Theories for Everything: An Illustrated History of Science - Hardcover

Langone, John; Stutz, Bruce; Gianopoulos, Andrea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792239121 ISBN 13: 9780792239123

Publisher: National Geographic, 2006

Synopsis

Theories for Everything highlights the rich, compelling stories behind science's greatest discoveries and the minds and methods that made them possible. Authoritative, entertaining, and easy to follow, it provides indispensable information on our current theories about the natural and physical world as well as a concise overview of how those ideas evolved.

Filled with illustrations, topical essays, and sidebars, these fascinating pages cover every major topic imaginable—astronomy, the human body and its inner workings, the nature of matter and energy, genetics and evolution, and the complex relationship between mind and behavior. Broken down by subject, the book provides readers with a thorough examination of each set of related theories as they are tested and refined and introduces all the major figures in the history of science, including Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Edison, Pasteur, Darwin, Pavlov, Curie, Einstein, Freud, Feynman, and Hawking. The lives of more than 45 scientists are captured in special time lines that add depth and detail to the running narrative.

Each discovery is presented as a detective story: the narrative focuses on how inquisitive investigators posit, revise, and improve upon their descriptions of nature. And like any first-rate mystery, it entices its readers, inviting them to match wits with the scientific sleuths whose theories for everything have unraveled nature's riddles and reshaped how we see our world.

About this title

About the Author:

John Langone was a veteran science journalist and author who had been an editor at both Discover and Time magazines, and a contributor to the science section of the New York Times, as well as a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard, a Fulbright fellow in Tokyo, and a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His previous books for National Geographic were The Mystery of Time and The New How Things Work.

From Booklist:

Written by seasoned popular-science authors, this typically colorful National Geographic production is a basic introduction to the historical process of science. The late Langone concisely introduces the concept of a theory, emphasizing that it is a general truth about the natural world and not, as in common parlance, a supposition. Definition in hand, the book dives into the oldest science, astronomy, with the most tenaciously held theory, Ptolemy's geocentric cosmos. As with ancient authority in other sciences, such as Galen on human physiology, Ptolemy put curiosity to sleep until Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton formulated testable theories that encompassed larger classes of phenomena. The treatment of the other major sciences likewise emphasizes the gradual overthrow of a reigning theory by a more comprehensive one. Addressing physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and neurology, the authors deploy graphical aids, including time lines, thumbnail biographies, and sidebars, to explain the major theories and figures in each science. With its profusion of illustrations, this is an inviting orientation to the fascinations of science. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0792239121
• ISBN 13: 9780792239123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408