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"No one can really feel at home in the modern world and judge the nature of its problems "" and the possible solutions to those problems "" unless one has some intelligent notion of what science is up to."

Isaac Asimov: New Guide to Science

Contrary to what one has been told, modern science did not start with the ancient Greeks but with the Renaissance in the 16th century that gave a boost to technology with the development of the telescope and the microscope, opening up the world outside and inside ourselves.

And once technology started, it ensured it kept on rolling with new scientific ideas leading to improved technology providing the scientists with the means to test new ideas to greater and greater accuracy. Technology came first, because it was possible to make machines by trial and error without fully understanding the principles on which they operated. But when science and technology got together, progress really started.

John Gribbin, an astronomer and popular science writer tells us in Science: A History (Penguin, Special Indian Price, £ 6.30) how the full scope of science developed, not in isolation but through its influence on technology and our world view.

Gribbin has divided his book into five sections: Out of the Dark Ages, The Founding Fathers, The Enlightenment, The Big Picture and Modern Times. Taken together, it outlines the development of science from the Renaissance (roughly) to the end of the 20th century. It is a very broad sweep that takes in all the physical and biological sciences and ends up with the present state of cosmology.

Gribbin's basic theme has been to show how scientific progress builds step by step and when the time is ripe two or more individuals may take the next step independently of one another. This does not mean that individual genius has no role to play; it has, but it isn't irreplaceable. All scientists rely on their predecessors and their contributions follow naturally from what went before. This goes as much for Newton and Einstein as for Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, as for the hundreds of eminent geniuses in every field of science, technology and medicine. There is a kind of continuity in science.

Two books kick-started the progress: Copernicus's On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres that advocated the heliocentric model of the universe that, with the help of Galileo, dispensed with the flawed physical theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy who believed that the earth was the centre of the universe. Vesalins's On the Fabric of the Human Body began the process of turning biology into a science by encouraging hands-on anatomical investigation rather than the hand-waving theories of Galen. From these two starting points, Gribbin follows the history of science along two strands of inquiry into the physical and life sciences.

Sadly, the history of science has never had many takers "" even J.D.Bernal's Science in History, S.Chandrasekhar's Eddington, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Isaac Asimov's New Guide to Science and so many others after the computer and Internet revolutions "" have had a poor run here. So, you may well ask, "why bother"?

All the same, read it for two reasons. First, for the myths that have been spun around some of the scientific discoveries. For instance, Galileo never dropped weights from the leaning tower of Pisa to disprove Aristotle's claim that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. It was Aristotleans who dropped weights to prove Galileo wrong.

Or, Newton's often quoted remark that his accomplishments were the result of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is now traced as a dig against the hunchbacked Robert Hooke to whom Newton never acknowledged any debt! There are many other 'fact or fiction' questions that you can read just for the fun of it or just to know that even the most eminent scientists can sometimes make the most ridiculous statements.

Apart from the many amusing asides, the two strands of Gribbin's narrative converge when the connections between them intensify, like the implications of geology for the age of the earth and the origin of species or the coming together of genetics and cosmology. What Gribbin brings home in this entire study is that science progresses by incremental steps rather than revolutions or paradigm shifts. Perhaps this could be said for any other human activity.