If you think scientific disagreements are solved by anything as mundane as evidence, Hal Hellman's book will put you right. In practice, people who shout louder have a built-in advantage, and the arguments they get into can last lifetimes.

Hellman has collected ten of what the dust-jacket terms "the liveliest disputes ever" to show that the hunt for knowledge is a tortuous and personal one. They run in time from Galileo's argument with Pope Urban VIII to Derek Freeman's reassessment of Margaret Mead's Samoan anthropology.

And they cover a wide range of sciences, although none comes from laboratory science where results tend to be more cut and dried than in subjects involving fieldwork and observation. Along the way, many scientists are made to look petty or obsessive, but the truth always wins out in the end.

Great Feuds in Science starts weakly. Hellman has little to add to such giants as Arthur Koestler (in The Sleepwalkers) or Bertold Brecht when it comes to Galileo's collision with the Catholic church. (The same applies to Neil Porter in the second book covered here.) But the 17th century, before the system of peer reviewing and publication got going, was a high water mark for scientific disputes. Thomas Hobbes versus John Wallis (on circle-squaring) was good value because it was also a case of Roundheads versus Cavaliers, although to us it is too obvious that Hobbes was wrong. Newton versus Leibniz on calculus was also droll, although here Hellman misses out the different backgrounds from which the protagonists came - Newton from theoretical considerations of motion, Leibniz from the practical necessity to calculate matters like the volume of a barrel. In this era scientists would often leave work unpublished for decades, which was bound to lead to priority arguments. This is one problem the research assessment exercise has definitely solved.

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Darwin's argument with the bishop of Oxford over evolution by natural selection is another much-discussed case about which one might fear there is little new to say. But Hellman is interesting about the background - pointing out that evolution, if not natural selection was widely accepted long before the great 1860 debate - and the subsequent history. Biblical literalists, he points out, cannot be converted because they work on faith, not evidence, and are powerful to this day in parts of the United States.

Some of the feuds Hellman describes were caused by people having ideas before their time. Alfred Wegener, the modern proponent of continental drift, tried to popularise the idea decades before proof could be obtained from the deep oceans. He compounded his hubris by being a meteorologist and astronomer, not a geologist.

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In another earth sciences case, Kelvin's fight with the geologists and palaeontologists over the age of the earth, the problem was simply two groups of people coming to a problem from opposite directions with irreconcilable data. The earth's crust and the fossils in it must have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve: but Kelvin showed that the earth must be far younger than this for its interior to be as hot as it is. The problem was solved at a stroke when the radioactivity of the earth's interior was found to be keeping it warm.

Some of Hellman's cases stretch the definition of a feud beyond breaking point. Derek Freeman did not have a feud with Margaret Mead because she died five years before he published, although the controversy that ensued when he did was a corker. There are some notable omissions, such as the Anglo-German-French dispute over the discovery of Neptune in 1846. More seriously, there are no current cases - how about David Baltimore and the HIV virus, Carleton Gajdusek, kuru and cannibalism, the British government and BSE? Even in the era of the peer-reviewed paper, scientists find plenty to argue over in public.

Hellman's book may not be perfect but it makes a rattling read. The same cannot be said of Porter's Physicists in Conflict, which devotes much of its space to either the general history of science or preambles, conclusions and context setting. It needs severe editing, and some of the material on the security dispute affecting Robert Oppenheimer is simply baffling.

However, there are high points such as the disagreement over the efficacy of bombing, which has many contemporary resonances, even though the chapter on this topic rambles outrageously and takes in such topics as the battle of the Atlantic. Also worth a look is the argument over atomism, if only to remind one that it is only a century since distinguished scientists could argue that atoms do not exist. And Porter is good at explaining the experimental method that allowed this and other disputes to be resolved by facts on such topics as gas viscosity.

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As its forbidding appearance implies, this book is one for a library loan, while Hellman could justify a purchase if a long flight looms. But prepare for unintended mirth at Porter's account of the death of Giordano Bruno. Did he really mean to say that "the torch would be picked up by Galileo"?

Martin Ince is deputy editor, The THES.