Science 101

What This Book Covers

1. Chapter One - Before Science Was Science
2. Chapter Two - The First Observers
3. Chapter Three - Greek Thinkers, Roman Tinkerers
4. Chapter Four - The Islamic Golden Age
5. Chapter Five - Medieval Europe: Knowledge in Chains
6. Chapter Six - The Scientific Revolution
7. Chapter Seven - The Method Itself
8. Chapter Eight - Chemistry and the Invisible World
9. Chapter Nine - Life Under the Microscope
10. Chapter Ten - The Explosive Century
11. Chapter Eleven - Machines That Think
12. Chapter Twelve - The Future of Figuring Things Out

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE Before Science Was Science BEFORE THERE WERE hypotheses, there were stories. Early humans didn’t run experiments. They told myths. If your crops failed, it wasn’t a soil pH issue. It was because the sky god was pissed. If someone got sick, it wasn’t bacteria. It was a curse, a demon, or a lesson from the ancestors. Everything in the world had to mean something, because randomness was terrifying. Meaning was safety. So people turned to symbols, stars, animals, omens, and rituals to explain what the hell was going on. This wasn’t stupidity. It was survival. The shaman wasn’t just a medicine man, he was the walking Wikipedia of the tribe. He knew which plants killed pain, which...