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This book tells the remarkable lives of the pioneers of science -
from Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Darwin, Pasteur and Marie
Curie, to Einstein, Freud, Turing, and Crick and Watson. A series
of seventy articles, written by an international team of
distinguished scientists, historians of science and science
writers, provides an unrivalled account of the lives and
personalities behind the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all
time. Organized thematically, starting at the 'Universe', and
moving smaller through the 'Earth' and 'Molecules and Matter' to
'Inside the Atom', with the final two sections looking at 'Life'
and 'Body and Mind', it covers all the major scientific
disciplines, including astronomy, biology, biochemistry, chemistry,
computing, ecology, geology, medicine, neurology, physics and
psychology, as well as mathematics. The Scientists will intrigue
budding scientists, those fascinated by the lives of great
individuals, and anyone curious to know how over the centuries we
came to understand the physical world around us and inside us.
With our access to Google Maps, Global Positioning Systems, and
Atlases that cover all regions and terrains and tell us precisely
how to get from one place to another, we tend to forget there was
ever a time when the world was unknown and uncharted-a mystery
waiting to be solved. In On the Edge, Roger McCoy tells the
captivating-and often harrowing-story of the 400 year effort to map
North America's Coasts. Much of the book is based on the narratives
of mariners who sought a passage through the continent to Asia and
produced maps as a byproduct of their journeys. These courageous
explorers had to rely on the most rudimentary mapping tools and to
contend with unimaginably harsh conditions: ship-crushing ice
floes; the threat of frostbite, scurvy, and starvation; gold fever
and mutiny; ice that could lock them in for months on end; and,
inevitably, the failure to find the elusive Northwest passage.
Telling the story from the explorers' perspective, McCoy allows
readers to see how maps of their voyages were made and why they
were so full of errors, as well as how they gradually acquired
greater accuracy, especially after the longitude problem was
solved. On the Edge tracks the dramatic voyages of John Cabot, John
Davis, Captain Cook, Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher, John Franklin
(who nearly starved to death and become known in England as "the
man who ate his boots"), and others, concluding with Robert Peary,
Otto Sverdrup, and Vihjalmur Steffanson in the early twentieth
century. Drawing upon diaries, journals, and other primary
sources-and including a set of maps charting the progress of
exploration over time-On the Edge shows exactly how we came to know
the shape of our continent.
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