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Previous Volume 349:2471 December 18, 2003 Number 25 Next

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By John Waller. 308 pp., illustrated. New York, Oxford University Press, 2002. $30. ISBN 0-19-860719-9.

In The Act of Creation, which was written almost 40 years ago, Arthur Koestler argued convincingly that very few ideas in science ever prove to be truly original. When they are, the originators seem to be so far ahead of their time that their contemporaries are unable to understand their ideas. Good examples of such thinkers are Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. As Alexander Pope put it aptly in his epitaph for Newton, "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." Concepts that seem original almost always stem from earlier . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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