DO YOU think James Lind proved that fruit juice prevents scurvy? That Robert Watson-Watt invented radar? That Isaac Newton showed a prism splitting white light into pure colours? Reader, you are the weakest link in the history-of-science round and must leave the contest.
If only you had read John Waller’s Leaps in the Dark, you would have known better. Like his earlier successful book, Fabulous Science, it examines a collection of hoary tales from science’s past. All their tellers are convicted of crimes ranging from oversimplification to outright falsehood. Sometimes, as with Watson-Watt or the microbiologist Selman Waksman, credited with discovery of streptomycin, this is due…
