Eurekas and Euphorias by Walter Gratzer, Oxford University Press, 拢16.99, ISBN 0192804030 Reviewed by Robert Matthews
THE Victorian critic and Oxford don Sir Walter Raleigh once described anthologies as like the plums and orange peel picked out of a cake. And usually pretty stale cake at that, one is tempted to add. All too often, anthologies are collections of the trite and the twee, interspersed with the tedious. Yet they do have their uses 鈥� providing handy quotes from obscure Victorians with which to start reviews.
The best of them cast fascinating new light on familiar characters, their personalities and their achievements. By that reckoning, Eurekas and Euphorias, an anthology of scientific anecdotes compiled by Walter Gratzer, stands head and shoulders above the rest as a source of eclectic and entertaining insights into the scientific mind.
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Chief among those insights is that there is no such thing as the scientific mind: the motivation and approaches of scientists are as varied as their personalities. Thus we read how John Hunter, the celebrated 18th-century Scottish anatomist, felt he had to test his ideas about the spread of venereal disease by infecting himself with gonorrhoea, while a century later Albert Neisser of Dresden thought it perfectly acceptable to test his theories by infecting four healthy people with syphilis.
Like the rest of us, even great scientists can look at the same evidence and each draw radically different conclusions that say more about their personalities than their brilliance. Gratzer recounts how in the late 1930s both Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard had worked out that there was a chance that explosive nuclear chain reactions might be possible. Like all too many scientists today, Fermi refused to look beyond the low odds of that threat becoming reality. Szilard, for whom science was inextricably bound to politics, insisted that the key issue was what would happen if that remote possibility came up.
Gratzer includes many old favourites, of course: Richard Feynman and the wobbling plate which led to his Nobel prize, Jocelyn Bell鈥檚 discovery of 鈥渁lien鈥� signals from outer space and Evariste Galois鈥檚 announcement of a new field of mathematics the night before the duel that killed him. Even so, around 90 per cent of the 170-plus anecdotes here were new to me. And all of them attest to Gratzer鈥檚 knack for picking stories that may seem merely entertaining at a first reading, but leave you pondering the issues long afterwards.