THE TEN MOST BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

Rather than tackling the most IMPORTANT experiments throughout history, Johnson takes a more engaging approach (to the layman, anyway). He examines the 10 most BEAUTIFUL experiments—the ones that contained in them an elegance of inquiry and a grace of execution. From the works of Galileo to Newton to Pavlov, these experiments not only were well-earned products of years of research, but also tended to undo hitherto accepted views of the world and how it worked. Dion Graham's narration takes on much of Johnson's wry cleverness. He sounds as if he's having as much fun narrating the experimenters' personal anecdotes as Johnson had writing them. Moreover, when those anecdotes start to ramble, Graham's enthusiastic narration becomes the cohesive thread through the elegant (but sometimes dense and wandering) text. A.A. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2009]