Scientific Goofs: Adventures Along the Crooked Trail to Truth

The "goofs" described here include some of the more spectacular and bizarre mistakes taken by reputable thinkers on the rocky road to scientific truth - goofs such as Ptolemy's insistence that the earth is the centre of the universe, Galvani's theory that frogs generate electricity, the belief that Martians irrigate their planet via a series of canals and Columbus's geographic speculations, which differ somewhat from modern maps.