The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

A riveting history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder explores the earliest ideas and explorers of “dynamic science”: an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe itself. And Humphry Davy, who, with only a grammar school education, stunned the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments, which led to the invention of the miners’ lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. Richard Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experiments—both successes and failures—were born of singular (and often lonely) dedication, and how science began to be viewed as one with the imagination. It is breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance.