Breakthrough

Breakthrough

How to Think Like a Scientist, Learn to Fail and Embrace the Unknown

Summary

A scientist’s journey from observation to discovery is anything but straightforward. It is littered with failure, unexpected diversions and joyous realizations. Science helps us to understand ourselves – but what we know about the world around us, what has already been explored and discovered, is only half of science’s story.

Dr Camilla Pang will look at some of the biggest mysteries facing science today and how some of the best, most cutting-edge scientists can illuminate our own approaches to observation, hypothesis, exploration, troubleshooting and discovery in our own lives. Breakthrough explores the frontier between what we do and don’t know about the world: where knowledge meets mystery, complexity overwhelms certainty, and the vastness of our universe unspools the logic of science's established laws.


There's a scientist hidden inside all of us. Science's greatest gift to us is not formulae but enabling the urge to discover that makes us truly human.

Reviews

  • A wondrous hymn to the scientific method, and some of its most profound discoveries, and what it can teach us all about how to live better and richer lives.
    Prof. Lewis Dartnell, author of BEING HUMAN: How our Biology shaped World History

About the author

Camilla Pang

Dr Camilla Pang holds a PhD in biochemistry from University College London and is a postdoctoral scientist specializing in translational bioinformatics. At the age of eight, Camilla was diagnosed with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and ADHD at twenty-six years old. Her career and studies have been heavily influenced by her diagnosis and she is driven by her passion for understanding humans, our behaviours and how we work. Her first book, Explaining Humans, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize.
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