The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed data that didn’t support the case he was making. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity was only “confirmed” in 1919 because an eminent British scientist massaged his figures. Joseph Lister’s famously spotless hospital wards were actually notoriously dirty. Gregor Mendel, supposed father of the science of heredity, never grasped the fundamental principles of “Mendelian” genetics. The history of science used to be presented as a heroic saga, in which a few far-seeing geniuses overcame the petty opposition of lesser minds to establish new scientific truths. But over recent decades, historians of science have cast a much more critical eye over their subject. Delving into laboratory notebooks and reconstructing once-fierce debates, they have challenged many of our basic assumptions about the nature of science and the roles its greatest heroes played. “Einstein’s Luck” reveals many of these findings to the general reader.
