A “radical retelling” (Financial Times) of the history of science—a tale of outsiders and unsung heroes from across the globe, far beyond the Western canon that most of us are taught.
When we think about the origins of modern science we usually begin in Europe. We remember the great minds of Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein. But the history of science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavor. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques that came from Arabic and Persian texts. Newton’s laws of motion used astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia. And when Einstein studied quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose.
Horizons is the history of science as it has never been told before, uncovering its unsung heroes. From Graman Kwasi, the seventeenth-century African botanist who discovered a new cure for malaria; to Hantaro Nagaoka, the nineteenth-century Japanese scientist who first described the structure of the atom; to Zhao Zhongyao, the twentieth-century Chinese physicist who discovered antimatter, this ambitious, revelatory history reveals how the most important scientific breakthroughs have come from the exchange of ideas from different cultures around the world.
