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Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society Hardcover – November 2, 2010

4.0 out of 5 stars 936

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“Bryson is as amusing as ever….As a celebration of 350 years of modern science, [Seeing Further]it is a worthy tribute.”
The Economist


In
Seeing Further, New York Times bestseller Bill Bryson takes readers on a guided tour through the great discoveries, feuds, and personalities of modern science. Already a major bestseller in the UK, Seeing Further tells the fascinating story of science and the Royal Society with Bill Bryson’s trademark wit and intelligence, and contributions from a host of well known scientists and science fiction writers, including Richard Dawkins, Neal Stephenson, James Gleick, and Margret Atwood. It is a delightful literary treat from the acclaimed author who previous explored the current state of scientific knowledge in his phenomenally popular book, A Short History of Nearly Everything.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) presents a remarkable collection of essays celebrating the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society of London and its many contributions to science. Society members have included such illustrious names as Darwin, Newton, Leibniz, and Francis Bacon, to name a few. The volume's 23 contributors are both uniformly excellent and remarkable for their diversity. For example, novelist Margaret Atwood writes a very personal piece about the image of the scientist and its sometime appearance as the "mad scientist." Science historian Paul Davies writes about the effects on Western society of the realization that we are not the center of the universe. Biologist Richard Dawkins opines about the revolutionary nature of Darwin's discoveries, and science fiction writer Gregory Benford contemplates the meaning of time. The wide array of scientific disciplines, including genetics, climate change, physics, and engineering, are each placed in a fresh and thought-provoking social and historical context. Bryson's name will bring readers in, but the real reward is fine writers writing about serious science in an accessible, good-natured style. It is a worthy celebration of the Royal Society. Color illus. (Nov.) (c)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

A Festschrift for the 350th anniversary of Britain’s Royal Society, this abundantly illustrated volume is not an institutional history. Rather, its 22 contributors address aspects of the scientific enterprise that a brain trust once headed by Isaac Newton has advanced so much. Several authors dwell on distinctions between theory and experiment, or between pure versus applied science. Another group tackles science’s perennial challenge of communicating to the public. Newton biographer James Gleick amusingly describes the Royal Society’s original journal as a cross between Physical Review and Ripley’s Believe It or Not; scientist Stephen Schneider and apocalypse-novelist Maggie Gee relate their efforts to focus attention on climate change; and science historian Simon Schaffer recounts a 1781 Royal Society controversy about Franklin’s lightning rod to suggest how the public should react when scientists disagree. A volume that enlists novelist Margaret Atwood to expatiate on fiction’s stock character of the mad scientist has something for everyone; that this one also showcases such popular scientist-authors as Martin Rees, Richard Dawkins, Richard Fortey, and Paul Davies ensures it will make a splash in the new-books display. --Gilbert Taylor

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; 1st edition (November 2, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061999768
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061999765
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.03 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.27 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 out of 5 stars 936

About the author

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Bill Bryson
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Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK.

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Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
936 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2010
Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery & the Genius of the Royal Society with Bill Bryson as the editor is a marvelous book. I have read thousands of times that the pace of science and innovation causes knowledge to double and replace itself at an alarmingly fast rate. Of course, it's not in the actual doubling of knowledge that a problem exists but in the fact that it is virtually impossible for us to keep track of that very same new knowledge. However, even in a world that is creating so much new knowledge it is reassuring to consider that the Royal Society is celebrating its 350th anniversary this year. That is a marvelous accomplishment and to be honest I can't name many institutions that have been around that long.

Bill Bryson is the perfect person to have headed this project. As a general science writer Bryson is aware of how important science and the Royal Society has been to the development of modern society. Then there is the rather eclectic group of contributors that have each offered a discussion on the development of science. Authors include James Gleick, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Wertheim, Neal Stephenson, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Simon Schaffer, Richard Holmes, Richard Fortey, Richard Dawkins, Henry Petroski, Georgiana Ferry, Steve Jones, Philip Ball, Paul Davies, Ian Stewart, John D. Barrow, Oliver Morton, Maggie Gee, Stephen H. Schneider, Gregory Benford, and Martin Rees. I'd have to admit that Margaret Atwoods discussion of Jonathan Swift's Academy, and Richard Dawkins' Darwin's Five Bridges: The Way to Natural Selection is for me the highlight of the book. However, each and every chapter is eye opening and worthy of your time.

It is a difficult fact to get your head around that when the Royal Society was established in 1660 we knew so little of the causes of the physical phenomenon of our planet. Whether the topic was the causes of the tides or why summer was warmer than winter, mystery tended to shroud almost everything. The Royal Society created the scientific method thus allowing discoveries to be measured and duplicated and encouraged good scientific exploration. "Good" in this case is relative, meaning that it was better than what preceded it. "Good" by today's standard still left much to be desired.

Seeing Further is written for the general public and even the most "unscientific" of us will have no problem making sense of what is read.

Well written and containing a section devoted to further reading, Seeing Further is a fun and inspiring read.

I give it five stars after reading the whole book.

Peace to all.
111 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2021
I have enjoyed reading several books by Bryson. This one is a book I had to take in spurts because it was so dense with ideas. Taking on a book covering so much science and math was a huge task and he has organized it well. It was nice seeing some historical perspective as well as literary insights! Plan on giving yourself time to reflect on so much! Well worth it.
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2011
I love Bill Bryson, have read most of his books and am actively trying to finish reading his others. So, I eagerly downloaded Seeing Further as soon as it came out eagerly anticipating Bryson's wit and writing style....and was disappointed quickly.

The intro is by Bryson, but not anything particularly witty.

But, I'd purchased the book, I like sciency stuff and was interested in learning more about the Royal Society, so I persevered.

And, ultimately, I'm glad I did. It's a nice updated on the current state of science in the world. There are discussions of String Theory as well as updates on evolution concepts. There are interesting discussions of dead scientists as well as living ones. All the various vignettes are written by scientists and/or science writers, therefore the quality of the various stories vary depending upon whether the writer is more writer or more scientist.

All in all it's a worthwhile science book. But it isn't a Bryson book by any means.
134 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2010
Review on the Kindle book as of November 10th...

Someone has argued that a poor review solely based on the formatting of the book is inadequate. However good the point may be, I still would not recommend a book, whether paperback or Kindle, to a friend if the organization of it were bad. This book is poorly formatted, and given the dramatically increasing number of people using Kindle, I think the two stars I am giving this book are relevant.

The content is great. Fascinating as usual with Bryson, though most of it obviously has not been written by himself but by 21 different scholars.

But the KINDLE formatting make reading it a slightly annoying experience. As mentioned previously, not only have the illustrations been completely omitted, but their captions have been left behind right in the text. Really?

Kindle books are outrageously expensive, sometimes more than plain, good old paperbacks. Don't get me wrong, I love the Kindle. But if we're going to pay so much for a book (that we can't sell, exchange or return) the least we can expect from Amazon is to provide quality stuff.

EDIT: Amazon sent out an email informing me that there was a free update available for this book!!! It downloaded in a few seconds and all the pictures are now available! So I now there are no reasons whatsoever for not buying this great read!
As usual, great Amazon customer service.

Disappointed I have to say. If you are looking into the paperback, you should go for it though.
22 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2024
At times it got a little preachy about economic, social or environmental issues but I was expecting more about physical science development over the years. Interesting but not really my kind of book.

Top reviews from other countries

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M. Judith Leckie
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and interesting book
Reviewed in Canada on July 25, 2019
Nothing for me to dislike.
Gopal N. Raj
2.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing book
Reviewed in India on August 28, 2017
I found the book sadly disappointing. With someone like Bill Bryson editing the book and other well-known writers contributing chapters, I expected a book that was a far better than this rather disjointed work.
MacGregor
5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks to Reviewers
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 21, 2013
Trying to be fair I wrote the review below under the misunderstanding that Bill Bryson had written the book, like the fairly awful 'History of Nearly...'. Subsquently realising that the 'travel writer' was only a marketing frontispiece I relented and bought & read. An excellent set of essays beautifully and at times 'lovingly' written as marked by the best being able to present simple. The extraordinary even spread of other reviewers 1 to 5 stars serves to show how extraordinary difficult it is to pitch at a general readership. To one scientifically half-educated, as myself, the content is mostly gently and wisely enlightening, the value will be limited to those without enthusiasm for basic science, sadly many of our greatest academics fall into the latter category.

"I would like to thank the other reviewers of this book for avoiding me temptation to buy, Kindle being more expensive than hardcopy is clear sign to avoid. Bryson's 'Nearly History' reminds of a tag for Horatio Alger Jnr " most influential junk ever published" but left clear 'space' for writer who understood science to do better and this surely is not that book. - Crosbie Smith would do much better. The most successful 'quacks' were ''half educated but appearing fully educated to the uneducated'', this sums up Bryson on science; CP Snow opined the same of academics.

From 'Our Final Century it was obvious for lay audiences that Sir Martin wrote best on the subjects only freshly brought to his enquiring intellect by selected experts. I would like to see Rees, Cox or especially Dawkins teaching economics, they would be 'wildly' successful because their trained minds would challenge the subject's conventional wisdom. What would be totally absorbing would be for Bryson to write a 'Short History of Economic Thought' to see just how prejudiced his conclusions. I once bet a professor dazzled by eminence that I could get Sir Martin to reply to an email - I sent him one asking him to recommended his own book so easily won my beer; his reply included "I am not an economist" as excuse for not understanding why the Royal Swedish Academy of Science embraced Economics while his Royal Society did not? Actually both are wrong, one for rewarding what is not science and the other for not endorsing what is science - see F. Soddy 1912. What governs the 'invisible hand' and the speed of the economic process? One cannot expect economists to understand if they have not been handed the appropriate physical science as by a Herbert Spencer style classification of the sciences.

Georgescue Roegen's 'master-piece' is arguably the best science history primer, brilliant but seriously tough even for those with some scientific grounding; it would be wonderful if Crosbie Smith was prepared to emulate for the more general market. One reviewer suggested that Bryson himself had written his 'History', I imagine an open plan "Book Factory" with 'mass-production' authors trawling the internet for half-knowledge, while maybe Bill endorses unspecified sponsors as Michael Jordan endorses Nike. Sample Bryson science: 'to illustrate how many stars there are in a galaxy I had a astra-physicist calculate how many peas would fit into the Albert Hall". A more modest philosopher would ask his children to count the number of peas in a litre jug while telephoning the Albert Hall to ask the ventillation engineer its internal volume and multiply. The 'insider' question is which sponsor did Bryson edorse in promoting Willard Gibbs? Did Gibbs meet Boltzman in 1871? If so that changed the world?

To avoid misleading, Sir Martin's book is 'lovely' as amongst scattered 'pearls', he displays the naivity so common and loved in the highest intellects. Curiously Sir Martin praises futurist Freeman Dyson for promoting "out of the Box" thinking, apparently forgetting that all science prior to the 20th century was formatted from "outside the box" and idee led from Britain in the 19th C, just that we called it Natural Philosophy; a separate science the loss of which is so undervalued in education.

American science is German science and so in Bryson's first history he omitted what Crosbie Smith termed the 'Science of Energy', British science that led the industrial revolution and built America. But scientists prefer theoretical science as much as engineers prefer practical science, so I guess Bryson in his history of science left out the science that invented the modern world and built his country? Right? I sure ain't payig to find out.
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Prof Dr Thomas Sonar
5.0 out of 5 stars 350 Jahre Royal Society
Reviewed in Germany on September 8, 2010
und ein hervorragendes Buch als Geburtstagsgeschenk. In zahlreichen Kapiteln wird die Geschichte der RS von den Anfängen bis ins 21. Jahrhundert beleuchtet. Die Kapitel sind von verschiedenen erprobten (und guten!) Wissenschaftsjournalisten geschrieben worden, das Papier ist hervorragend und das Buch ist einfach gut gemacht!
One person found this helpful
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Jim Layfield
4.0 out of 5 stars Well put together and enjoyable book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2023
Very entertaining stories about the Royal Society.