The workings of science are almost entirely naturalized. For us, it seems natural that scientists discover facts about the natural universe, and that they do so by formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test those hypotheses. But to someone in the in the 15th century, this process was entirely alien.

Wootton aims to discuss the scientific revolution, the period between Tycho's Nova of 1572 and the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, where science became an accepted mode of knowledge. But the real objective is a broadside against a school of scholarship which has wrecked proper history of science, namely David Bloor's Strong Programme, and an undue relativism in history of science, with it's origins in Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift theory of scientific revolutions.

This book is at its best in discussing the world of knowledge prior to the scientific revolution. I was entirely unaware of the controversy about the location of the sphere of land and the sphere of water in Aristotelian physics, or the belief that the oceans were literally above dry land, as preserved in the phrase 'high seas'. There's a lot of good linguistic explanation of the origins and usages of words like experiment, fact, and discovery. Wootton's argument is that the discovery and exploitation of the New World provided the initial crack in the armor of scholastic Aristotelian knowledge, since the Americas were so obviously there and the ancients had said nothing about them. An interesting graph of sales of a popular Ptolemaic astronomy textbook shows a dip in sales in the 1570s, since a nova cannot be explained in a universe of divine spheres, and then a collapse with Galileo's discover of the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus around 1608. The old knowledge was dead.

But how did the new knowledge arise? Here, Wootton is sadly less detailed, talking a little about the various uses of Torricelli's experiment. And of course, the printing press played a key role in bringing down the price of books and allowing precise copies of complex technical diagrams, something scribes were hopeless at reproducing accurately. But where there should be evidence, there is mostly invective against postmodern relativists.

Now I'll admit that I'm part of the science and technology studies tradition Wootton rails against. He's right that the Strong Programme is often poorly used, and that relativism misses the key ability of science to accurately describe the natural world. Yet, even a sophisticated realism has trouble getting out of the recursive trap that 'successful science accurately describes the natural world, which we know because of successful science, which has been shown to accurately describe the natural world, etc". There were experimenters prior to Galileo, but as Wootton discusses, their discoveries died, because they did not exist in a social context which allowed for scientific discovery.