A discovery has a personal history
Books
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel tells how John Harrison, a self-taught English clockmaker, spent decades building a sea clock accurate enough to fix a ship’s longitude, while astronomers and officials favored other methods. It is short and brisk.
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
Andrea Wulf
Andrea Wulf follows Alexander von Humboldt from his expedition through South America to his influence on Darwin, Thoreau and John Muir, showing how he came to see nature as one interconnected system.
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
Robert Kanigel
Robert Kanigel tells the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a largely self-taught mathematician from southern India who wrote to G. H. Hardy in Cambridge, worked with him through the First World War and died at thirty-two.
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
James D. Watson
James Watson gives his own brisk, gossipy account of the race to find DNA’s structure in 1953. It is revealing about ambition in science, and notoriously unfair to Rosalind Franklin, whose data he used.
The Strangest Man
Graham Farmelo
Graham Farmelo portrays Paul Dirac, a founder of quantum mechanics who predicted antimatter, and his famously literal, taciturn manner, which Farmelo suggests may reflect autism. It won the Costa Biography Award.