Eurekas and Euphorias

• 'Review from other book by this author The crisp yet limpid style throughout is unusually attractive, the sources are impressively diverse and the level of writing makes the book suitable for non-scientists as well as for scientists in their own and disparate fields. This is a tour de force.' -Pre-publication endorsement of "Eurekas and Euphorias" from Bernard Dixon, former Editor of New Scientist ·
• 'a "wonderfully entertaining collection of scientific anecdotes' -The Sunday Telegraph 'hilarious compilation of scientific history, gossip and eccentricity' -Sunday Times · '...not only a fascinating read, it is a lesson about doing good science that may prove more valuable than a shelf of advanced text books. I strongly recommend this book to every scientist.' -Review of Walter Gratzer's "The Undergrowth of Science" in EMBO reports, vol 2, no. 9 2001 ·
• 'He is a good writer and holds the reader's attention well . . . What will be the next example of pathological science?...I would recommend Gratzer's book as a tool to help us recognize it sooner and fight it effectively.' -Review of Walter Gratzer's "The Undergrowth of Science" in Nature, Vol 408, 2nd November 2000 ·
• 'It's hilarious, baffling, surreal, dry, shocking, and almost always enthralling [...] You'll want this book just for the delight of reading it. You'll also want it if you ever do any public speaking - it's a treasure house of suitable stories' -Focus magazine

A collection of fascinating stories, entertainingly told, showing the human face of science. Eurekas and Euphorias contains around 200 anecdotes brilliantly illustrating scientists in all their shapes: the obsessive and the dilettantish, the genial, the envious, the preternaturally brilliant and the slow-witted who sometimes see further in the end, the open-minded and the intolerant, recluses and arrivistes. Told with wit and relish by Walter Gratzer, here are stories to delight, astonish, instruct, and most especially, entertain the general reader,

scientist and non-scientist alike.

Contents

• The great stench
• Culture clash
• The reveries of Kekule
• Rontgen's rays
• Light on sweetness: the discovery of aspartame
• Otto Stern's sulphurous cigars
• Metchnikoff restored to life
• An ill wind
• Marie Curie and the Immortals
• 'Every integer his personal friend': Hardy visits Ramanujan
• David Hilbert's eulogy
• Rabi meets his match
• The Bucklands explode a miracle
• Farmyard thermodynamics
• Newton ponders
• Rutherford finds a solution
• The vanishing blackboard
• Cats and dogmas
• But what use is it?
• Unlocking the chains
• Of life and death :
• Mathematical peril
• Fortune favours the ham fist
• To discern a true vocation
• The Pauli principle
• The first eureka
• Lordly disdain
• A martyr to science
• The marble and the mop
• Pythagoras's theme
• New ways with barometers
• The professor remembers
• Dalton's daltonism
• The trick of the tick
• Comfort in adversity
• Winter in Paris: Becquerel and the discovery of radioactivity
• The unbreakable cypher
• Two hundred monks aleaping and the devil in the bottle
• The success of the operation and the death of the patient
• Pendant professor
• Feud
• The man of few words
• Mauled by the Bulldog
• Damping the canine rotor
• Nemesis in Nancy
• Mathematician's melodrama
• Ben Franklin stills the waves
• Fraternal fire
• The wages of sin
• Loving an enzyme
• The poltergeist next door
• The problem solver
• The Resonance Bridge
• A laboratory libation
• Slot machine yields jackpot
• Shooting down Venus
• None so blind
• Raising the dead
• Vibrios in Vienna
• Drowning the telephone
• Trouble at t'lab
• The child is father to the man
• Hooke's tease
• Know your adversary
• The divine spark comes by night
• Following by example
• Science for survival
• The hounding of J. J.Sylvester
• The quiet American
• Solving the insoluble
• A sceptic confounded
• Wrong experiment, right conclusion
• Old soldiers never die
• A case of night starvation
• Fortunate furtive encounter
• Eddington's disobedient conscience
• Smoking for the Fuhrer
• Polish and perish
• Baccy and quanta
• The country doctor, his captive, and the professor
• Whispers from the void
• The lying stones of Mount Eivelstadt
• The mind of a mathematician
• The old melon
• Strong medicine
• A Russian tragedy
• The way of the world
• Tug of war on the thread of life
• The trivial and profound
• Phlogiston consigned to flames
• The errant compass
• Liberation by fire
• How small is small?
• Seeing sparks
• A Victorian tragedy, a twentieth-century sequel
• A visit to the Fuhrer
• Butterfly in Beijing
• Cook knows best
• Chemistry in the kitchen: the discovery of nitrocellulose
• The living fossil
• The sound of physics
• Grand Guignol
• The mathematical wallpaper
• Out of the mouths of poets
• Venomous vermin
• A principle misapplied
• A message from space
• The emperor's chessboard
• A modest appraisal
• The little green men who weren't
• The virtues of squalor
• Hevesy's subterfuge
• Crystal clear
• Little brown dog
• Friends and enemies
• The maestro's gaffe
• Hybrid vigour
• Buffon's balls of fire
• Science in extremis and the phosphorescent toothpaste
• Their Lordships kick a football
• The power of incantations
• Hoax!
• Humphry Davy gives himself airs
• Truth stranger than fiction
• The mosquito bites back
• Some are born great
• Victorian vitality
• Charles Goodyear vulcanizes
• Pasteur wields the tweezers
• The limits of logic
• As in a dream
• Metal takes wing
• A mathematical death
• Shocking experiment
• Gallon surpassed
• Beef and ale
• The wrath of fools
• Domestic horror show
• A ball on Mars
• Boyle on the boil
• The physicist as travelling salesman
• Monsieur LeBlanc's solicitude
• The emperor and the scientist
• The man of principle
• The stolen invention
• The Jesuits and the bomb
• Ferreting out a virus
• A man's world
• The shock of recognition
• Fruits of the sea
• A slice of pi
• The last of the true amateurs
• Dr Pincus's pill
• The frivolous philosophe
• Koch on cooking
• The heat of the light
• A world of science in a teacup
• A copper or two
• The savants and the chauvinists
• The case of the flaccid ears
• The good-natured philosopher
• A myth and its genesis
• 'Where the hormones there moan I'
• The disagreeable man
• The crackle that made history
• The physicist's peregrinations
• From mania to miracle
• Madame la savante
• The gold standard
• Margin of error
• Pomposity and circumstance
• The use of vacations
• The lecturer's craft
• The purple cloud
• The fist in the fistula
• Tripping over an answer
• Throwing the hounds off the scent The body's bounty
• The flat-earther's revenge
• Potholes on the path to fame
• Humboldt's stratagem