by Len Fisher | 4 May 2015 | Mini Stories from Science
When I started this series of Mini Stories, I did so out of pique. Not one, but two agents had told me that people would not be interested in a book about how scientists think. I thought that they would be – or, at least, that they ought to be, and would be if someone... 
by Len Fisher | 6 Feb 2015 | Mini Stories from Science
I thought that this would be an easy post to write. Just scour through some scientists’ autobiographies (I have around a hundred on my shelves), pick out some quotes, and the post would write itself. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Because scientists love talking... 
by Len Fisher | 19 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
I’m getting a bit carried away with Einstein here, but he is one of my heroes, and the Special Theory of Relativity was only a start. Eleven years later, he completed his General Theory of Relativity, based on another very simple, but very deep, “What if?” question.... 
by Len Fisher | 18 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
The trouble with you, Mr. Einstein, is that you don’t know how to count. Einstein’s childhood violin teacher The calculations that Einstein performed to draw his conclusions from the simple initial “what if?” assumption needed a new sort of mathematics. Just as he... 
by Len Fisher | 16 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
Albert Einstein not only fitted the stereotypical image of a scientist – he helped to create it, and also played up to it. With his old rumpled clothes, his shock of hair, and a violin case under his arm, he was a journalist’s delight, just as Stephen Hawking is...