Includes index.

"Just how did the scientific discoveries that have changed our world come about? Surendra Verma investigates the eureka moments, the serendipities and the plain errors that have peppered science's last 2,000 years. From the 6th century BC and Pythagora's claims that the world was round, to the 1989 announcment of nuclear fusion in a glass jar, Surendra Verma trawls through history in search of the more human side of science. Read about Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer ; the Riemann hypothesis, mathematics' greatest unsolved problem ; William Preece, a Post Office chief engineer who declared that 'Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys' ; the forgery of Piltdown Man, the fossil thought to be the 'missing link' ; how Vesalius scotched the idea that men have one rib fewer that women ; and much more, including the bane of mosquitoes everywhere, the insecticide DDT ... "- back cover.

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