Our drive to know; A starving man's hunger for knowledge. The human odyssey of discovery -- Curiosity; Lizards don't ask questions. From handy man to wise man. What infants ask, but chimps don't -- Culture; Humanity's first church. Knowledge, ideas, and values go viral. Human and primate culture -- Civilization; From the Savannah to Uruk. How the charms and headaches of neighbors led to the new arts of writing and arithmetic. The invention of law, from peasant: "don't vomit in streams" to planet: "don't stray from your orbit" -- Reason; Bad crops and angry gods. A new framework for looking at the world. The mystery of change and the tyranny of common sense. Aristotle, the one-man Wikipedia -- A new way to reason; Trusting your eyes over your ancestors. Castrated boars and universal laws of motion. The tactless Professor Galileo -- The mechanical universe; The good, the bad, and the ugly: Isaac Newton. The bet that turned Newton from alchemy to authoring the greatest scientific treatise ever written. The force of Newtonian thinking -- What things are made of; From embalming to alchemy. The similarities between burning and breathing. Lavoisier loses his head. Mendeleev and his periodic table -- The animate world; Cells and the complexity of life. A recipe for making mice and the revolution of the microscope. Tragedy, illness, and Darwin's secret research -- The limits of human experience; The billion billion tiny universes in a drop of water. Cracks in the Newtonian worldview. Accepting an unseeable reality. Planck and Einstein invent the quantum -- The invisible realm; The insights of a dreamer. The crazy ideas of a pale and modest young man. The early quantum laws, "awful nonsense, bordering on fraud" -- The quantum revolution; Heisenberg's new physics. The bizarre reality of the quantum universe. The empowering and humbling legacy of a new science -- Epilogue; The advance of human understanding as a succession of fantasies; the importance of critical and innovative thinking; Where we are and where we are going.