Open up the Random House Webster's Dictionary of Scientists and find out what nuclear physicist Oppenheimer really felt about the atomic bomb; learn what drove Alan Turing, who helped crack the Nazi Enigma code, to suicide...and much more! From the ancient Greeks to the atom-splitters - learn of the lives and motivations of the world's greatest scientific thinkers!

In clear, jargon-free language, the Random House Webster's Dictionary of Scientists offers 1,800 biographies of scientific genius: from Ptolemy to Feynman, Hippocrates to Curie, Galileo to Oppenheimer. Over half of these up-to-the-minute biographies deal with scientists of the 20th century, with more profiles of women in science than any other book. With over 400 photos, illustrations, and quotations, you are able to obtain a richer view of the person and the life behind the scientific mind.

To allow you to fully appreciate the lives of these scientists, brief histories are included of each branch of science. The fields of astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering and technology, geology, mathematics, and physics are chronologically recorded and explained from the origins of scientific practice through their contemporary advancement. There are also ample appendices that supplement the biographies and help to answer the questions that are bound to be sparked by the fascinating profiles in this book.