The key turning point in the history of science came with the invention of two remarkable tools: the microscope and telescope. Through their lenses, we saw extraordinary phenomena, for the first time, in the 1600s—from Saturn's rings and craters on the Moon to red blood cells and sperm cells—and science changed forever. It was like discovering new planets inside our own bodies. Once we saw these hidden, unimaginable and completely surprising dimensions of reality, we could not go back—and the tools were what guided us forward. These new unexpected instruments revealed unexpected new worlds that we did not even know could exist and without them, they would not have been possible. They sparked dozens of major discoveries—more than a single scholar or research team has ever achieved. These two optical breakthroughs mark when we vastly surpassed the human mind as the central driver of perception and exploration—ultimately triggering modern observational and experimental science. These two discovery machines catalysed into the development of a toolbox of six groundbreaking tools and methods that accelerated and consolidated science, enabling future researchers to confirm the discoveries using them. This represented the birth of the first systematic scientific toolbox—enabling a cascade of discoveries that defined 17th-century science. What explains the explosion of sustained scientific discovery is not just culture, institutions, a scientific community, genius or European geography, but especially the invention of these two new tools that drastically expanded our capacity to perceive and measure phenomena we never could before—and demanded new explanations. Technological acceleration—in a cycle of new tools that enable new discoveries and motivate improved tools—then became self-sustaining once these instruments arrived and remains the driving force of scientific progress today. The greatest discovery we have ever made may well be the discovery of the power of our tools themselves—the realisation that they are the greatest force of progress. So the legacy of Galileo, Hooke, Boyle, Newton and their contemporaries was not any individual discovery. It was ultimately the newly developed tools they used that moved us from isolated insights to scalable discoveries. It was expanding the very way we spark discoveries. Because our tools shape what we can perceive and know, the history of science is also a history of our sensory evolution. Science is no longer bound by our biology and cognition, but has finally learned how to outgrow them with new tools. With each generation of instruments, we grow new eyes and new intuitions—in a cycle enabling us to detect new phenomena that were not imaginable before. 226 T HE ENGINE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY But to understand how we got to that crucial point in history, we went further back and traced the deep historical origins of scientific thinking itself. This led us to a challenging and cross-disciplinary question: what are the origins of science, technology and civilisation? We tackled the question by outlining the conditions that enabled these achievements. We found how observing, problem solving, experimenting and developing tools are deeply embedded in how we have always—and will always—get by and uncover insights about nature. And we explained how our universal toolbox (these evolved abilities of the mind) together with our adaptive toolbox (the external tools we have invented) is the driving force that has enabled us to actively create vast bodies of scientific and technological knowledge—and eventually give rise to science and civilisation. So it is time we rethink what science actually is—because it is not just a body of knowledge. We need to redescribe science as an evolving process powered by methods. Throughout history, we have actively driven the major advances—the palaeolithic technological revolution, agricultural revolution and later scientific, industrial and digital revolutions—by leveraging our methodological abilities in more sophisticated ways and creating better methods and tools: through method revolutions. Our new methods and tools better explain how we have developed science as the key driving force we can actively influence, and they are more observable and traceable in the works left behind throughout history—ancient artifacts, the landmark books of 17th-century scholars and the breakthrough papers today. We can also take important practical steps to advance science by better understanding our evolved constraints and building the very tools to overcome them. Understanding science's past progress is crucial to improving what drives and hinders its progress today. Our expanding toolbox is the engine of science, historically and presently. It has been and will continue to be—through collective mind-method synergies—our primary catalyst to tackle our big scientific, environmental and social challenges. Establishing ways to improve science helps us shape the science of the future; and the answer commonly lies in the power of our toolbox: not in doing more of the same in science, but in upgrading how we think, observe and discover. The answer commonly lies in more effectively tapping our toolbox in innovative ways. This sparks important questions: could science have advanced much faster over the past centuries if we had focused much more on innovating better thinking tools— rather than just studying nature with the ones we had? Why are we today not yet systematically designing better tools and methods to mimic and extend all human sensory and reasoning abilities—the full spectrum from advanced tools to expand our imagination and causal reasoning, to amplify simulations and pattern recognition? How many discoveries have been delayed or missed because we use familiar methods, instead of inventing new ones? How much of scientific progress has been slowed over decades and centuries by science's fixation on end results, rather than stepping back to ask if we even have the right tools and are asking the right questions? How can we best develop and test new tools of perception and thought—new tools that often yield more uncertain but more surprising breakthroughs? We explore in depth how we can expand our scientific toolbox in Chapter 11. But first, in the next chapter, we dig deeper into our evolved method-making foundation of science.