"Drawing on the lives of five great scientists -- Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein -- scientist/author Mario Livio shows how even the greatest scientists made major mistakes and how science built on these errors to achieve breakthroughs, especially into the evolution of life and the universe"--

A falling apple inspired Isaac Newton's insight into the law of gravity-or so the story goes. Is it true? Perhaps not. But the more intriguing question is why such stories endure as explanations of how science happens. Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science brushes away popular misconceptions to provide a clearer picture of great scientific breakthroughs from ancient times to the present. Among the myths refuted in this volume is the idea that...

Why do we catch colds? What causes seasons to change? And if you fire a bullet from a gun and drop one from your hand, which bullet hits the ground first? In a pinch we almost always get these questions wrong. Worse, we regularly misconstrue fundamental qualities of the world around us. In Scienceblind, cognitive and developmental psychologist Andrew Shtulman shows that the root of our misconceptions lies in the theories about the world we develop...

"Science is how we understand the world. Yet critical flaws in peer review, statistical methods, and publication procedures have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless-or worse, badly misleading. Drawing on surprising new data from "meta-science" (the science of how science works), Science Fictions documents the errors that have distorted our knowledge on issues as varied as cancer biology, nutrition, genetics, immigration, education,...