The invention of science

For all of the attention paid to the inarguable benefits to humanity of the industrial revolution, histories of its necessary predecessor - scientific revolution - are few and far between. Wootton expands that canon with a masterful, deeply read history, digging into obscure texts to trace changes in language use and the diffusion of ideas. The core hypothesis here is provocative but by the end of the book extremely convincing - that the "discovery" of the Americas in the late 15th century (from the European perspective, obviously) destroyed the belief system that had preceded it. This system shockingly had no word for "discovery" or "fact," which had to be invented across European countries to account for disorienting new, indisputable truths.

There's so much more here, and importantly Wootton is upfront about the limitations of his research and possible alternative explanations. There's a lot of inside baseball discussion of the appropriate way to analyze history, which I loved but your mileage will vary. Highly recommend

This excellent, comprehensive, astonishingly well-researched, and above all enthralling book seeks to establish an inflection point in history indicating the birth of science, much like Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve. But rather than focusing on the rediscovery of Lucretius, Wootton looks to the discovery of America and the nova observed by Tycho Brahe as the moments that shattered the crystal spheres of Aristotle and ushered in the new science with its basis in experiment. Additionally, he tracks the emergence of science linguistically, by identifying when the modern contexts (which we take for granted) of scientific words, such as "fact," "evidence," "experiment," "hypothesis," and "theory," come into use. I found this a compelling method, as well as an interesting counterpoint to my limited experience with Aristotle (his "Physics"), in which I got frustrated with his deduction from etymology (not a real example, but something like, "rainbows are beams of light curved into bows by the rain, and that is why we call them rainbows"). I am a big fan of the ancient Greeks and Platonic philosophy, but as far as I am concerned, Aristotle got what he deserved.

This book makes clear that we are still living through an intellectual revolution, one that touches on all aspects of our lives, and is still meeting with resistance while deepening our understanding of the Universe, half a millennium later. May the revolution continue.