Science & Technology

Einstein is the great icon of our age: the kindly refugee from oppression whose wild halo of hair, twinkling eyes, engaging humanity and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius. He was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days. His character, creativity and imagination were related, and they drove both his life and his science. In this marvellously...

In "Tesla: Man Out of Time, " Margaret Cheney explores the brilliant and prescient mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists and inventors. Called a madman by his enemies, a genius by others, and an enigma by nearly everyone, Nikola Tesla was, without a doubt, a trailblazing inventor who created astonishing, sometimes world-transforming devices that were virtually...

At Harvard, social acceptance and success with the opposite sex had to be applied for. In the absence of family money or innate charisma, misfit and maths prodigy Eduardo Saverin dreamed of joining one of Harvard's elite Final clubs. His best friend, painfully shy computer genius Mark Zuckerberg, turned instead to his natural talents, hacking into the university's computer system to create a...

James Hector was astounding. Scottish-born and trained as a surgeon, at 23 he took part in a daring British expedition to survey western Canada, and was given up for dead at a place still known - on account of his accident - as Kicking Horse Pass. Fortunately, he survived. Then head-hunted to carry out a geological survey of Otago, he arrived in New Zealand in 1861 and within a few years had...

Before there was CSI, there was one man who saw beyond the crime - and into the future of forensic science. His name was Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and through his use of cutting-edge science, he single-handedly brought criminal investigations into the modern age. As a young, charismatic physician in the early 20th century, Spilsbury hit the English justice system like a cannonball, garnering a...

Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in 20th-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the...