A sense of history can give the student a feeling for the movement, progress and continuous change inherent in science—the idea of science not as a static body of facts but rather as a dynamic human activity, with today's theories being merely on the leading edge of a trail from the past that stretches indefinitely into the future. It can also place the nature of discoveries in a truer perspective. Students can be encouraged by seeing the great men and women of science not as cold, perfect, intellectual giants but as human beings with human strengths and weaknesses similar to their own.
These goals are fulfilled with varying degrees of success to this series of videotapes, as revealed by a sampling of four of the 19 tapes released to date. Although the 45-to 60-minute interviews differ in format (some include movies, photographs, drawings, equations, tables, graphs and other audiovisual aids), ...
