How We Learned What We Know

Fara begins in Mesopotamia and refuses to treat European science as the destination. The best single-volume global history of the subject.

The standard account of science from 600 BCE to 1450, and unusually fair to the medieval period that most popular histories skip as a blank.

The book that gave us the paradigm shift and argued that science does not progress by accumulation. Read it now so that the rest of the pathway has a shape to argue with.

A British Museum volume with specialist chapters on Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Mesoamerican astronomy. One book for the whole ancient sky.

The classic account of Babylonian and Egyptian mathematical astronomy, by the scholar who established that the Greeks inherited far more than they invented.

Indian mathematics and astronomy from the Vedic period onward, including the Kerala school's infinite series two centuries before Newton and Leibniz.

A physicist on the Arabic scientific tradition, from the translation movement to al-Biruni and Ibn Sina. Published in Britain as The House of Wisdom.

Read the selections on vision and the camera obscura. Ibn al-Haytham tested his claims by experiment six centuries before anyone in Europe made a method of it.

Saliba argues that the European revolution used Arabic astronomical models directly, and that the transmission was far later and far deeper than usually admitted.

Needham's own essays posing the question that carries his name, from the scholar who spent fifty years documenting Chinese science.

A distillation of Needham's enormous project into one illustrated volume of inventions, with the dates that make the point.

How a Cambridge biochemist fell for a Chinese scientist, learned the language, and rewrote the history of science. The biography makes the project comprehensible.

Opens by denying there was such a thing, then explains it anyway. The best short corrective to the heroic version.

Written as a conversation between three men so that Galileo could argue for Copernicus without appearing to. It did not work and he was tried for it.

Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler as they were: mystical, wrong about a great deal, and stumbling into the right answer. Koestler's Kepler is unforgettable.

Humboldt, who saw nature as a connected web and predicted human-caused climate change in 1800, and who was the most famous scientist in the world before being forgotten.

How science arrived in India as an instrument of rule, what Indians did with it, and why the colonial laboratory is not a footnote to the European one.

The Great Trigonometrical Survey: fifty years of measuring India to the inch, thousands of dead surveyors and porters, and the mountain that got named after the wrong man.

Read the first four chapters and the last. Darwin argues like a lawyer building a case he knows will be attacked, and the caution is part of the achievement.

How geology discovered deep time, and why the discovery required a change in what counted as evidence rather than new evidence.

The evolutionists before Darwin, from al-Jahiz in ninth-century Baghdad through Buffon and Lamarck to Darwin's own grandfather. Nobody arrives at an idea alone.

The women hired at Harvard to measure photographic plates, one of whom worked out how to measure the distance to other galaxies. Henrietta Leavitt's law is the ruler modern cosmology uses.

Bohr and Einstein arguing for thirty years about whether the theory describes reality or only predicts measurements. The best account of the debate for a general reader.

Meitner worked out that the nucleus had split, from exile, by letter, and the Nobel went to Hahn alone. Sime's biography is the standard account of how that happened.

Nine hundred pages that are also the best history of twentieth-century physics, because the physics and the weapon cannot be separated.

Wu designed and ran the experiment that overturned the conservation of parity. Her two theorist colleagues received the Nobel for predicting it.

Bose demonstrated millimetre radio waves before Marconi's transatlantic signal, refused to patent anything, and then spent his career on plant physiology.

Ray's own account: mercurous nitrite, the first Indian pharmaceutical company, and a chemist who thought industrial self-reliance was a political act.

Raman found the effect that carries his name using equipment costing a few hundred rupees, and won the Nobel two years later. The biography is by a physicist and does not skip the science.

Saha, Bhabha and Bhatnagar building a scientific state out of an independence movement. Anderson covers the ionisation equation and the politics with equal seriousness.

The Black women mathematicians who calculated trajectories for NASA in a segregated building. Shetterly's book is more careful and more interesting than the film.

Cells taken without consent in 1951 that are still growing in every lab in the world, and a family that could not afford health insurance. Consent, race and property in one story.

The same handful of physicists defended tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole and then fossil fuels, using one technique: manufacture doubt. Documented from the archives.