To grasp how science has transformed our world in the modern era, we must ask two important questions- why is science so powerful? And why did we take so long to invent it - two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics? The Knowledge Machine's radical answer is that science calls on its practitioners to do something irrational- by wilfully ignoring theology, metaphysics and theoretical beauty - in essence, stripping all previous knowledge away - scientists channel unprecedented energy into observation and experiment. Like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens or Thomas Kuhn's 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine overturns what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.
