Moving from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad to Oxford, and from the Museum of Alexandria to the Royal Society of London, the author shows that the scientists of the past not only did not understand what we understand about the world - they did not understand what there is to understand.

Steven Weinberg has won the Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, the Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet and numerous honorary degrees. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Royal Society of London and the American Philosophical Society. A long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is the author of The First Three Minutes and Dreams of a Final Theory, among other books.