To hear David Wootton tell it in his new book The Invention of Science, 16th-century Europe was the last place you’d expect an intellectual revolution. It was a region where witchcraft and unicorns were accepted as real, even by the intellectual classes. They also felt that the Greeks and Romans had already discovered everything worth knowing. An extended hangover from a night out with Aristotle and Christian theology stifled anything that looked like a sense of inquiry. Knowledge, if anything, was on the decline.

Yet, as Wootton explains, the intellectual ferment started by Copernicus and Galileo brought about a change that led to the breakthroughs of Boyle, Pascal, and Newton. Some of their findings are still in use today, and the scientific approaches they pioneered have expanded in scope to revolutionize the modern world.