Entdeckt, erdacht, erfunden

Göttingen, the city that creates knowledge, the city of Nobel laureates. Groundbreaking inventions trace back to Göttingen, while some ideas developed here have long been forgotten. Some brought progress and innovation, others scandals and misfortune, and yet others were meant to bring great fame to their inventors but failed even in their inception. Beyond the well-known names like Gauss and Weber, this book raises the question of how knowledge was developed in Göttingen across different fields and centuries, at what cost some advanced their research, and what stories lie behind these ideas. From the first Göttingen Nobel laureate Otto Wallach, who laid the foundation for the production of fragrances and flavorings with his research in 1910, to the nucleus of racial ideology and cocaine, this collection spans the most curious, groundbreaking, and reprehensible ideas that originated in Göttingen.