Includes bibliographical references and index.

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. THE AGE OF WONDER investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space and the explorers of "dynamic science," of 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; and Humphrey Davy, who with only a grammar-school education stunned the scientific community with near-suicidal gas experiments that led to the invention of the miners' lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe.

Not AR rated.