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Innovators - Donald Kirsch ***

This was a difficult review to write. The idea is a good one - sixteen innovative scientists whose ideas were first doubted but came to be mainstream thinking. Donald Kirsch does a good job of making their work accessible. The focus is heavily biased towards medical science (reflecting the author's background) with the likes McClintock, Semmelweis, Rous, Prusiner, Cushman and Ondetti, Sehgal and Warren and Marshall. If most of these names are unfamiliar, I'd also suggest that most aren't as transformative as the likes of Galileo, Planck, and Wegener, but they still provide interesting stories.

I'm not sure I would have included Rachel Carson, who despite being a scientist isn't well known for visionary science (and whose advocacy resulted in the abandonment of DDT, even in controlled fashion that could have saved many lives). But my big concern about the book is the result of two others names already mentioned above. These are the ones I know a significant amount about - and both are flawed. Admittedly that's just two out of 16 - but I can't help but wonder if there are aspects of other subjects that are equally problematic. My bugbears are Galileo and Planck.

Although Kirsch is mostly historically okay on Galileo, the piece on him totally misses the point any historian of science would make that his major contribution to science was nothing to do with the Copernican system, but his physics book Two New Systems. While Galileo did make a couple of first astronomical observations, notably the Galilean moons of Jupiter, his support of the Copernican system was just one of many, with most of his observations already made by others (and his observations actually could just as easily have supported the Tychonian system). The only reason, to be honest, this part of his work is of such interest is the story of his trial, not his science. And, of course, it wasn't his original idea.

By contrast, the Planck piece demonstrates over and over that the author has no clue about quantum physics, or physics history. Just to give a couple of examples, we are told ‘Einstein published his theory [of relativity] in 1905 and received the Nobel Prize in 1921, reasonably quick acceptance for such a totally revolutionary idea.’ Admittedly he did publish his special theory of relativity in 1905, but his big one, the general theory was published in 1915 (and the text makes it clear the author is referring to both theories). Most damningly, Einstein got his Nobel Prize for a totally different piece of work on the photoelectric effect - it had nothing to do with relativity. Another example: we are told that Schrodinger’s cat experiment ‘is binary… it happens that all computing is binary, based on strings of ones and zeroes…’ and uses this as an explanation of quantum computing. But the whole point of Schrodinger’s cat is that is in a superposed state - and quantum computing is not based on zero/one bits, but on qubits, which aren't  binary.

I've never read (or written) a book without a few small errors, but I’m afraid these are too big to overlook.

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