ADVENTURES IN DISCOVERY

The contributors to this book are all professional scientists, engineers, etc. who have been around for a long time as writers -- a combination of talents that makes for popular, easily assimilated material like Poul Anderson's lengthy, very interesting run down on recent findings in paleoanthropology which place man's appearance on this planet some 1.75 million years before previous estimates. Isaac Asimov describes how the discovery of inert gasses like argon, helium etc. came about as a complete fluke; James Blish does a piece on the trials and triumphs of Roger Bacon whose pleas for empirical experimentation were dismissed as witchcraft; L. Sprague de Camp recalls the famous feud between Professors Cope and Marsh who battled over fossils in the American West; Ben Bova discusses modern means of weather control, John Brunner shows how science is tuning into dreams. Adventures in Digest form for the curious layman.