From the conclusion: "In the year 1600, for the crime of asserting that the Earth was one of an infinite number of planets, a man named Giordano Bruno was burned alive. Bruno, an Italian philosopher and mystic, had run afoul of the Inquisition....

"Almost exactly a century later, in 1705, the queen of England bestowed a knighthood on Isaac Newton. Among the achievements that won Newton universal admiration was this: he had convinced the world of the doctrine that had cost Giordano Bruno his life.

"Sometime between those two events, at some point in the course of the 1600s, the modern world was born."

This great book is that wild and almost unbelievable story.