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.