In his controversial book The End of Science, John Horgan suggested that the era of great scientific discoveries is over: Exploring the solar system or the human genome may keep us busy for a while, but our findings probably won't require the invention of radical new theories on a par with those of Copernicus, Darwin or Einstein. After all, how much has happened in astronomy since the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, or in genetics since James Watson and Francis Crick's description of DNA in the 1950s, to fundamentally change the way we see the universe and our place in it?

When Horgan's book came out in 1996, I was a reporter at Science magazine covering developmental biology, a discipline undergoing a stunning metamorphosis thanks to new techniques for manipulating genes. I knew better, therefore, than to swallow Horgan's idea whole. I suspected that readers familiar with other fields would scoff just as loudly, but I lacked detailed evidence. Now John Maddox, one of "the last great scientific polymaths" (in the estimation of Richard Dawkins), has assembled that evidence into a captivating, highly readable book.