The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750 by David Wootton My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book matters. It matters generally because of its meticulous scholarship and its well-reasoned articulation of the processes that underpin scientific knowledge. It matters specifically now as an antidote to the forces of counter-scientific thinking that, through ignorance or self-serving lies, are picking away at the fabric of society and academia. In the context of COVID, a robust and reliable scientific process is life-saving. What I came to better appreciate through reading Wootton is both how recent and also how fragile the processes we call "science" really are. My crude understanding prior to reading the book was that the key transition into modern thought occured with Aristotle. Plato represented antiquity with the proper locus of inquiry being the mind; the objects of the world are no more than interesting approximations of intellectual "f...