More Great Scientists

The extraordinary Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, who featured in our first collection of Great Scientists and their Discoveries, famously declared: 'The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters of this language are triangles, circles and other geometrical forms.' One theme that emerges from this new collection of remarkable scientists is that nearly all were brilliant mathematicians. In fact, it was the detailed mathematical observations of the first of them, Nicolas Copernicus, in the fifteenth century, which brought about the revolution in scientific thinking that led directly to Galileo's own discoveries some fifty years later. Copernicus could fairly be said to have stood not only the world, but the entire universe, on its head. His discovery that the planets, including the Earth, revolved around the sun overturned centuries of thinking. It was commonly assumed in the Middle Ages that the great thinkers of the past, particularly the ancient Greeks, had solved all the mysteries of nature. People believed that the aim of science, or 'natural philosophy', was to learn what these masters of the ancient world could teach us.