The British critic and novelist, Melvyn Bragg, has chosen twelve works that changed the world for an upcoming book and TV program. Nice to see a good representation of scientific works:
- Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton
- On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
- Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
- Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright
- Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
- Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
- Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men
- On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
- The King James Bible (1611)
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith
- The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare
You can read this article for Bragg’s justification of his choices. He does, by the way, note that he ended up focussing on British works, so I guess that is why nothing by Bill “Issac Newton of Information Theory” Dembski makes the list. Yes, that must be the reason.
March 20, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Books that Changed the World
Stranger Fruit leads us to a piece in Sunday’s Times Online by the British critic and novelist Melvyn Bragg entitled “The world’s best books.” Braggs says, . . . I wanted books that I could prove had changed, rootedly, the…
March 23, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Crap. Where’s “Jaws”?