This was fascinating. Each chapter opened with an introduction, short biography, and scientific relevance for each person: Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein.

Copernicus' writing On The Revolution of Heavenly Spheres was my favorite of all. He explained the historical context and his own discovery about celestial movement, day span, longitude, shadows, planetary rotation and revolution. Galileo's writing was a dialogue between two friends that explained his discoveries and theories. Kepler's writing Mystery of the Cosmos and Harmony of the World explained celestial movement was neat to visualize. The remaining writers were really good too.

Majority of the material covered was above my level of basic comprehension. I could grasp the concept but not the fine-tuned explanations. My knowledge of physics, astronomy, and mathematics is at the high school level! Buy I would recommend this to anyone interested in seeing where scientific concepts originated from and their writers! Thanks!

While this book is an excellent collection of science writings, it also shows how science writing has evolved since the time of Copernicus. Included in each section is a short biography of each writer. Some of the works are rather confusing to me. For instance, Kepler spends most of his time talking about ratios of planetary distances and relating them to music.

Copernicus speaks of his calculations and observations, finding a number of astronomical distances and things. Of course he uses Euclidean geometry throughout, which is something I really need to brush up on.

Galileo uses discourse between some imaginary people to discuss his methods and ideas.

Kepler uses ratios and observations collected by Tycho Brahe. They must have really guarded their observations back in the day, though I don't get why...

Newton explains his ideas in terms of Euclidean geometry also, which hinders my understanding, since I have to flip back to find the little drawings.

Einstein uses Vector Calculus and simple high school algebra to showcase his ideas, which are quite powerful in this day and age. It is rather amazing that he figured out most of this without experimental data, which only furthered his fame back when he was alive.

I enjoyed reading on the shoulders of giants, and i love to journey in to fear with five scientist, to all mankind story.

Great read. While some of the math is difficult to understand its enough to just read through and get an idea of how these great minds percieved the world around them. Also Hawkings write ups are almost worth it in itself.

I didn't read it all from cover to cover because it is not as acessible as Hawking's other popular writings for the most part. Reading the scientists from Copernicus to Einstein, you will discover your favorite. Mine was Galileo because he wrote dialogues that were easy to digest and made you think. His style and characters reminded me a bit of Plato.

I wonder how much work Stephen Hawking actually put into this book, all I konw for sure is that the foreword and brief biographies are probably his. But I don't think he edited any of the original works himself as the notes state that they were compiled from previous editions ages ago. I would also have wanted to see the appendixes from the original but they were omitted here due to "lack of interest" as explained by notes in the margins.

In summary, On the Shoulders of Giants is the biggest science book I own and I didn't feel the urge to buy another science book for a long time afterwards.

a very hard read

If you're interested in a detailed exploration of the foundations of fundamental physics and astronomy this is the book for you.

Acapella Books in Little 5 Points, 2008-12-23.

“On the Shoulders of Giants: the Great Works of Physics and Astronomy” is a 1,264 page book published by Running Press in 2003. The book includes world renown texts written by Copernicus (1543), Galileo (1638), Kepler (1610), Newton (1687), and Einstein (1916). Stephen Hawking edited the texts and wrote commentaries about the authors and their writings. This book presents 7 classics that underpin our understanding of science, astronomy, physics, and mathematics. (P)

4.5/5 stars

"On the Shoulders of Giants" is a collection of some of the most influential works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Einstein with Stephen Hawking provided the short biography and his comments on each scientist above. I must admit that the original work of the four most important figures (with the exception of Einstein's) is completely incomprehensible to me as they are around four hundred years old, thus making the method of writing and explaining concepts quite different from today's world. But I love the short descriptions and the personal views that Stephen Hawking wrote.

Me ha decepcionado esta obra, consistente en una selección de extractos de científicos relevantes.
Mi percepción es que la motivación del libro es meramente editorial y que los textos originales lucen como meros recortes inconexos.
Además, las introducciones de Hawking no proporcionan una visión potente del cambio que realmente implican las teorías expuestas.
A años luz de obras como La revolución copernicana de Thomas Kuhn o de las obras de Feyerabend.
O de mejores obras de Hawking, como Historia del tiempo o El gran diseño.

must have reference