Weighing The Soul

Description

Science and common-sense often don't mix. In fact, many of the biggest insights only occur when people are forced beyond common-sense explanations in their search to understand how the world works. With his usual mix of wit and wisdom, Len Fisher tells the fascinating stories behind some of the great as well as some of the not-so-great scientific ideas of the past - those that were truly bizarre, peculiar or downright daft, and those that just seemed that way at the time. As he shows, it is often only with hindsight that the two can be told apart, and it is some of those who appeared most wrong - and whose proponents were variously ignored, persecuted and imprisoned as a result - that ultimately went on to be proved most right. Len's engaging style takes us from Frankenstein's monster to pacemakers, from The Water Babies to the structure of DNA, from one American doctor's attempts to weigh the human soul through to the necessary mysteries of modern science, and in revealing the human stories behind some of science's most important discoveries, he proves Schopenhauer's famous maxim: 'All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.'