The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

by David Wootton

A companion to such acclaimed works as The Age of Wonder, A Clockwork Universe, and Darwin’s Ghosts—a groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world.

We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today, science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history.

The Invention of Science goes back five hundred years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently, but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts—Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious minds from across Europe—whose studies of the natural world challenged centuries of religious orthodoxy and ingrained superstition.

From gunpowder technology, the discovery of the new world, movable type printing, perspective painting, and the telescope to the practice of conducting experiments, the laws of nature, and the concept of the fact, Wotton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of knowledge. Ultimately, he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization—and the birth of the modern world we know.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Philosophy, Audiobook, Historical

784 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2015

About the author

MA, PhD (Cantab), FRHistS

David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History. He works on the intellectual and cultural history of the English speaking countries, Italy, and France, 1500-1800. He is currently writing a book entitled Power, Pleasure and Profit based on his Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2014. His most recent book is The Invention of Science, published by Allen Lane.

In 2016 he will give the annual Besterman Lecture at the University of Oxford.

He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and has held positions in history and politics at four British and four Canadian universities, and visiting postions in the US, before coming to York.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book with a simple argument to make: that the scientific revolution was a real thing, it definitely happened, and it happened at a specific point in time, namely, ‘between 1572, when Tycho Brahe saw a nova, and 1704, when Newton published his Opticks’. In that century and a half, a staggering number of new truths about reality became understood – we went from living at the centre of a universe of celestial spheres, reading manuscripts to glean the lessons of the ancient Greeks, to living on a terraqueous globe orbiting the sun, and studying printed books from a new breed of modern experimental scientists. And it was all driven by advances in instruments, a new awareness of the potential for discovery, and a growing conviction that empirical experience was more important than philosophical dogma or classical authority.

The simplicity of Wootton's premise is, in a way, a clue to his defensiveness. He is explicitly arguing against the claims of ‘postmodernist’ historians, who have suggested that successful scientific theories are, in terms of historical description, not fundamentally different from unsuccessful ones, and that anyway scientific ‘truths’ are culturally dependent and enforced by political authority. Wootton is having none of this.

More power to him; but unless you have gone through life with a steely conviction of the right-mindedness of Bloor's strong programme, Wootton's intramural aggression may quickly become tiresome. His arguments are aimed at his historiographical opponents, not at the general reader. And he is not above frequent asides to make this point explicit (‘It should be obvious that he was not right about this’; ‘the notion…seems to escape Boghossian’). Time and again he interrupts his narrative to bring the evil relativists on stage behind him, so we can shout at them like a pantomime audience. Look out, it's Simon Schaffer! It's Michel Foucault, with waxed moustaches and a black cape! Boo! Hiss! They're behind you (for a given local value of ‘behind’)!

I imagine that fifty or sixty years ago, histories of the scientific revolution presented a standard timeline of Great Men And Their Discoveries. Happily, things have moved on a bit since then; and yet, reading Wootton, I found myself yearning for some basic facts and figures about what actually happened and who did what. In the end, this is not (as its subtitle claims) a ‘history of the scientific revolution’ at all, but rather a history of the attitudes and thought processes that contributed to or grew out of it. Instead of looking at a steady progress of breakthroughs and developments, Wootton concerns himself with changes in the era's conceptual tools; he analyses texts in great detail, focusing on specific items of vocabulary as markers of changing attitudes – indeed, some chapters seem to consist of little more than a timeline of neologisms – and he lavishes much more time and attention on the coining of such terms as ‘discovery’, ‘fact’ or ‘experiment’ than he does on actual discoveries, facts or experiments.

I have a very high tolerance of this kind of semantic approach, but even I found it a bit exhausting after a while. Finally hitting a chapter on Newton, you rub your hands with anticipation, only to read: ‘My first goal in this chapter, then, is to establish why Newton was hostile to the word “hypothesis”…’ and your heart just sinks. Wootton's arguments about how language reflects mental attitudes are well-made and convincing, but what you don't get in this book is much sense of the grubby reality of early-modern science – the long nights, the sweating over furnaces, the trial and error of different practical approaches.

Combined with his combative stance vis-à-vis other historical treatments, it all serves to make his undoubted learning sound uncomfortably like pedantry in places. (This is not helped by a somewhat finicky approach to notation: Wootton uses Latin numerals for endnotes and Roman numerals for footnotes, so that many sentences end in a superscripted mishmash of characters: ‘…even then it was at first confined to political revolutionsˣˣˣⁱᵛ⁴¹’.)

Overall, I'm unsure how much I'd recommend this. On the one hand, it really has changed the way I think about the long seventeenth century, especially in terms of how I interpret the language of all these early scientists. And fundamentally I share Wootton's impatience with a lot of relativist history. All the same, the sad truth is that I'm just left craving a plainer, more chronological description of the key breakthroughs of the period. Doubtless many such histories exist, but this one, which positions itself as a new standard, feels too polemical to be in a position to fully replace them.

[Mark Hebwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so looking forward to liking this book. But in the end, I did not really warm to it. I do not say this lightly, and it even takes me some courage to admit it. Why so? Because the history of ideas is a subject close to my heart, and I wrote a longish essay at university about the development of historiography in the 17th century. That does not mean I am an expert on this subject - far from it - but it does mean that I researched some of the dynamics this book explores in quite some depth, and that I was hoping to re-discover the joy I had at university through reading the book. But for the most part, I did not, and here is why:

This book is a proper work of scholarly research

Now, this of course would rather speak in favour of it than against it. But after decades spent outside the world of academia, I had forgotten what academic research can be like. The part I had forgotten is that many scholars find it necessary to define the scope of their topic clinically, aiming to make clear precisely where they stand relative to other scholars, how they differ from other research, and who they regard as their intellectual influence.

And again, there is not necessarily anything wrong with this. But, come on, David, was it really necessary to spend 50 pages on whether the term "scientific revolution" is appropriate or not to describe the three centuries since the discovery of America? The term was invented by Thomas Kuhn, a key scholar in the field, whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was met with so much acclaim that the key term from its title re-surfaced in the research of other eminent thinkers (notably Alexandre Koyre, The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus, Kepler, Borelli.

Now, apparently, the term "revolution" is so ingrained in the scholarly psyche that we need a tedious chapter discussing whether naming conventions established by contemporary scholars are appropriate or not. I was hoping this book would deepen my insights into a crucial development in the history of ideas. Certainly, one or two pages on this would have sufficed?

So I was off to a disappointing start. In fact, I would have preferred it if David had discussed his research methodology to put his analysis onto a sound footing. Surprisingly, David chose not to talk about that at all. That is surprising in a work of scholarly research. But worse than being merely surprising, in the case of this monograph, it is also disappointing. It is disappointing because it omits a necessary building block without which much of what David says lacks rigour. Well, I thought so, anyway.

Methodology: What's in a word?

The methodology that I am quibbling with is a linguistic approach to historical analysis. Frequently, David traces the usage of a certain expression back through the ages, and identifies a time when the expression was not widely used. He then concludes that the concept the expression denotes cannot have existed in the time period before it was coined, and by extension concludes that the concept behind the expression developed first with the emergence of the word.

The issue I have with this method is subtle. I do not deny that language reflects 'reality', and that speakers (users of the technology 'language') define words through usage and consensus of what they stand for. The expression 'internet' did not exist in ancient Greece, the word 'gay' meant something entirely different in 1730 than it does now, and there is rarely ever the need today to use the word 'abacus', for example.

So yes, I agree that language reflects society, and that 'linguistic archaeology' can be a useful and appropriate tool to infer the state of mind of past societies or communities. But I wonder how this method needs to be applied, and what the conclusions are that it allows.

How to apply the tool

The problem with "linguistic archaeology" is that it requires a statistician, not a historian, to use it properly.

The first time David uses the linguistic method is in his discussion of the term "discovery". Basically, he says that prior to the discovery of America there was no term in the European languages that expressed the concept of "first finding evidence for something hitherto unknown". David argues that the absence of the term also denotes the absence of the concept, and highlights the dominance of the Aristotelian, anti-empirical, method.

I actually find David's idea convincing, and brilliantly insightful in principle. But I do not trust myself to accept if fully. And the reason is that David has not shown me evidence that frequency of usage actually jumped after 1492 from near-zero to something significantly non-zero. Actually, he never even defines what metric he uses to identify an increase in usage. It is number of occurrences per text per year? If so, where are the numbers? I want to see a bar chart. And this introduces another problem - how long does the time series have to be before I can conclude that the word 'discovery' really did not exist pre-Columbus? 100 years? 200? If I apply the benchmark of modern science, I could not accept the hypothesis as 'true' unless I can show that the frequency of usage increased to a significant level within a clearly defined confidence interval. And that is a problem unless I count words in all relevant texts on a given subject since antiquity.

To be fair to David, he does mention EEBO and ECCO (Early English Books Online; Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and comments on the efficiency of search algorithms these facilities offer (p592), so there is evidence that he applied some form of structured statistical anaysis. But he never goes into his methodology, he never shows us the results, and he most certainly does not publish the numerical evidence.

None of this invalidates his insights. But what I would see as lack of rigour in this regard diminishes the confidence I have in David's results. And this is a problem because his methodology of linguistic archaeology permeates the book. I suspect David is far more gifted linguist than he is a statistician.

What conclusions can we draw when applying the tool?

To make things worse, I did often not agree entirely with the conclusions he drew. To stay with the example of "discovery", David concludes that prior to the discovery of America, the concept of 'discovery' did not exist, because the word did not exist. But I wonder. To me, it is more plausible to suggest that discoveries were happening so rarely in pre-'Americodiscovery' times that people had not coined a word for it. So after Columbus, the Aristotelian stranglehold on natural philosophy weakened sufficiently to allow 'findings that had hitherto not been made' to occur at an ever-increasing rate, and because of this a catchy expression had to be coined.

This interpretation changes the gist of David's argument only subtly, but I think the difference in viewpoint is still important enough to mention. It is different to say "the frequency of discoveries increased materially" from "discoveries did not exist pre-Columbus".

But it is a beautiful book

So I must admit, what I see as vagueness in the key methodology David employs did not allow me to trust his findings as much as I would have needed to for a truly satisfactory learning experience.

But there are chapters in the book in which it did live up to my expectations. These are chapters 4 to 6, in which David brilliantly lays out the interplay between discoveries and the impact they have on the way we view the world. The discovery of America was to be the ultimate death-knell for the Aristotelian 4-sphere model of the world, which in turn paved the way for the development of perspective painting and a commensurate re-interpretation of the position of 'man' in the world, and of the world in the cosmos.

The book is full of beautifully reproduced paintings, drawings, and woodcuts. At one point, I was so excited by the illustrations that I thought I'd buy a first-edition copy of Robert Hooke's Micrographia. I even found one on Abe Books for £80,000, plus £12 shipping. Twelve pounds shipping? The cheek of it...

Ok so I didn't buy it. But I did buy a facsimile copy. And I bought some other books from the time, like Johannes Kepler's Somnium, or Francis Godwin's Man in the Moone, arguably the first ever science fiction novel.

So in the end, I did have a fun time with the book, and you can see I did get excited about the time. But since it is a proper scholarly treatise, and not pop-science, I could not get past what I saw as a methodological weakness. But if your opinion on this differs, or you are able to overlook the issue, you will probably gain interesting insights reading it.

So in the end, I would still recommend the book, even though I did not get the rich intellectual experience I was hoping for.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is probably a very important book to read if you're a philosopher of science who thinks that the theories of phlogiston and evolution are of equal validity. Of course, those people do not exist. This is clearly a failure of editing, agenting, and a triumph of misleading marketing. This book is not at all a general reader's book about the scientific revolution, and certainly not about the invention of science. it is, instead, scholarly articles embedded in a polemic against postmodernists (the book was apparently conceived in 1982).

Others have written about the book's many structural flaws; I will just note two intellectual flaws. First, Wootton opposes the sociology of science, because they approach science sociologically, without any regard for the truth claims of scientific theories. Does he feel the same way about the sociology of religion, I wonder? To make my point clear: sociologists study human interactions. They do not care what those interactions are *about*, and if they did, they would be betraying the point of sociology.

Second, Wootton's positive arguments are horrific. To take the most obvious: he claims that Columbus' discovery* of the Americas made science possible, by introducing the very concept of discovery. It was not possible to 'discover' gravity, in other words, without the concept of discovery; without that concept, one could just go on adjusting already existing theories, rather than taking account of new facts (he also covers the invention of the idea of the fact). Slight problem here: Columbus' 'discovery' of the Americas was also the Americans' 'discovery' of Europe. And yet, science did not develop in the Americas until after the Europeans had really, really, really 'discovered' it. Why not? Because concepts are useless in the absence of economic development, political support, and so on. Science may rely on the concept of discovery *grammatically* (Wootton loves him some Wittgenstein, and is at pains to show that Wittgenstein was not a relativist), but not *historically*. There is nothing here about the importance of economic development for the development of science, which is no failing in an academic article about the concept of 'discovery,' but a rather glaring one in a book about the scientific revolution.

A true disappointment.

*: Columbus did not, of course, 'discover' the Americas. They'd been discovered for some time by, you know, the many civilizations spread out over the continent for a millenium or more. Wootton does not care.

[Steven Peck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply one of the best treatments of the history and philosophy of science I've read. An exploration of how science developed, what tools and cultural conditions made it possible, and how and why it has progressed. It is also presents a very clear understanding of what science is and why it works for explicating nature and making progress in prediction. I teach History and Philosophy of Biology at my university and this has been a treasure trove in detailing the nuances of how and why science is what it is today. A book rich in historical details that I will return to again and again I'm sure.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

another book I read across time and finished the last few pages in these two free days after the New Year - dense, requiring effort (both to understand the prose occasionally and to understand the arguments) and one I wouldn't recommend for a novice reader in its subject (The Scientific Revolution and the crucial change that happened in Western Europe gradually between 1500 and 1700, and most notably between 1600 and 1700) that led to the world of today

There are always arguments whether there was a "revolution", what is "science" and so on, but as the author points out, if you look at the "intellectual life/world view" in 1500, 1600 and 1700 the differences are striking and the fundamental questions tackled in the book are "what happened, was it "predetermined" to happen or an accident that Newton, Locke, Leibniz, Hooke and many others building/responding/arguing with earlier works by Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus and others and being able to freely (more or less) and timely meet, communicate, share, dispute happened to live and work in the same historical period, how it happened etc

Not a "linear" or "events: when, who, how" but a full meditation on the subject also regarding it through the prism of current thinking and arguing with such in addition to presenting a panorama of the epoch

Highly recommended and worth persevering through the book

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is no lightweight book - both literally and metaphorically. It packs in nearly 600 pages of decidedly small print, and manages to assign about 10 per cent of these simply to deciding what is meant by a 'scientific revolution' (the subtitle is 'a new history of the scientific revolution'). While warning of the importance of being aware of the change in meaning of some terms, the author successfully demolishes the arguments of those who argue that terms like science, scientist and revolution can't be applied to the seventeenth century because they're anachronistic. (He doesn't say it, but this is a bit like saying you shouldn't call a dinosaur a dinosaur because the word wasn't in use when they were around.)

What's also very apparent in a section on history and philosophy of science is why so many scientists are dubious of philosophers and historians of science. When an adult can seriously suggest that we can't say that current science is better than that of the Romans - all we can say, suggest these philosophers and historians of science, is that our science is different - it makes it very clear that some academics have spent far too much time in ivory towers examining their philosophical navels and really haven't got a clue about the real world.

We then get into the main content of the gradual process of science, in the current sense of the word, coming into being. It's certainly interesting in a dry way to see this analytically dissected, though the slightly tedious nature of the exposition makes it clear why popular science has to simplify and concentrate on the narrative if readers are to be kept on track. I appreciate that an academic like David Wootton wants to ensure that every i is dotted and t crossed, but I think that all the arguments of this book could have been made in half the length by cutting back on some of the detail and repetition.

This book, then, is not popular science in the usual sense, but neither is it a textbook. If you are prepared to put the effort in, you will receive huge insights into what lies beneath: one view of the true history of science. That's why the book gets 5 stars. I've learned more about the history of science from this one book than any other five I can think of that I have read in the past. I have to emphasise that 'one view' part, though. History is - well, not an exact science. As far as I can see (I'm not equipped to criticise the content) this is a superbly well researched piece of scientific history, but in the end, the conclusions drawn are down to Wootton and he enjoys making it clear where he is strongly contradicting other historians of science.

There's a huge amount to appreciate here. Wootton convincingly demolishes Kuhn's idea that scientific revolutions require heavy disagreements among scientists, showing how exposure to experience (often thanks to new technology, such as the telescope) can swing the argument surprisingly painlessly. And he shows what a remarkable influence words have on the development of science (music to the ear of a writer). Perhaps most remarkable of all is Wootton's careful, very detailed exposition of the idea that the real trigger for 'modern' scientific thought was Columbus's discovery of America, which demolished the existing model of the Earth and made it possible to see how experience can triumph over the philosophical quagmire of authority.

If you've a fair amount of time to spare and really want to dig into the way that the scientific revolution came about, I would heartily recommend giving this title a try.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will look, I trust, realist to relativists and relativist to realists: that is how it is meant to look.

The Invention of Science isn't an easy book to read. Neither is it particularly difficult, thanks to Wootten's felicitous prose. But it does require a high degree of concentration as Wootten ranges both far and deep in his exploration of how "science" got its start. His argument is intentionally provocative, precise, plainly stated and copiously supported. The writing is lively, witty, even barbed – qualities generally absent in scholarly texts. I also appreciated Wootten's approach to the footnote/endnote conundrum: references are saved for the endnotes to accommodate readers who want to hunt down sources; but comments that amplify the argument are placed at the bottom of the page, to keep the reader in the flow. In addition, he's placed a series of "longer notes" at the end of the book, where his basic arguments are outlined with brio (and more ancillary texts).

In Wootten's account, science is essentially "the triumph of experience over philosophy." All the standard characters are there – Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Newton – but also an entertaining, anarchic host of lesser-known scientists, mathematicians, theologians and philosophes, doctors and clergymen. Wootten gives the standard accounts an interesting spin, looking as much at the tools of thought as at the tools of discovery and invention (telescopes, prisms, air pumps). He investigates the history and meaning of words such as discovery, invention, facts, experiments, laws, hypotheses, and even more ordinary and apparently obvious terms such as progress and common sense. Another excellent review on this page found this procedure a problem. I didn't. I was fascinated – although, as I said at the start, one needs a strong cup of coffee and plenty of quiet concentration to make it through a few of these chapters.

This is a book that fully lives up to its title. I read it after reading Noam Chomsky's recent lectures – as a kind of luxuriant, deeply satisfying postscript – but that was just to amuse myself.

[Simona B · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most erudite books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

[Cindy G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not really qualified to critique the content of this book, but I will comment for other readers like me who enjoy history of science as amateurs. This is clearly a scholarly work, however I only felt that about 10% of it was above my head (e.g. using historian/philosophy jargon that I needed to either look up or just skip over. Having had one college course discussing Kuhn helped me.) It is a long book, and having made the effort to read it I now regret not having taken a few notes, as there were many "hmmm, very interesting!" moments that changed my basic understanding of an aspect of history. (The whole thing about beliefs about the shape of the Earth was way more fascinating than the cartoonish impression I think many people retain after school.) Wootton's basic thesis is that a series of inventions, discoveries, and new ideas mostly within the 16th-17th centuries were necessary game-changers for real science as we know it to develop. He makes quite a thorough case for each point, though I have seen other published reviews aren't quite convinced these developments aren't just part of a more continuous arc of history. Despite wishing it was a bit shorter, I'm glad I read this. Whether or not his thesis is important to the average person, all the discussions were worthwhile updates to my understanding of western history.

- An added note: Wootton's thesis was way more convincing to me than that of "The Swerve" by Greenblatt. That (shorter) book was definitely an enjoyable read, but, again, as an amateur, I was not convinced by its grand claims about Lucretius.

[Ken Muldrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Invention of Science, by David Wooten, is by far the best explanation of what science is and how it works. Although presented as a history of how science started, it is much, much more. You may lay aside your Popper and Kuhn, and indeed, bury the more recent philosophers of science and their misguided relativism, and indulge yourself in this joyous and entertaining account of the greatest breakthrough of all that emerged from the age of discovery.

The activity of science, as Wooten describes it, can be generalized as an example of the behavior that is sometimes called competitive-cooperation. Unlike cooperation and competition, considered as separate, and essentially opposite, modes of behavior, competitive-cooperation is the engine of growth that underlies civilization. In a nutshell, it consists of individuals cooperating to construct goods that are part of physical reality while competing for rewards that exist only in social reality (by way of example, a brick is part of physical reality while a ski club is part of social reality). Straight-up competition between individuals for rewards or plunder from physical reality is necessarily a zero-sum endeavour at best, and often results in diminishing returns. Physical resources are always limited in abundance thereby imposing strict limits on the growth of production (what we usually call economic growth). Cooperation, on the other hand, is often a positive-sum game, leading to a surplus of goods compared to what the individuals involved could have produced with no interactions at all. The problem comes from the need for coordination of individual action. Management is necessary, resulting in two separate classes of individuals as soon as the complexity of the endeavour surpasses that of the most trivial of tasks. For work that is unpleasant, coercion of the workers is also necessary, whether by carrot or stick. Competitive-cooperation melds the two by using rewards that exist only as social constructs (and therefore not subject to limits-to-growth) to drive competition between individuals, while the focus of that competitive drive is a cooperative venture to construct goods that exist in physical reality. Coordination is accomplished by directing individual actions through rewarding those actions that contribute to the greater project, eliminating the need for management. Coercion, too, is eliminated by giving rewards of greater value for work that is especially unpleasant. In the activity of science, the goods that are being constructed consist of discovered, reliable knowledge about physical reality itself, while the reward for discovery is prestige and the bestowing of honors on the discoverers.

Through this understanding of how science works, several mysterious aspects of the endeavour are easily understood. People have long argued over who was the first true scientist, and indeed, many people who pick up Wooten’s book will very likely be interested in who he identifies to fill that role. But Wooten instead insists that there can be no first scientist (though he does identify a first scientific experiment) because science is necessarily a collective endeavour; you might as well ask about the temperature of a single molecule. If this is the case, though, then why are honors bestowed upon individual scientists? Why craft ‘great man’ narratives around important discoveries, lionizing individuals for the work of a community? Although paradoxical, the mechanics of competitive-cooperation are such that individuals must be given social rewards even though the success is due to the cooperation of a collective. That is also why we so often see multiple, simultaneous breakthroughs among independent scientists with no communication channels connecting them. It is often remarked that some particular conceptual innovation was ‘in the air’ just prior to discovery. Again, this is how competitive-cooperation works: the cooperative aspect of science means that not just finished discoveries are communicated to the collective, but also all the groping thought processes and blind-alley experiments (though the former are disseminated through a formal process of publication while the latter are disseminated through the informal give-and-take discussions at conferences). Indeed, Wooten succeeds in not only giving us a magnificent history of the invention of science, but also a philosophy of science with great explanatory power.

Wooten begins by insisting that historians need to view history with hindsight (rejecting the misguided naysayers who heckle with claims of ‘whig history’), while at the same time realizing that we need to translate their language into ours. During times of great transformations, language is necessarily muddled as people grope toward understanding the changes that are overtaking them. Throughout the book, he is meticulous about tracing the origin and development of words and concepts in service of understanding what early scientists thought they were doing, and what we now understand them to have done.

Surprisingly, the idea of discovery itself only appears just prior to Columbus’ voyage to find a Western route to the Indies. Before about 1486, anyone talking about invention was referring to ancient discoveries (the Greeks did have the concept of discovery but the Romans discarded it and it lay dormant until the late 15th century). Truly world-changing discoveries from Medieval Europe, such as eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, and various water-powered machines, have no record of their invention, nor any narrative about their inventors. The task of Renaissance intellectuals was to recover lost knowledge, not to discover new knowledge. It is only with the adventure narratives that began to accompany the geographical discoveries of Portuguese mariners going around Africa that the idea of progress in human knowledge begins to take off. Then after Columbus discovers the new world, the granting of prestige to discoverers begins to supplement these narratives (and with Waldseemüller’s map, where the new world is named for Amerigo Vespucci rather than Columbus, we also see the beginning of misplace eponymy that continues to this day in science).

The accumulation of geographical knowledge drove a silent revolution in the understanding of the earth’s structure by philosophers. This was a process driven by experiential facts and resulted in the wholesale overturning of existing knowledge and the universal adoption of a new consensus model in the space of a few decades. The terraqueous globe model, though posited earlier, had no support at all in the 15th century. The prevailing view was of a small sphere of earth and a larger sphere of water, superimposed in various ways, all of which predicted that antipodes could not exists. There was a further belief that any land at the equator could not be habitable, but this was due to Aristotle, not models of the earth. Following the discovery of people living quite happily at the equator, and then Vespucci showing that antipodes did exist (to say nothing of Columbus’ discovery of the new world, unknown to Aristotle), the various two-sphere models were discarded in favour of the terraqueous globe.

From this account of falsification in action, Wooten then moves to the development of abstract models, especially mathematical models, of reality. Double entry bookkeeping is discussed, not in the usual manner of driving commercial activity, but rather as a process of abstraction: the transformation of all transactions into cash equivalents so that precise comparisons could be made. Later, the architect Brunelleschi travelled to Rome to measure buildings with classical architecture. He used geometry to convert the view from a single point into elevation drawings. At some later time, he realized that the inverse procedure was possible, to create perspective drawings by converging lines to a vanishing point. Alberti formalized the procedure mathematically so that geometry became a method for creating models of reality. With further developments of geometric methods, Brahe was able to show that heavenly bodies were very far away, laying waste to the notion of crystal spheres. Galileo famously turned the telescope (invented to allow terrestrial spying) to the heavens and found mountains on the moon, satellites orbiting Jupiter, and most significantly, a full set of phases for Venus—killing Ptolemaic astronomy in its tracks. The sub-lunar world was also modelled geometrically, leading to progress in cartography, navigation, ballistics, and fortification. Mathematical models produced reliable knowledge that became very useful to the Princes of Europe who were engaged in perpetual warfare over territory.

Even more surprising than the absence of a notion of discovery in the medieval world is the absence of facts, as we know them. The very idea that something has really occurred or is actually the case (something that does not need an agent) was invented between 1650 and 1700. The importance of facts is due to their not being true by definition, so they can be shown to be false, and more importantly, having survived a test for falsity, may be relied upon with more confidence. Wooten traces this history doggedly because once printing was invented, facts could be transferred from person to person without any degradation (books are an “immutable mobile” in Bruno Latour’s phrase). The testing of facts for reliability, then, becomes the keystone of the emerging science. Empirical experiments using a carefully designed procedure, with witnesses for verification, and published in print so that independent replication could be done, becomes the method for establishing matters of fact. Pascal’s Puy-de-Dome experiment is the first experiment that fulfills all the criteria needed for it to be called scientific (in our sense of science). Crucially, a community of scientists is needed before the first scientific experiment can occur, thus we cannot talk about a first scientist because the designation is a collective property. Also of prime importance is that although science is a social construct, the knowledge discovered by science is not a social construct; its reliability is independent of the rhetoric and persuasion of scientists. Wooten takes us through the development of the concepts of law, theory, hypothesis, and evidence as the structures around which scientific knowledge is constructed.

The relationship between technology and scientific knowledge is tackled by first looking at the development of the mechanical universe (every effect has a cause that is effected at the point of action; no spooky action-at-a-distance). Because the delay between conceptual innovation and technological innovation can be very long, historians of technology often discount the necessity of conceptual knowledge, primarily because it has become a commonplace by the time the technology is developed. In addition, a complete analytical framework for a technology will almost always come after the technology is developed, so technophiles will insist that clever tinkering, divorced from scientific knowledge, is the driver of innovation. Wooten is having none of it, though, and he masterfully guides us through the major technological developments of the industrial revolution, showing how scientific knowledge was absolutely essential for every innovation that occurred.

To bring the book to a close, Wooten recounts the pathway through which science was invented between 1572 and 1704, an event that has become invisible to us due to its astonishing success. Science has given us not just reliable knowledge about the world, and technology developed using that knowledge, but it has also given us intellectual tools (for example, probabilistic thinking) that have enormously expanded our ability to solve problems by manipulating ideas. This book is a masterpiece and should be read by everyone who has any interest in what science is.

[Bart Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Invention of Science is a very wise and erudite volume about the essential changes that were necessary for modern science, i.e. the Scientific Revolution, to occur in the 16th century. These included more efficient ways to disseminate information, such as the printing press, which also aided in building a scientific community; the turn toward both practical experiment and mathematics; the development of the very ideas of progress and discovery; and the way changes in scientific theories, and modern science itself, often required new concepts and language. The author offers prime examples such as the development of the concepts of fact, theory, progress, experiment, law, discovery, etc. This volume is steeped in meticulous historical detail of the scientific figures and times of the 16th and 17th century. A marvelous work of research and scholarship. If you’re interested in increasing your awareness of many of the important concepts which have shaped our modern science and thought, this book is for you. Readers whose interest is piqued by this subject would likely enjoy Conceptual Revolutions by Paul Thagard, which also goes into great detail concerning the role conceptual changes played in specific, important theories of science. The Invention of Science has my highest recommendation; I would give it 6 stars, if I could.

[D.L. Morrese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wootton claims there are two major philosophical camps among those who write about the history of science. He calls them the 'realists' and the 'relativists'. The realists regard science as essentially a formalized application of human common sense. To them, science is a systematic method of asking questions about the natural world, which leads to reasonably accurate answers. As these answers build upon one another, collective human understanding grows. It's almost inevitable. Relativists, on the other hand, see science as an aspect of human culture. Both the questions it asks and the answers it finds are culturally dependent, so it never obtains any objective knowledge and consequently cannot progress in the sense that it gets us closer to a true understanding of what the world actually is or how it works. Instead, it creates stories about the world that work for a particular culture at a particular time. Relativism, he claims, "has been the dominant position in the history of science" for some time (Pg. 117). (This seems odd to me since, of the two extremes, relativism seems the most absurd, but that's what he says. Since he's the expert and I'm not, I'm sadly willing to entertain the idea that he may be right about this.)

Wootton sees some merit in both of these perspectives, and this book is his attempt to reconcile them. His self-appointed task can be summarized in these quotes that appear near the end of the book:

The task, in other words, is to understand how reliable knowledge and scientific progress can and do result from a flawed, profoundly contingent, culturally relative, all-too-human process. (pg. 541)
Hence the need for an historical epistemology which allows us to make sense of the ways in which we interact with the physical world (and each other) in the pursuit of knowledge. The central task of such an epistemology is not to explain why we have been successful in our pursuit of scientific knowledge; there is no good answer to that question. Rather it is to track the evolutionary process by which success has been built upon success; that way we can come to understand that science works, and how it works. (Pg. 543)

And this is what he does in an extensively researched and exhaustively documented account of the development and evolution of science. The way of thinking, which we now call science, truly was new and revolutionary. It emerged primarily in Western Europe between the times of Columbus and Newton. Wootton doesn't claim a single igniting spark, but he gives Columbus's voyage in 1492 credit for providing a powerful challenge to the prevailing belief that the ancients had known everything worth knowing. Although Columbus himself never accepted that the land he found by traveling west from Spain was a previously unknown continent, others soon came to this realization, and it showed that the authority of Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Holy Scripture were not as absolute as people believed. Here was an entirely new world, with strange animals, plants, and people, which the respected and authoritative ancients had known nothing about. Possibly just as significant was that the existence of these two huge continents was not found through philosophical reflection or by divine revelation. This new land was 'discovered' by a bunch of scruffy sailors—commoners!

From here, he explains that these emerging ideas added new words and new (and modern) definitions to old words, such as 'discovery', 'fact', 'experiment', 'objectivity', and 'evidence'. These all have their current meanings because of the scientific way of viewing the world that emerged between the 16th and 18th centuries. (Personally, I think his discussion of the word 'evidence' goes into more detail and greater length than needed to make his point, but for those in academia, it may be helpful).

He also shows how culture influenced the development of scientific thinking. More often than not, the culture of this time hindered rather than helped. Prior to the scientific revolution, philosophical disputes were decided through clever rhetoric, creative verbal arguments, and appeals to tradition and authority. Because of this, early practitioners of science felt it necessary to justify themselves by citing the works of long-dead philosophers like Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius. Although none had the authority of Aristotle, they were ancient, which implied a certain respectability. The new scientific way of thinking, on the other hand, "sought to resolve intellectual disputes through experimentation." (pg. 562)

I am more of an interested observer of science than I am a practitioner, but I have to admit that the realist view seems far closer to the truth to me than does the relativist concept. It is undeniable that science is done by scientists, that scientists are people, and that people are shaped by the cultures in which they live. But modern science originally began by challenging the assumptions of the culture in which it first emerged, and it retains that aspect of cultural skepticism to this day. I suspect that many current scientists are motivated, at least in part, by the dream of possibly overturning a prevailing theory or showing that it is somehow flawed or incomplete. In the 17th century, challenging cultural assumptions could bring a long, uncomfortable visit with inquisitors followed by a short, hot time tied to a stake. Today, it can bring a scientist fame and fortune.

Scientific progress isn't inevitable, but it can and does reveal culturally independent facts. Scientists are products of their cultures, but the process of science intentionally strives to put those cultural assumptions aside. It may be the only human activity that does so.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

The workings of science are almost entirely naturalized. For us, it seems natural that scientists discover facts about the natural universe, and that they do so by formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test those hypotheses. But to someone in the in the 15th century, this process was entirely alien.

Wootton aims to discuss the scientific revolution, the period between Tycho's Nova of 1572 and the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, where science became an accepted mode of knowledge. But the real objective is a broadside against a school of scholarship which has wrecked proper history of science, namely David Bloor's Strong Programme, and an undue relativism in history of science, with it's origins in Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift theory of scientific revolutions.

This book is at its best in discussing the world of knowledge prior to the scientific revolution. I was entirely unaware of the controversy about the location of the sphere of land and the sphere of water in Aristotelian physics, or the belief that the oceans were literally above dry land, as preserved in the phrase 'high seas'. There's a lot of good linguistic explanation of the origins and usages of words like experiment, fact, and discovery. Wootton's argument is that the discovery and exploitation of the New World provided the initial crack in the armor of scholastic Aristotelian knowledge, since the Americas were so obviously there and the ancients had said nothing about them. An interesting graph of sales of a popular Ptolemaic astronomy textbook shows a dip in sales in the 1570s, since a nova cannot be explained in a universe of divine spheres, and then a collapse with Galileo's discover of the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus around 1608. The old knowledge was dead.

But how did the new knowledge arise? Here, Wootton is sadly less detailed, talking a little about the various uses of Torricelli's experiment. And of course, the printing press played a key role in bringing down the price of books and allowing precise copies of complex technical diagrams, something scribes were hopeless at reproducing accurately. But where there should be evidence, there is mostly invective against postmodern relativists.

Now I'll admit that I'm part of the science and technology studies tradition Wootton rails against. He's right that the Strong Programme is often poorly used, and that relativism misses the key ability of science to accurately describe the natural world. Yet, even a sophisticated realism has trouble getting out of the recursive trap that 'successful science accurately describes the natural world, which we know because of successful science, which has been shown to accurately describe the natural world, etc". There were experimenters prior to Galileo, but as Wootton discusses, their discoveries died, because they did not exist in a social context which allowed for scientific discovery.

[M.C · Rating 4 out of 5]

He dudado entre tres y cuatro estrellas, pero al final ha pesado la gran erudición demostrada. Hay partes pesadísimas en la obra, de escaso interés, como cuando analiza el origen de ciertas palabras. pero en general el tema es tan interesante de por sí que hace que soportes esas partes torturantes y sigas adelante. Lo mejor las reflexiones historiográficas.

[Gabrielle Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very granular at times but necessary to lay the groundwork for the language and fundamental understandings required to define and describe science at its origin.

[Jani-Petri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not in the end have the patience to finnish this.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a undergrad degree in Chemistry, and yet I felt inadequate in trying to keep up with the way the info was delivered. Maybe the chaos coming from a very busy mind of the author?

[Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a remarkable quantity of science history, specially the investigation of the use of new words (like discovery, invention, experiment, evidence, hypothesis, thesis, etc.).

Wootton have a chronological order, and let us explore different texts of multiple authors, including some obscure theologians, explorers, and diverse philosophers that started to use the new words to describe what is happening on science.

It's clear that it is difficult to talk about a scientific revolution, even more difficult to associate the industrial revolution with the scientific one (he gave some examples, but science is faster than technology, like the examples of Galileo and the Jupiter moons to measure time).

Also, the book have a fatal flaw, most of the documents are from English philosophers or scientist, with the notable exceptions of Galileo, Descartes and Pascal, we don't have a glance of the French point of view of science history (besides remarks on Diderot and Voltaire, there is not a profound exploration).

Anyway, the quotes and notes are extremely useful, and it is a good book to start before to go to the new classics like Kuhn or Popper.

[Skjam! · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the beginning of the Fifteenth Century, there were no scientists as we understand the term, and no science. Received wisdom from Aristotle and Galen ruled knowledge and philosophy. Then a series of changes in technology and the way people investigated nature brought a new way of thinking. By the end of the Seventeenth Century there were scientists, an intellectual community of people who had created a process we call “science.”

This book covers the history of those centuries, and how the Scientific Revolution began. David Wootton is a professor of Intellectual History at the University of London and an Anniversary Professor at the University of York, and the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries are part of his focus.

There were, according to this book, several contributing factors to the Scientific Revolution. The printing press allowed ideas to be widely spread and preserved for long times. Perspective drawing allowed more accurate pictures to be published–you could build something from plans! The telescope and microscope opened up new worlds to human vision. Readily available compasses improved navigation.

Plus of course, the “discovery” of America showing there were entire landmasses unknown to the ancient philosophers, and a nova in 1572 that revealed the heavens were not fixed and unchangeable as Aristotle had decreed. The old answers no longer satisfied, and people began methodically testing to see what actually happened when, for example, you floated ice in water.

It wasn’t an overnight change; several of the pieces took a while before their true significance or usefulness was understood. At first, much of it was simply mathematicians applying their skills to astronomy or ballistics. But over time, the changes accelerated, so that by the time of Isaac Newton, what he did with refraction of light was clearly the scientific method.

This is a college level text, with copious footnotes and end notes, bibliography and index. Professor Wootton spends a great deal of time tracking down earliest uses of various words used for science in a science-related context, like “fact” and “hypothesis.” This can get tedious, but he’s trying to show how the new way of thinking had to adapt and invent vocabulary for ideas that simply didn’t exist in that form before. Thankfully, there are also illustrations throughout, and a center section of color plates.

The author also has a section devoted to calling out historians he disagrees with, primarily relativists. Apparently, there is a school of thought that science is effectively a group delusion, with more socially prominent or connected scientists imposing their views on their colleagues. Creationism is just as good science as evolution, it would seem. The author claims that there are such things as theories that don’t stand up to facts. I am not educated enough to evaluate his conclusions or his description of other historical philosophies; he may have misrepresented them.

Recommended primarily for history students and science buffs. The casual reader would probably be better off with biographies of the various individual people involved, many of whom led interesting lives that are barely touched on in this volume. (Women and non-Europeans who helped advance the cause of science are barely mentioned, mostly to say they existed.)

[Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had hopes this book was about the invention of science, in part because I was trained and worked as a scientist. Alas, the book turned out to be about the philosophy of the history of the history of science. Most of the book was about the origin of words needed to understand science. For example the author spent about 75 pages on the word "fact." He pointed out that before 1650 there was no such word because the western world had no such concept of a scientific fact. With the beginning of experiments in the 17th century, which was the invention of science, they finally needed a word to refer to a scientific fact established by an experiment. OK, interesting, but 75 pages: give me a break.
The reason the invention didn't occur until the 17th century is that there was no need. Aristotle had explained every thing. For example Aristotle opined the obvious that heavy bodies fall faster than light bodies. Do you think Aristotle could have taken 5 minutes to see if that was true, which of course it wasn't. So for almost 2,000 years the world was perfectly happy with Aristotle's reams of nonsense.
Bottom line, not recommended for anyone except philosophers of the history of science.

[Alvaro de Menard · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book in search of an editor. At least twice as long as it should've been: repetitive to an absurd degree (was the author paid by the word?) and filled to the brim with extraneous digressions of no interest whatsoever.

On top of that, it's horribly disorganized. The author has 2-3 hobbyhorses he returns to in almost every single chapter, regardless of relevance or context. Sometimes he'll do half a treatment of a topic, then do the rest 100 pages later in a completely different chapter.

Even if we were to overlook these weaknesses, the book is still extremely weak in terms of its substance. It's almost 800 pages long, yet the author dedicates just a single paragraph on the key question of why the scientific revolution took hold in Europe but not Islam or China. His answer is that it's because they lacked the concept of discovery!

[Xin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is very heavy on the historical, philosophical, anthropological, even linguistic aspects of the “history” of sciences, yet without solid understanding of the sciences beneath those tumultuous changes and the mathematics that linking them together. It’s more of a general history book by a historian not a scientific book about the true history, essence, and beginning of science. A complete joke and waste of time. Don’t read it if you are truly interested in the beginning of sciences.

[Ibraheem · Rating 3 out of 5]

help me please . i love this book but i want to read it in arabic . is there an arabic copy of this book ?

[Cleokatra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a long, tough read for me. I'm a scientist, but I don't read much science history. The book is beautifully written and well researched, so 4 stars.

[Islomjon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The primary thing that I understood while reading "The Invention of Science" is that it is not for everyone who are interested in scientific discovery or its history. Comparing to To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, this work is more heavier since it includes not only the historical events, but thorough analysis of their predecessors and consequences; and rather it seemed to me as an argumentative scholar work to go against on other types historiography. The book retells that history of scientific revolution with the view of contemporary situation: economic, religious and scientific view. Moreover, it goes deeper explaining and arguing with modern philosophical ideas about the influence of particular invention or discovery.

Nevertheless, it was crucially interesting to go in details about his critical and deep research as well as understanding that some ideas would not be popular as long as they don't have words to explain them.

[Daniel Schotman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although very informative. The book sometimes comes across as a bit all over the shop as the book treats with different subjects. It is not as the cover of the book states A new History Of The Scientific Revolution, which what I was actually looking for.

It is obvious the author knows his stuff and is widely read, but I expected something different.

[Liam Kilroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though I don’t agree with all of Woottons arguments (and I feel he’s a bit harsh towards philosophers at times), this book is well researched and well written. The last 100 pages are the best, in my opinion, where he offers a high-level view of not only his own arguments but those which he is responding to. I respect that he is able to find value in the positions of the epistemic relativists and (naive) scientific realists while pointing out that neither works well on their own.

[Ian Tymms · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book matters. It matters generally because of its meticulous scholarship and its well-reasoned articulation of the processes that underpin scientific knowledge. It matters specifically now as an antidote to the forces of counter-scientific thinking that, through ignorance or self-serving lies, are picking away at the fabric of society and academia.

In the context of COVID, a robust and reliable scientific process is life-saving. What I came to better appreciate through reading Wootton is both how recent and also how fragile the processes we call "science" really are. My crude understanding prior to reading the book was that the key transition into modern thought occured with Aristotle. Plato represented antiquity with the proper locus of inquiry being the mind; the objects of the world are no more than interesting approximations of intellectual "forms" and of limited use to the thinking philosopher. However misguided much of Aristotle's thinking may have been, I understood science to have begun with Aristotle's determination to investigate the details of the world through observation and classification.

Wootton argues convincingly that just observing the world and documenting what is seen is not enough to form the foundations of science. What is missing until the 16th and 17th centuries is a true scientific process and a culture of inquiry. And for such a process and culture to exist, Wooton demonstrates, a series of social and technological advances needed to be made. The printing press is necessary because knowledge has to be widely available and documented clearly so that others can test and verify. Advances in technology are important because they provide the precision instruments that allow for the careful and replicable measurement of the natural world. A culture of inquiry built on the social investment in the 16th century voyages of discovery supports the elevation of individual thinkers who can explore the natural world in new ways. Wootton's chapter on the historical evolution of the concept of a "fact" is both exhaustive in its scholarship and compelling in its argument that an enlightenment understanding of a "fact" is qualitatively different to any understanding that preceded it. Before the enlightenment, "fact" had more of the quality of the modern concept of "gossip" relying on hearsay and authority; after the enlightenment, a "fact" requires validation in objective evidence. This is the true origins of modern science.

Most interesting for me is Wootton's explanation of the relativism of the mid 20th century. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, the post-structural thinking of Jacques Derrida was influential. I found the arguments (to the extent that I understood them) compelling and persuasive but also deeply unsettling as they seemed to uncouple the mind from the world. In the final chapters of his book, Wootton offers a rapprochement by reminding the reader of the "whiggish" history to which Derrida and others in the relativist tradition were reacting.

What stopped Aristotelian philosophy maturing to become modern science were the mechanisms of self-serving social power which permeate language and culture. The post-modern philosophers provide a clear articulation of these processes. What Wootton argues - very convincingly to my mind - is that it's possible to understand the thinking of Derrida and Wittgenstein and others as a useful addition to the history of science rather than as a refutation of scientific process. Scientific thought needs to be understood as both a social and a "factual" process.

[Nilesh Jasani · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Invention of Science, a scholarly work, is written for a purpose quite different from the understanding it provides to most readers who are not experts in the field.

The author is a master of the field. Many of his arguments are counterpoints to positions taken by other renowned experts. These may be critical but subtleties are going to be beyond the comprehension of the rest. The enormous amount of details provided could be important for those in the field, but lay readers do not have the advantage of the supporting evidence or criticisms used by those being countered. As a result, the details get overwhelming every so often through the book.

Yet, the book is a fascinating work. To explain its unintended utility, let me use the example of an era our generation knows - information revolution. The similarities are definitely not precise - for example, meaningful developments were over a span of decades and centuries during what is later defined as the scientific revolution era while for us major innovation leaps happened in months and years. Still, such an example would help. Say, a later day historian is writing a book called The Invention of Digitization, language of the time - which could freely include the words like apps, browsing/search, GPUs or cloud - can fully explain the the zig-zag path through which 8084 processors, floppy disks, FTPs, GUIs, modems etc this world evolved.

What Galileo, Columbus and all the discoverers of those eras did was quite different not only from their viewpoints but also from ours. Of course, they told us about gravity and showed the way to America but they discovered "discovery". They started multiple new paths of inquiry and processes that have shaped our sciences, learning and technology ever since. What constitutes a theory or a hypothesis, the roles played by evidences, the importance of facts, the falsifiability and accumulation of rational knowledge - these are some of a large number of topics discussed in a fascinating way in this book.

This is not an easy book. So many arguments would appear overly pedantic for non-experts. Or simply a gibberish intended for another expert in the field who is not in agreement. Yet, for the patient, the book throws flashlight on the times that sparked something immense for the humanity, and mostly in the language or methods of that time rather than those of the later days.

[Simon B · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was looking for a history that outlined the scientific advancements that contributed to the new thinking that was the forerunner to revolutions of 18th and 19th centuries. I got a meandering polemic against postmodernist and social relativist notions of the Scientific Revolution infused with Eurocentrism. I don't mind a critique of postmodernism but this is not a 'new history' but a defence of the old history: a tale of Progress & Modernity that emanates from the great minds of enlightened European men. It gets off to a particularly bad start with it's claim that European discoveries of the New World introduced the hitherto unknown concept of 'Discovery', which in turn laid the basis for scientific discoveries of the early modern era. A cursory knowledge of the history of human migration suggests finding new places is hardly a human achievement uniquely confined to Europeans. His repeated claim that Columbus 'discovered' the Americas prompted scorn: the author can't be unaware of the indigenous American critique of this racist notion ... he just doesn't think it's important. But his repeated claim that the clitoris was first 'discovered' by an male 16th century Italian anatomist prompted pity: the author is a something of a dinosaur, someone who knows what he likes and likes what he knows. His definition for what constitutes science is: "knowledge of natural processes based on evidence." It's not a bad definition but it does not support his argument that science did not exist until it was invented in Europe after 1572. Agriculture, animal husbandry, nomadism all exhibit this type of knowledge. If he cannot find evidence for science before his period it's because he has studiously avoided looking for it.