It's easy to think of scientists as loners absorbed in their own thoughts. Sometimes they are. Their real lives, however, can be just as interesting as the wonderful ideas spilling out of their heads. It's great fun to watch big ideas bounce from mind to mind over the course of centuries.
James Gleick's Isaac Newton is a short, accessible biography of a solitary man who recreated the entire world of science. But he wasn't as logical as we'd like him to be. At the same time that Newton told us how the world rose and fell in nature, he pursued alchemy to the point of being a magician. Gleick's biography is a concise portrait of a man who was filled with lonely contradictions.
By contrast, Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin portrays an aggressively sociable man, possessed not only with all of Newton's logic, but also with an obsessive need to be perfect in as many ways possible. Reading this book is a gentle reminder of all the things you haven't yet done with your life.
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is a wonderful antidote to this sort of insecurity. Richard Feynman is a genius who puts you at ease as he pulls you into his world. He does what he wants and thinks what he wants, and it's fun watching him do it.
It might be easy to think that science gradually reveals itself like magic, but any decent biography proves that science is made by people, who are constantly testing their own assumptions in the hope that one day we might just get it right. These books prove that scientists might actually be human.
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