The Faber Book of Science

John Carey

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780571300273
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Faber Book of Science introduces hunting spiders and black holes, gorillas and stardust, protons, photons and neutrinos. In his acclaimed anthology, John Carey plots the development of modern science from Leonardo da Vinci to Chaos Theory. The emphasis is on the scientists themselves and their own accounts of their breakthroughs and achievements. The classic science-writers are included - Darwin, T.H. Huxley and Jean Henri Fabre tracking insects through the Provencal countryside. So too are today's experts - Steve Jones on the Human Genome Project, Richard Dawkins on DNA and many other representatives of the contemporary genre of popular science-writing which, John Carey argues, challenges modern poetry and fiction in its imaginative power.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prelude: The Misfit from Vinci
• Going inside the Body
• Galileo and the Telescope
• William Harvey and the Witches
• The Hunting Spider
• Early Blood Transfusion
• Little Animals in Water
• An Apple and Colours
• The Little Red Mouse and the Field Cricket
• Two Mice Discover Oxygen
• Discovering Uranus
• The Big Bang and Vegetable Love
• Taming the Speckled Monster
• The Menace of Population
• How the Giraffe Got its Neck
• Medical Studies, Paris 1821
• The Man with a Lid on his Stomach
• Those Dreadful Hammers: Lyell and  the New Geology
• The Discovery of Worrying
• Pictures for the Million
• The Battle of the Ants
• On a Candle
• Heat Death
• Adam’s Navel
• Submarine Gardens of Eden: Devon, 1858–9
• In Praise of Rust
• The Devil’s Chaplain
• The Discovery of Prehistory
• Chains and Rings: Kekule’s Dreams
• On a Piece of Chalk
• Siberia Breeds a Prophet
• Socialism and Bacteria
• God and Molecules
• Inventing Electric Light
• Bird’s Custard: The True Story
• Birth Control: The Diaphragm
• Headless Sex: The Praying Mantis
• The World as Sculpture
• The Discovery of X-Rays
• No Sun in Paris
• The Colour of Radium
• The Innocence of Radium
• The Secret of the Mosquito’s Stomach
• The Poet and the Scientist
• Wasps, Moths and Fossils
• The Massacre of the Males
• Freud on Perversion
• Kitty Hawk
• A Cuckoo in a Robin’s Nest
• Was the World Made for Man?
• Drawing the Nerves
• Discovering the Nucleus
• Death of a Naturalist
• Relating Relativity
• Uncertainty and Other Worlds
• Quantum Mechanics: Mines and Machine-Guns
• Why Light Travels in Straight Lines
• Puzzle Interest
• Submarine Blue
• Sea-Cucumbers
• Telling the Workers about Science
• The Making of the Eye
• Green Mould in the Wind
• In the Black Squash Court: The First Atomic Pile
• A Death and the Bomb
• The Story of a Carbon Atom
• Tides
• The Hot, Mobile Earth
• The Poet and the Surgeon
• Enter Love and Enter Death
• In the Primeval Swamp
• Krakatau: The Aftermath
• Gorillas
• Toads
• Russian Butterflies
• Discovering a Medieval Louse
• The Gecko’s Belly
• On The Moon
• Gravity
• Otto Frisch Explains Atomic Particles
• From Stardust to Flesh
• Black Holes
• The Fall-Out Planet
• Galactic Diary of an Edwardian Lady
• The Light of Common Day
• Can We Know the Universe? Reflections  on a Grain of Salt
• Brain Size
• On Not Discovering
• Negative Predictions
• Clever Animals
• Great Fakes of Science
• Unnatural Nature
• Rags, Dolls and Teddy Bears
• The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
• Seeing the Atoms in Crystals
• The Plan of Living Things
• Willow Seeds and the Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Shedding Life
• The Greenhouse Effect: An Alternative View
• Fractals, Chaos and Strange Attractors
• The Language of the Genes
• The Good Earth is Dying
• Acknowledgements
• Index of Names
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright