TV personality Adam Hart-Davis meets 14 of the world’s leading scientists to discuss their work, their passions, and those elusive ground-breaking moments in their lives.

This is a book that shows how science can explain the world that we inherited and shape the world that we would like to leave for future generations.

• Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Bath, UK) tells her personal story of the discovery of the first pulsar.
• Sir Michael Berry (Bristol, UK) ties knots in nothing.
• Richard Dawkins (Oxford, UK) explains what Darwinism means today.
• Loren Graham (MIT, US) explains why Stalin’s top-down policy meant that no Russian engineering project would ever work properly.
• Richard Gregory (Bristol, UK) explores some of the visual illusions that so easily fool us.
• Eric Lander (MIT, US) discusses the excitement of the human genome project.
• Lord May of Oxford (UK) President of the Royal Society talks about chaos, ecology and HIV.
• John Maynard Smith (Sussex, UK) discusses why we bother with sex.
• Rosalind Picard (MIT, US) believes in wearable computers that understand our emotions.
• Sir Martin Rees (Cambridge, UK), Astronomer Royal, discusses the big bang, black holes and the end of the universe.
• Eugenie Scott (Oakland, US) is a leading campaigner for the teaching in schools of evolution rather than creationism.
• Lewis Wolpert (UCL, UK) speaks on the ethics and practicality of cloning and on his own depression.
• Colleen Cavanaugh (Harvard, US) describes the excitement and discomfort of exploring the deep ocean.
• Peter Raven (St Louis, US) is a leading advocate of biodiversity – described by Time magazine as a hero for the planet.

Adam Hart-Davis is a successful freelance broadcaster, writer and photographer. He is an acclaimed presenter of TV programmes, primarily for the BBC, that make science, technology and history accessible to a wide audience. Before becoming a presenter he was a TV producer on a wide range of programmes for commercial television.

Adam Hart Davis holds a Dphil from York University and an MA in Chemistry from Oxford University. He was educated at Eton College. He completed three years post doctoral research in Canada and the UK and several years with Oxford University Press before beginning his television career at Yorkshire Television.

Full details of the programmes on which he has worked can be found on his web-site: www.adam-hart-davis.org.