This book presents 26 of the most compelling stories from the history of science, starting with A for Absolute Zero and concluding with Z for Zwicky, the maverick American astrophysicist who was the first to conjecture the existence of dark matter. In the course of this journey through the alphabet, the reader will encounter a series of fascinating characters: the French astronomer who gave up everything to chase the transits of Venus; the Italian nuclear physicist who decided to quit physics and study Cambrian trilobites rather than join the Manhattan Project; the caustic Austrian scientist who, equally at ease with psychoanalysis and the laws of quantum mechanics, revealed the hidden secrets of dreams and the periodic table of chemical elements; the young Indian astrophysicist who was the first to understand how a star dies; and the French scholar forced to hide her sex behind a false identity in order to publish the fundamental theorems on prime numbers. And so on and so forth. Each story is self-contained and can be read briefly, perhaps the time between two stations, making the book the ideal companion for countless real or metaphorical journeys. weiterlesen