I just finished reading an interesting article in The New York Times titled License to Wonder. In it, the author talks about two misconceptions that students usually develop about science. But it was the author’s statement that ”there are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, but there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration — or lack of it — in the history of science” that jumped out at me.
Recently, Templeton Press published From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All Time: In Their Own Words by Marco Bersanelli and Mario Gargantini.
From time to time, the diligent science student huddled over dense volumes of research findings and highly technical data will stumble upon a truly rare treasure: the author’s answer to the question of, “Why?” Why did the authors of these volumes commit themselves so ardently to life in the laboratory? What was it that motivated them to keep their eye to the microscope for years on end? Why did the world’s greatest scientists devote their lives to research—an endeavor where failure is the exponentially more likely outcome than success?
In From Galileo to Gell-Mann, Bersanelli and Gargantini have gathered the answers to these fascinating questions from over one hundred of the brightest scientific minds from our past and present. It is a goldmine of insight that previously could only be found hidden deep within thousands of scattershot pages of footnotes from out-of-print journals, rare books, and unpublished papers.
To learn more about this publication, click here.
