Beginnings, Blunders and Breakthroughs in Science

This ebook is an updated and revised version of The Cause of Mosquitoes’ Sorrow: Beginnings, Blunders and Breakthroughs in Science (Icon Books, UK; paperback 2007) and Beginnings, Blunders and Breakthroughs in Science (MJF Books, USA; hardback, 2007)

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Just how the scientific discoveries that have changed our world come about? ‘Beginnings, Blunders and Breakthroughs in Science’ investigates the eureka moments, the serendipities and the plain errors that have peppered the science’s last 2,500 years. 


Overflowing with wit, insight and information, the book offers chronological account that takes us from ancient Egypt and the earliest reference to ‘pi’ to the twenty-first century and the discovery that ended the search for the elusive God particle. 


In 191 short, sharp and simple stories you’ll learn, with surprise and delight: 


• How anaesthesia was discovered at a party 
• Who, in the sixth century BC claimed that the earth is round 
• Why the Riemann hypothesis remains mathematics’ greatest unsolved problem 
• Who announced that because Great Britain had ‘plenty of messenger boys’, it had no need for the telephone 
• How Vesalius, in 1543, scotched the idea that men have one rib fewer that women 
• How a sewerage farm odour reducer benefitted medicine 



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Surendra Verma is a journalist and author based in Melbourne, Australia. He has published numerous popular science books internationally, which have been translated into 13 languages.