Bragg's chapters sometimes skirt irritatingly round the scientific core of their subject's work. Somehow the repeated observation that acceleration feels like gravitation, say, is not enough to convey what Einstein had in mind in his theories of relativity. It sounded an adequate description on the radio. But it is out of place when we can re-read the hard bits. But the examination of what makes a great mind, and why those great minds pursue science, is obviously of huge interest to Bragg, and this conveyed vividly to the reader.
Contradictory traits keep appearing.
So Faraday divided his time between science and an obscure Scottish Christian sect, the Sandemanians. He was apparently uninterested in the challenge posed to his religion by Darwin's work. Bragg delights in championing Freud as a great scientist, undeterred by the fact that his theories about the unconscious as a hidden world which keeps bubbling to the surface, remain objectively untestable. And Bragg encourages Greenfield to defend the great psychoanalyst against the charge of misogyny. Freud described his women patients as hysterical because they often were, and of making sexual advances to him because they often did.