This is an extended version of an interview from the Nature podcast. To listen to the full show, go to nature.com

slash nature slash podcast. As a nature podcast listener, no doubt the scientific method is your

bread and butter. Build a theory, make a prediction, and test. And so knowledge grows and we

gradually improve on our old assumptions.

But do you ever wonder how these methods of modern science came about?

David Witten, a historian at the University of York, argues that science as we know it was

forged at the end of Europe's Renaissance, starting in around 1570.

Over the course of more than a century, scholars began to

challenge old authorities and even invented a new language of discovery. David has summed up the

revolution in a new book called The Invention of Science. In it, he attempts to put to bed a 50-year

debate. Did the scientific revolution really give birth to modern science?

Reporter Lizzie Gibney first asked David where and when he thinks the revolution began.

1572 is the moment when Taka Brahe and various other astronomers, Tos I was the first, see a new star in the sky. It becomes extremely

bright. It becomes brighter than the planet Venus. And it's an astonishing phenomenon because in

the world, intellectual worlds in which Taka Brahe lived, change in the heavens was impossible.

And what Taka Barae set out to do was take very elementary simple measurements to demonstrate that this new star was far further away than the moon and the sun and therefore was in the heavens.

And after six weeks or so, it began to fade away.

But behind was left, 100 books discussing this phenomenon.

And that's the beginning of a new astronomy when for the first time

people began to think the astronomy they'd inherited from the ancients no longer worked,

and that by making more careful observations and more accurate measurements, they would be able

to construct a new understanding of the heavens. So the scientific revolution, as you call it in

...