The 1600s were not, on the face of it, an obvious candidate for the description of the "age of genius". It was a world in which everyone was God-fearing and when everything from floods to comets was seen as the inscrutable (and unchallengeable) will of a jealous, stern deity. Yet it was from this unpromising soil that the modern, scientific world-view bloomed. Edward Dolnick's project is to chronicle the thinkers and the discoveries that made it possible.
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