What does it feel like to know something about the world that no-one in history has known before? And what is the explanation for the central mystery of science: that mathematics is so perfect a model of reality? Scientist Marcus Chown explores these questions with his characteristic wit, colour, and clarity. He moves between historical and contemporary scientific breakthroughs to highlight the central magic of science - its astonishing predictive power. Each chapter is a short story of scientific triumph, for example: - How Urbain Le Verrier, sitting at a desk in Paris in 1845, deduced the existence and location in the night sky of an entirely new planet. The discovery of Neptune on 23 September 1846 created an international sensation. - How Aleksandr Friedmann in 1922 used Einstein's theory of gravity to show that the Universe could not have existed forever but must have been born . In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the heat afterglow of the big bang. - How Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924 predicted the existence of a weird state of matter close to absolute zero in which trillions of atoms behave as a single entity. In 1995 Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman created a Bose-Einstein condensate.

- How a man hiking in Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains in 1965 realised there must exist a hitherto unsuspected subatomic particle. And half a century later, at a cost of tens of billions of euros, the Higgs particle was found at the Large Hadron Collider. - How Albert Einstein in Berlin in 1916 used his discovery that space-time is a 'thing' that could be warped to predicts that waves should propagate through it like ripples on a pond. And how on 14 September 2015 a shudder went through giant detectors in the US - the unmistakable signature of a 'gravitational wave'.