This is the foundation of all: that we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover what nature does, or may be made to do.
Thus did Francis Bacon, early in the 17th century, outline the future of science and technology. This drive for knowledge and power has now given us a world dominated by science, and this text tells the story of how we have arrived there. The achievements of the great scientific thinkers of the ages — Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, Freud, Hubble and many more — are explained and woven together into an exciting story of intellectual discovery, but a story in which a sense of the mystery of the universe is always present.
