It’s one of the fundamental things that makes us human: wondering why the world is the way it is. For some of us, it is enough merely to wonder. For most, basic explanations of why and how we came to be here satisfy a casual curiosity. But for a special few – the British geniuses featured in this book – entire lives are dominated by posing questions that no one has asked before, and then finding the answers.That’s what this book is about: the lives and achievements of the Britons who discovered and decoded the mysteries of the universe. Men and women who changed our perception of ourselves and of our surroundings from a belief in mystical superstitions to rational understandings of our existence. Household names such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, but also lesser-known geniuses such as J.J. Thompson, John Hunter and Fred Hoyle.This history of British science and its scientists begins in the late seventh century, when Vikings were overrunning the last vestiges of Roman culture. Only a few monks in the north-east of England were keeping scientific enquiry alive by studying and translating classical Greek and Roman philosophical works of nature, medicine, astronomy and arithmetic. But in this tiny pocket of philosophical learning the course was being set for the unimaginably rich and fascinating journeys of scientific exploration that continue to this day.
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