The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College

  • Eva Díaz
University of Chicago Press (2015) 9780226067988 | ISBN: 978-0-2260-6798-8

What links systems theorist and architect R. Buckminster Fuller with artistic innovators such as Josef Albers and John Cage? The answer is Black Mountain College, North Carolina. From 1933 to 1957, in this unaccredited institution in Appalachia, they and other “artist-scientists” created an iconic lab for experimental research in the arts. As art historian Eva Díaz reveals in this engrossing study, their explorations in materials, form, chance and indeterminacy were never less than electrifying. Her sympathetic portrait of Fuller as a utopian saving the world through geodesic geometry is particularly assured.

Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth

  • James Lawrence Powell
Columbia University Press (2014) 9780231164481 | ISBN: 978-0-2311-6448-1

Deep time, continental drift, meteorite impact and climate change: each of these twentieth-century geoscientific discoveries was once viewed as heretical. So reminds geologist James Powell in this exemplary treatise on scientific progress. He traces the evolution of each landmark finding through the work of the dogged researchers who proved it, step by step. Many fights were hard-won, as shown in the efforts of Gene Shoemaker, Luis and Walter Alvarez, Robin Canup and others who established connections between meteorite impact, the birth of the Moon and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers

  • Amir D. Aczel
Palgrave Macmillan (2015) 9781137279842 | ISBN: 978-1-1372-7984-2

Mathematician Amir Aczel was obsessed from childhood with the origins of numerals. This bracing mathematical detective story reveals how he cracked the puzzle: by homing in on zero. Close readings of classical texts convinced him that this subtle concept emanated from the East. He treks through the findings of archaeological scholar George Cœdès, the surprising nexus of sex and mathematics, and much of southeast Asia before hitting pay dirt with a seventh-century artefact in a dusty Cambodian shed.

A Scientist in Wonderland: A Memoir of Searching for Truth and Finding Trouble

  • Edzard Ernst
Imprint Academic (2015) 9781845407773 | ISBN: 978-1-8454-0777-3

During his 1993–2011 tenure as the world's first chair in complementary medicine (at the University of Exeter, UK), Edzard Ernst scrutinized alternative medical treatments, turning up false claims and sparking a furore among enthusiasts. As he shows in this ferociously frank autobiography, his early career was as dramatic — during a stint as chair of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Vienna, he uncovered the institution's historical involvement in medical experiments under the Third Reich. A clarion call for medical ethics.

Pioneers of Neurobiology: My Brilliant Eccentric Heroes

  • John G. Nicholls
Sinauer Associates (2015) 9781605353258 | ISBN: 978-1-6053-5325-8

This scientific memoir by neurobiologist John Nicholls takes the form of short biographical sketches focusing on the eccentricities of key people he has worked with or encountered, from Nobel prizewinners to lab technicians. It is quite a list, including Stephen Kuffler, Bernard Katz, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Gunther Stent and James Watson. Nicholls's gently amusing anecdotes shed light on the developing environment of molecular neurobiology, mostly in Europe and the United States, since the 1950s.