A Century of Nature : Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World

Rating:
Summary: A lovely book
Review: I had hoped this chonicle of twenty-one discoveries would be pentetrable by the intelligent, but not specialized reader.
I was disappointed.
The introductions to the articles reprinted from Nature are sometimes more dense then the articles themselves - and occasionally nothing more than songs of praise for Nature having printed the article.
Many of the Nature articles are simply beyond the comprehension of the reader who is untrained in the subject.
Probably a fine book for those with deep scientific credentialing, but not necessarily so for the intelligent layperson.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: Overly ambitious
Review: I had hoped this chonicle of twenty-one discoveries would be pentetrable by the intelligent, but not specialized reader.
I was disappointed.
The introductions to the articles reprinted from Nature are sometimes more dense then the articles themselves - and occasionally nothing more than songs of praise for Nature having printed the article.
Many of the Nature articles are simply beyond the comprehension of the reader who is untrained in the subject.
Probably a fine book for those with deep scientific credentialing, but not necessarily so for the intelligent layperson.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: A lovely book
Review: Over the past century "Nature" has been the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, along with its less cosmopolitan rival, "Science." Laura Garwin has selected 21 papers published between 1920 and 2000 to illustrate both the quality of the journal and the development of science in the twentieth century. Each paper is prefaced by a short essay written by an expert in the field, outlining the background and impact of the paper. Some of these introductions cover all of the information necessary to allow someone with even a minimal high school science background to read the following paper with full understanding; others make slightly higher demands. Most of the papers are quite short. As a current reader of Nature, I can testify that Garwin et al. chose papers that are far easier to read than the average.

Is this a complete history of science in the 20th century? No, it is very selective, and reflects the fact that much of the best work in theorectical physics prior to World War II appeared in German, while more recent theoretical particle physicists have favored "Physical Review" over "Nature". You can, however, find the discovery of the neutron here, and the discovery of nuclear fission that paved the way for the atom bomb just a few years later. Plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading, pulsars and planets, DNA and T cells, buckyballs and Dolly, the cloned sheep- all are included.

This book has the richness of actual science, with narrative skills of good science popularization. I am afraid I must disagree with the earlier reviewer's ciriticism. While Steven Weinberg's Foreward is a bit patronizing, the other introductions are all helpful. While some of the papers demand attention, they are all so short that they don't demand your attention for very long. Highly recommended.