Contents
A starving man’s hunger for knowledge … The human odyssey of discovery
Lizards don’t ask questions … From Handy Man to Wise, Wise Man … What infants ask but chimps don’t
Humanity’s first church … Knowledge, ideas, and values go viral … Human and primate culture
From the savanna to the city … How the charms and headaches of neighbors led to the new arts of writing and arithmetic … The invention of law, from peasant (Don’t vomit in streams) to planet (Don’t stray from your orbit)
Bad crops and angry gods … A new framework for looking at the world … The mystery of change and the tyranny of common sense … Aristotle, the one-man Wikipedia
Trusting your eyes over your ancestors … Castrated boars and universal laws of motion … The tactless Professor Galileo
The good, the bad, and the ugly: Isaac Newton … The bet that turned Newton from alchemy to authoring the greatest scientific treatise ever written … The force of Newtonian thinking
From embalming to alchemy … The similarities between burning and breathing … Lavoisier loses his head … Mendeleev and his periodic table
Cells and the complexity of life … A recipe for making mice and the revolution of the microscope … Tragedy, illness, and Darwin’s secret research
The billion billion tiny universes in a drop of water … Cracks in the Newtonian worldview … Accepting an unseeable reality … Planck and Einstein invent the quantum
The insights of a dreamer … The crazy ideas of a pale and modest young man … The early quantum laws, “awful nonsense, bordering on fraud”
Heisenberg’s new physics … The bizarre reality of the quantum universe … The empowering and humbling legacy of a new science
Epilogue
The advance of human understanding as a succession of fantasies … The importance of critical and innovative thinking … Where we are and where we are going
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index