Galileo's Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing - Hardcover

"Science only knows one commandment: contribute to science." This line, spoken by the title character in Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo, inspired the title of this collection of science writing by 59 diverse authors. Most of the pieces collected by editor Edmund Blair Bolles are excerpted from texts by working scientists or natural philosophers, including George Smoot of NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer to Lucretius. Marie Curie's joy on seeing the lovely, glowing bottles of impure radium in her workroom at night is just one of the vivid images to be extracted from this volume, though with far less effort than the radium cost the Curies.

Edmund Blair Bolles is a professional writer living in New York City. He has written books on many subjects, usually focusing on their basis in science. Bolles is the author of So Much To Say, a book about children's language, Remembering and Forgetting, a book about the nature of memory, and Second Way of Knowing, a book about perception.