Tenacity and Stubbornness: Einstein on Theory and Experiment -- Convergence or Coincidence: Ancient Measurements of the Sun and Moon-How Far? -- The Rationality of Simplicity: Copernicus on Planetary Motion -- The Silence of Scientists: Venus's Brightness, Earth's Precession, and the Nebula in Orion -- Progress Through Error: Stars and Quasars-How Big, How Far? -- The Data Fit the Model but the Model is Wrong: Kepler and the Structure of the Cosmos -- Art Illustrates Science: Galileo, a Blemished Moon, and a Parabola of Blood -- Ensnared in Circles: Galileo and the Law of Projectile Motion -- Aesthetics and Holism: Newton on Light, Color, and Music -- Missing One's Own Discovery Newton and the First Idea of an Artificial Satellite -- A Change of Mind: Newton and the Comet(s?) of 1680 and 1681 -- A Well-Nigh Discovery: Einstein and the Expanding Universe.

These historical narratives of scientific behavior reveal the often irrational way scientists arrive at and assess their theories. There are stories of Einstein's stubbornness leading him to reject a correct interpretation of an experiment and miss an important deduction from his own theory, and Newton missing the important deduction from one of his most celebrated discoveries. Copernicus and Galileo are found surpressing information. A theme running throughout the book is the notion that what is obvious today was not so in the past. Scientists seen in their historical context shatter myths and show them to be less modern than we often like to think of them.