Extract from “My Heart's in the Highlands”

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer -

A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) - a British writer, the creator of Sherlock Holmes is the best-known detective in literature and the embodiment of sharp reasoning. Doyle himself was not a good example of rational personality. He believed in fairies and was interested in occultism. Sherlock Holmes stories have been translated into more than fifty languages, and made into plays, films, radio and television series, a musical comedy, a ballet, cartoons, comic books, and advertisement. By 1920 Doyle was one of the most highly-paid writers in the world.

Besides stories about Sherlock Holmes he wrote historical and adventurous stories, among them “The Lost World”, “The Poisoned Belt”.

Arthur Hailey (1920 – 2004) was born in England and began his writing career as a pilot during the Second World War. After the war he lived and wrote in Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen as well as British; he also lived briefly in the United States. For the past twenty-six years Arthur Hailey and his wife Sheila made their home in the Bahamas. Hailey's novels include the bestselling “Hotel”, “Strong Medicine”, “Airport”, “In High Places”, “The Final Diagnosis” have been published in thirty-nine languages; an estimated 160 million copies are in print worldwide. Most of his books have been made into films or TV series.

People of Science

Sir Isaac Newton (1643 –1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, published in 1687, is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution. He worked in many scientific fields such as mechanics, optics, mathematics and made many important discoveries.

Newton's stature among scientists remains at the very top rank, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain's Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Newton was deemed the more influential.

Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867) an English chemist and physicist is known for his pioneering experiments in electricity and magnetism. Many consider him the greatest experimentalist who ever lived. Several concepts that he derived directly from experiments, such as lines of magnetic force, have become common ideas in modern physics.

Faraday's discovery (1845) that an intense magnetic field can rotate the plane of polarized light is known today as the Faraday effect. The phenomenon has been used to elucidate molecular structure and has yielded information about galactic magnetic fields.

Faraday described his numerous experiments in electricity and electromagnetism in three volumes entitled Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839, 1844, 1855); his chemical work was chronicled in Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (1858). Faraday ceased research work in 1855 because of declining mental powers, but he continued as a lecturer until 1861.