Burke looks at eight different moments in history when a change in the body of knowledge radically altered the accepted view and in doing so gave birth to a major institution or way of thinking that has become basic to this modern world; the events including the arrival of Aristotelian logic, the rediscovery of perspective geometry, the printing press, the study of trajectories that found the law of gravity, the Industrial Revolution, the theory of evolution and quantum physics and the atomic bomb. The book was of course written too early to encompass the personal computer, the internet and the mobile phone, which will probably change our lives more than all the rest of his examples put together.