Dava Sobel

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day—"the longitude problem."
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration...

Sobel paints an unforgettable portrait of the Copernican Revolution. Encouraged by his German protégé, Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric model of the universe, tantalizing 16th-century mathematicians and scientists--and triggering a groundswell of opposition.

"The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo's Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many remarkable young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own. "Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name," writes Dava...