John Gribbin explores the defining decades of the seventeenth century’s scientific revolution, when the Royal Society established what became the scientific method, a way of doing and communicating science that set the tone for the three and a half centuries that followed.

In THE FELLOWSHIP he describes the origins of the Royal Society, which grew out of meetings held in Oxford during the Civil War, and latterly in London, among natural philosophers, especially through the efforts of three men: William Gilbert, Francis Bacon, and William Harvey.

The extraordinary return in 1759 of a comet that, on the basis of Newton’s theory of gravity, had been predicted by Edmond Halley, marked the triumph of this scientific revolution.