100 Ideas that Changed the World

Essays from such authorities as Brian Cox, Patrick Moore, Richard Dawkins, and Marcus du Sautoy offer glimpses into the minds behind history's greatest eureka moments With selections nominated by experts from all fields of science and engineering, this fascinating book explores 100 of the most forward thinking, far-reaching, and downright inspired ideas and inventions in history. The essays cover topics as diverse as the Big Bang, vaccination, computing, radioactivity, human genomes, the wheel, and more. Each essay looks at the logic behind these great inventions, discoveries, theories, and experiments, studying the circumstances that brought them into being and assessing the impact that they had on the world at large. From the earliest understandings of our place in the solar system, via Darwinism, DNA, neutrons, and quarks, right up to the theories that are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge today, we are forever propelled forward by our most gifted scientific minds.

Jheni Osman is the award-winning former editor of the BBC's award-winning science and technology magazine, Focus. She launched the Focus app and presented the podcast and FocusTV. She has also written for Countryfile and Lonely Planet magazines, and in TV production at the BBC's Natural History Unit.