George Johnson

Science in the twenty-first century has become industrialized. The experiments so often acclaimed in the newspapers—sequencing the genome, proving the existence of the top quark, discovering a new planet by analyzing the wobble of a distant star—cost millions of dollars and research teams that have grown to the size of corporations. But until very recently, the most earthshaking science came from individual pairs of hands. These experiments were designed and conducted with such straightforward elegance that they deserve to be called beautiful. Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, brings us back to the days when a single mind confronting the unknown could uncover a new law of the universe.