Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science (Hardcover)
Featuring two hundred color plates, this history of the craft of scientific inquiry is as exquisite as the experiments it documents.
This illustrated history of experimental science is more than just a celebration of the ingenuity that scientists and natural philosophers have used throughout the ages to study—and to change—the world. Here we see in intricate detail experiments that have, in some way or another, exhibited elegance and beauty: in their design, their conception, and their execution. Celebrated science writer Philip Ball invites readers to marvel at and admire the craftsmanship of scientific instruments and apparatus on display, from the earliest microscopes to the giant particle colliders of today. With Ball as our expert guide, we are encouraged to think carefully about what experiments are, what they mean, and how they are used. Ranging across millennia and geographies, Beautiful Experiments not only demonstrates why “experiment” remains a contested notion in how the work of science is done, but also explains how we came to understand how the world functions, what it contains, and where the pursuit of that understanding has brought us today.
This illustrated history of experimental science is more than just a celebration of the ingenuity that scientists and natural philosophers have used throughout the ages to study—and to change—the world. Here we see in intricate detail experiments that have, in some way or another, exhibited elegance and beauty: in their design, their conception, and their execution. Celebrated science writer Philip Ball invites readers to marvel at and admire the craftsmanship of scientific instruments and apparatus on display, from the earliest microscopes to the giant particle colliders of today. With Ball as our expert guide, we are encouraged to think carefully about what experiments are, what they mean, and how they are used. Ranging across millennia and geographies, Beautiful Experiments not only demonstrates why “experiment” remains a contested notion in how the work of science is done, but also explains how we came to understand how the world functions, what it contains, and where the pursuit of that understanding has brought us today.
Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water and The Music Instinct. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.
“Beautiful Experiments is an engrossing tour through 2500 years of innovation, imagination, and colorful personalities. Too often, experiments are dropped out of science history, assumed to be yet another tool that scientists use to construct theories. Ball brings experiments—in all their materiality, ingenuity, and beauty—back not only into history but into human culture.”
— Robert P. Crease, author of "The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science"
— Robert P. Crease, author of "The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science"