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Newton, the alchemist
John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, once described Issac Newton and physicists of his time as “not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers”. The British economist, rather uncharacteristically, did not substantiate. But in The Clockwork Universe, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society and the Birth of …
Evolution of ideas
When German inventor Johannes Gutenberg devised the printing press, he scarcely had an inkling of his debt to China. But as Steven Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From, A Natural History of Innovation, the 15th century inventor would not have managed without Chinese ink and movable type. The …
In their elements
At school the periodic table was one of those things to be mugged up. Some - how the iron, silver and gold in Mendeleev’s chart seemed alien to the stuff we used everyday. Pity we did not have Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon. The book tells the histories of the …
