Science is about discovery, a journey towards knowledge.

With authors as diverse as Galileo and Lewis Carroll, the extracts featured in this anthology span centuries and continents; they include startling revelations that changed the way we think and tackle more prosaic questions such as why the sea is salty; they consider the natural beauty of the snowflake and the man-made wonder of the first computer. What links them all is a desire to understand, explain and enrich the world, and the ability to communicate this in original, clear and engaging prose.

‘Relaxed, sunny and domesticated . . . the science emerges naturally, and reflectively from our familiar world’ Guardian
‘The Art of Science showcases not only readable translations of key scientific ideas but situates those ideas in their cultural and historical context’ Independent

Richard Hamblyn is the author of The Invention of Clouds, which won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Terra: Tales of the Earth, a study of natural disasters, Data Soliloquies, co-written with the digital artist Martin John Callanan, and The Cloud Book, published in association with the Met Office. He teaches creative writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.