. Do you wear corrective lenses? They may add to the flash of your eye a radiation five times the natural background level ...”

“... Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read is an engaging account of a harmless obsession. For thirty years he has been ferreting out every copy of Nicholas Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium to which library catalogues, booksellers’ lists, auction records, informed tips and plain luck led him. The exceptional importance of Copernicus’s work in the history of science was only indirectly the cause of this monomania ...”

“... should turn to Victor Thoren’s The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe (1990) or to J.L.E. Dreyer’s Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the 16th Century (1890, reprinted 1977). What made Tycho a world-historical figure was his involuntary exile to Prague. There his great registers of observations fell into the hands of a man ...”

“... ability to produce high-class wonders looked like it would never run dry. Both Wootton and John Heilbron bring fresh insights even to the invention of astronomical telescopy, overworked though the field is. The different points from which they start out are revealing: Heilbron imaginatively grounds Galileo’s complex ...”

“... of anti-semitism started only after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, but I learnt from Heilbron’s book that attacks on Einstein began in 1919, the very year that Sir Arthur Eddington’s confirmation of the Theory of Relativity brought him world fame. They came from anti-semitic physicists who rejected his theories, from anti-semitic newspapers ...”