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Books

Science was invented in 1572

Or so David Wootton seems to suggest, in a giant treatise celebrating the 17th century’s other glorious revolution

16 January 2016

9:00 AM

16 January 2016

9:00 AM

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

Allen Lane, pp.769, £30, ISBN: 9781846142109

There was no science before 1572, the year that Tycho Brahe saw a new star in the night sky above him. To be sure, the Greeks had made efforts to present their knowledge of nature in a systematic fashion, but they lacked the tools — more specifically they lacked the ways of thinking — that have allowed investigators over the past 300 years to question the traditions that have preceded them, to probe the inner workings of nature, and in so doing to build increasingly informative accounts of the world that surrounds us.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £25, Tel: 08430 600033. Tim Lewens’s The Meaning of Science was published last year.

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