Customer Reviews

Einstein's Luck: The Truth behind Some of the Greatest Scientific Discoveries

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If this is science history, it's a pity so few professors can write it. This thought-provoking and enjoyable book reads like a series of detective stories while challenging any simplistic assumptions of the past. We learn that some accepted "proofs" proved nothing at all and that we mistakenly label as revolutionaries men who were truly typical of their time.
Dr. Joseph Lister, for examples, whose name is eponymous with antiseptic, managed to exceed the death toll of his colleagues because of his own lack of sanitary standards. Gregor Mendel made important contributions to knowledge but by his own beliefs and theories he was no Mendelian. Charles Darwin followed the tradition of his age in believing in the inheritability of acquired characteristics. And we have pioneers like Robert Millikan and Arthur Eddington who made data fit a chosen theory, rather than the other way around.
Yet, far from belittling such men, this book shows them in a new and more human light that transforms our understanding of scientific discovery. John Waller's book is an entertaining read for the layman and an essential read for the scientist or historian.

Einstein's Luck (or 'Fabulous Science' in the UK) is a fascinating and provocative book that will have you re-examining your ideas of the 'scientific greats', and introduce a healthy skepticism into your opinion of science research generally.

Remember learning in school how Eddington proved Einstein's theory of relatively by comparing the position of stars during and after an eclipse? Actually his images were so poor they proved precisely nothing except that Eddington was a dab hand at faking results.

Remember how Millikan demonstrated that an electron had a discrete charge? Well, look at his notebook and you'll see how he threw away all of his results which proved exactly the opposite!

The book catalogues a series of famous scientists whose passion and belief in a theory blinded them to contrary evidence. In fascinating detail the book describes the circumstances surrounding the experiments both in the laboratory and in the wider social context.

What links these scientists is that, as it turns out, the theories they were expounding happened to be right - just not for the reasons they gave.

This compelling book should be compulsory reading for all students of science and is delightful food for thought for anyone interested in science.

What I like about this book, is that not only is it engaging and a good read, but it actually makes me feel clever!
With interesting stories written in highly accessible language, the author doesn't condescend to his reader nor talk over his head. A true teacher, he reveals, explains and encourages, enticing you to read on first, and then continue to make more discoveries of your own by thinking about the implications of what he says.
Wish we had more authors and teachers out there like this!

By showing the truth behind some of the most famous discoveries in the history of science, John Waller pays a tribute to the countless unknown hardworking people who made these discoveries possible. In this well-documented and highly entertaining book, the reader is repeatedly shown that: 1) science seldom progresses through the sudden insights of geniuses, but is a continuous process; 2) as in other fields of human activity, some scientists got a credit they did not deserve, while others were unjustly ignored. This book is a must to everybody who is interested in the history and the ethics of science.

This book is a refreshing egalitarian change from the kind of history that implies that a handful of geniuses are responsible for most scientific progress. It shows that many famous people were less innovative than is commonly thought, and that science is more incremental than revolutionary (but in spite of the title, it says little about Einstein).
But I can't help wondering whether the book exaggerates to make the misleading histories sound more scandalous than they really were. However, I only see one sentence that seems to justify this suspicion. On page 94 (regarding the effects of the great depression on the Hawthorne studies) he says "the desperation in these words seems to leap from the page". I don't see any clear signs of desperation in those words he quotes. It wouldn't surprise me if the workers were desperate, but the book fails to convince me about this.

In this book, the author demonstrates that the immaculate pictures that we may have of some of the great scientists of the past may not be so, well, immaculate. The book has been divided into two parts: Part 1 addresses cases where individuals have deliberately cherry-picked data to support their convictions about certain theories ("sins against science"), and Part 2 examines situations where historical facts have been deliberately altered/distorted by individuals, usually for the purpose of self-aggrandisement ("sins against history"). The book contains 13 chapters, each focussing on a given scientist. Some of the better-known ones that are featured include Robert Millikan, Arthur Eddington, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin and Charles Best. There were also some individuals that I was completely unfamiliar with. Each chapter contains some astonishing revelations along with explanations as to how and why the "dishonesties" occurred.

I found the prose to be clear, refined, often engaging and rather scholarly, i.e., a bit dryer than it could have been. Although highly accessible to a wide readership, I suspect that this book will likely appeal the most to those seriously interested in the history of science.

There's nothing really revisionist about this book, it's essentially a history book. If you ever do science, you know that the data are messy, and sometimes you have to smooth over the results to fit the theory.

Disclaimer: I've not read the book yet, but have ordered it and will update this review if the facts do not support the above thesis.

Further, this is a 300 page book, not an 800 page book (the description is a typo)