The Seven Follies of Science is a genial museum of the impossible: squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, doubling the cube, perpetual motion, and the other celebrated problems on which centuries of ingenuity have broken. John Phin explains each folly, why it cannot be done, and the strange persistence of those who tried anyway — with a bonus budget of paradoxes and illusions at the end.
It is a book about the boundary line of the possible, written with sympathy for everyone who ever camped on the wrong side of it. Download the free EPUB and enjoy science’s most instructive failures.