Mad Science Experiments

Amazing Stories from the History of Science

The Book

Science Book of the Year 2005 in Germany 
 
You don't have to be an eccentric obsessive to be a scientist, but it helps...In "The Mad Science Book", Reto Schneider tells the extraordinary tales of 100 of the more unusual experiments conducted across seven centuries of science.
 
From the attempts of the 14th-century Dominican monk Theodoric von Freiberg to discover the cause of the rainbow, to the efforts of the 20th-century psychologist Harry Harlow to be the perfect mother to a family of reluctant rhesus monkeys, these are stories that are often bizarre, sometimes mind-boggling - occasionally stomach-churning - but always divert ing, informative and enlightening.
 
Among the myriad delights on display in this cabinet of scientific curiosities are the renowned doctor from Padua who sat in a pair of scales for 30 years, recording the minutest changes in his weight; the sheep, the duck and the rooster who became the world's first air passengers; the disgusting Dr Stubbins Ffirth, who swallowed other people's vomit in an attempt to prove that yellow fever cannot be transmitted from one person to another; the hapless soldier Alexis St Martin, left with a hole in his stomach after an accident with a musket; and the ever-optimistic Charles-Edouard Brown-Seq uard, who injected himself with essence of guinea pigs' testicles as an anti-ageing remedy.
There is trivia here in abundance, but also quirky, but genuinely influential, science, notably Merrill Flood's and Melvin Dresher's experiments with choices of outcomes, which have been widely influential as game theory.
 
A fizzing cocktail of fascinating science and rich entertainment, "The Mad Science Book" tells the extraordinary stories of some truly, madly, geeky people. It should be top of every self-respecting science buff's Christmas 2008 wishlist.
 

Poll: The 10 Weird 
Experiments -
Vote for Your Favourite

 
Read about Nicolas Minovivis strange hanging studies and nine other bizarre experiments.

Quiz

"Do embarrassement researchers ask you to suck a pacifier in public?"

"Did Darwin play the bassoon for worms?"

Know the answers? Then you are ready for the mad experiments quiz.

Editions

English

The Mad Science Book
(Quercus 2008)
buy (uk)
(uk) (ger)

German

Das Buch der verrückten Experimente
(Bertelsmann 2004)

Dutch

Bizarre Wetenschap
(Elmar 2004)
buy


Swedish

De Galna Experimentens Bok
(Fahrenheit 2006)
buy


Corean

매드
사이언스 북
(Puriwa Ipari 2008 )


Polish
111 najbardziej szalonych eksperymentów(Proszynski 2009)
buy

Chinese
to come 2009 (SDX Joint Publishing Company)

Italian
to come 2009 (Garzanti)