Science has never stayed in one place

David Lindberg’s textbook surveys science from its Greek beginnings through Rome, the Islamic world and medieval Europe up to about 1450, explaining how scholars thought about nature on their own terms.

Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist raised in Baghdad, tells how scholars under the Abbasid caliphs and after translated Greek works and advanced mathematics, astronomy, optics and medicine, and how that work later reached Europe.

Seb Falk follows John of Westwyk, a fourteenth-century English monk who built astronomical instruments and studied the stars, to show how much careful science went on in the supposed Dark Ages.

Dick Teresi, a science journalist, gathers evidence of mathematics, astronomy and engineering in Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Africa and the Americas, arguing that modern science owes more to non-Western cultures than textbooks admit.

James Poskett argues that modern science grew from exchanges across the world from 1450 onward, crediting astronomers in Istanbul, naturalists in the Americas and physicists in Japan, often working within empires and wars.