From skyscrapers to jet aircraft, from mobile phones to computers, the products of modern science surround us on all sides.
Perhaps the most significant product of science, however, is not the microwave, or the space station or the widescreen TV; it is the scientific method itself, and it is hardly an exaggeration to state that those societies that have actively embraced this method have flourished; those societies that have preferred instead to rely on superstition, witchcraft and religion have failed.
The men and women who appear in The Great Scientists have all excelled in their chosen field of science; some have excelled across a range of scientific ideas, while still others can, with some justification, claim to be the founders of their own disciplines.
The road out from under the darkness of superstition into the light of reason has not always been an easy one: scepticism, mockery, threats and worse have often been the lot of the experimental scientist who has dared to challenge the accepted 'truths'. Yet they have persevered, and in doing so have provided a shining example for the rest of humanity.
The great scientists have burned, in Bertrand Russell's telling phrase, 'with all the noonday brightness of human genius'. The Great Scientists tells their story.