For untold centuries, humans tracked the regularities of the natural world and developed systems that let us make predictions about the future. But, with a few rare exceptions, we did little more than that. The few stabs made at understanding things were anything but systematic, and they didn't produce unified theories about the underlying properties of the physical world. But then, roughly 500 years ago, everything changed.

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.

How did this happen? The Invention of Science is in part an attempt to describe that. But it's also an academic argument against recent ideas in the study of science that suggest there was never actually a scientific revolution, or that science is purely a social construct that doesn't actually get us any closer to something that most of us would call reality.

Relativity is not just relative

Science is definitely a social activity. Wootton's history identifies plenty of social factors that fed in to the scientific revolution, and how convincing your peers of your findings became part of the scientific process. But lately, it's become fashionable in some academic circles to treat science as an exclusively social process. Grant funding agencies dictate the results they want, and researchers simply design experiments or hardware to produce them. Like everything else in the world, the whole activity is just another way of exercising power.

Sixteenth century Europe was the last place you'd expect an intellectual revolution. How did this happen?

Some of the more measured sociologists and philosophers who have adopted these ideas have asked serious and significant questions about the nature of science. For example, they've pointed out that we shouldn't read too much into the fact that our theories make accurate predictions unless we have some sense of the total number of possible theories, and how many of those would also make accurate predictions.

But doubts about the validity of science to describe reality have also produced things like the science wars and suggestions that there is no such thing as a scientific method. For his part, Wootton is shocked that it's even an issue. Yes, science is a social activity; but it's also limited by an underlying reality. He makes a comparison with, of all things, gardening. Yes, our social preferences dictate what a good garden looks like. But Minnesota's winters limits which perennials will survive there—it's not an "anything goes" social activity. Neither is science.

If some academics question whether reality exists, then it should be no surprise that they also question whether the scientific revolution occurred. The revolution as it's typically defined ended without changes in language ("scientist" wasn't adopted until much later) or anybody doing science as a full-time job, leaving some questions open about what exactly had changed. Wootton devotes page upon page to dissecting these arguments, including a careful etymology of scientific terms like "fact" and "discovery."

Whether you find that a good use of text will depend on how much you care about these arguments. For his part, Wootton feels that he's handled both issues: a real revolution took place that left us with a process that has value because it helps us understand the nature of our world. We call that process "science."

Recipe for revolution

One of the words that Wootton thinks is especially significant is "discovery." In Medieval times, European languages generally lacked a word for the concept of the before-and-after moment that comes with uncovering new knowledge. That, Wootton argues, is in keeping with European views on knowledge in general: the ancient Greeks and Romans had everything figured out, and human knowledge had been in decline since. In the universities of the time, medicine was derived from Galen's writings, astronomy from Ptolemy's, and the natural world (which was viewed as separate from the heavens) came from Aristotle.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had everything figured out, and human knowledge had been in decline since.

Complicating matters was the effort of St. Thomas Aquinas to make Aristotle part of Christian theology. Question the wrong aspect of his writing and you risk charges of heresy.

Many of the ideas handed down by the likes of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen were wrong, sometimes comically so. But very few Medieval Europeans thought of testing them. Sporadically, Wootton notes, people doing medicine would stumble across an organ that Galen never mentioned, but these proto-discoveries didn't lead to any sort of generalized effort to improve the state of our knowledge.

Things changed, Wootton argues, with what we now call the voyages of discovery, initiated by the Portuguese (who brought the word descubrir into the European lexicon). The new lands showed that the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans was limited and that the acquisition of new knowledge could have tremendous import. But the new lands were especially hard on Aristotle. He had written that the equatorial regions could not possibly have humans living in it, yet there they were. He'd written that water (one of the four elements) was present in 20 times the volume of Earth, yet there was dry land around the entire globe.

Meanwhile, social factors unrelated to discovery also set the stage for a revolution. The development of perspective in painting, Wootton argues, hinted that the world could be described through math and geometry. This set the stage for Newton's study of optics. The printing press allowed discoveries and the methods that produced them to be spread within a community of shared interests. New English laws that formalized standards of evidence influenced early English scientists.

Seeing planets anew

But the key developments started in astronomy. Copernicus developed an alternative to Ptolemy's system of planetary motion, one with the Sun at the center, rather than the Earth. But he left everybody uncertain about whether the heliocentric universe was a convenience for calculation's sake, or if it reflected the way the planets were actually arranged. But he was still trapped in Aristotle's world—his orbits were circular. Kepler got rid of those, but still tried to describe the distance between planets using Aristotelean geometry.

It took Galileo to definitively put an end to Aristotle's dominance. Within months of constructing a telescope, he turned it on the moon and showed that Aristotle's claim that heavenly bodies were perfect spheres had to be wrong. Shortly afterwards came the moons of Jupiter, raising further doubts about the Earth-centric view. And then he found that Venus had phases, meaning it had to orbit the Sun. And he published everything. Separately, he had a habit of systematic experimentation that allowed him to challenge Aristotle about falling objects while tidying up some loose ends left by Archimedes.

It took Galileo to definitively put an end to Aristotle's dominance.

Galileo's approach was contagious. When Toricelli developed a barometer, others read his description, built their own, and discovered that nature doesn't actually abhor a vacuum. When Pascal took his barometer to the top of a mountain to experiment with changes in air pressure, he brought friends with him because he wanted his results verified by his peers (Wootton finds this particularly praiseworthy). After reading about how to make an air pump, Boyle devised improvements and was soon formulating laws about the behavior of gasses.

By the time Newton began working, centuries of unrelated developments and the work of various pioneers had given him everything he needed. His Principia and Opticks are a mix of experimental work, proposed laws, and a unifying underlying theory. Science was ready for use.

Convinced yet?

Wootton takes over 600 pages to lay out his history and arguments. Notes and references continue for dozens more. This is not a book to be approached lightly, and (as mentioned above) a lot of it is devoted to arguments that you probably didn't even know were going on in academic circles. I don't need to be convinced that science helps us understand fundamental, underlying reality, so I found it difficult to care about this part of The Invention of Science. If you're the sort who's willing to accept that HIV causes AIDS and we can use that knowledge to design effective drugs, you probably won't care much about that part of the book either.

Similarly, I was already aware that not much science happened prior to Galileo and Newton, and an ever-broadening scope of organized discovery came afterwards. Whether you want to call this change a revolution is largely a matter of semantics. Given the many decades involved, other words may be more appropriate. (Wootton describes some early authors, writing at a time when "revolution" hadn't been used in the sense of the French and American ones, who used "reformation" instead, modeled on Martin Luther's.)

My only issue is that this 600-page tome will intimidate a lot of potential readers.

Even with page after page proving that science had a revolution and isn't just a social construct, academics will probably still quibble over details in The Invention of Science. It's impossible that one individual, even one as intelligent as Wootton, could have read every single source cited in this book and not made a mistake or misinterpreted. But I don't think minor errors or the baggage of academic arguments detract from Wootton's book. My only real issue is that this 600-page tome will intimidate a lot of potential readers who would otherwise enjoy or benefit from the overall picture that he paints.

I found The Invention of Science compelling. It gave me a new appreciation for all the happy accidents that allowed science to take root in the unlikely soil of Medieval Europe. Science is such an obvious approach to us now that it's healthy to remind ourselves what a distinctly human success story it is and how it has helped us to flourish despite ourselves.