If we were to adopt these seven reforms, we could trigger a method revolution in science—a deep transformation in how science progresses and at what pace. Implementing these reforms would break from the status quo: the era before the method revolution, where we until now commonly made advances in methods and tools in a surprisingly ad-hoc and unplanned way with large time lags between new methods and discoveries. It would spark a shift towards the method revolution , where we would design and develop methods and tools in a planned, strategic and targeted way—with minimal time lags. Historically, the development of new tools and the development of new scientific discoveries have been riddled with long, unnecessary delays—simply because we have not yet systematically coordinated and fast-tracked tool development across science. Advances in tools would then move from the background to the foreground in understanding how we drive scientific advances. We can then begin actively engineering the conditions for making breakthroughs. When we dig deeper, we find a key pattern among science's major discoveries: many did not begin with chasing answers, but with building better ways to ask questions that sparked those answers. Yet today, science still lacks a general understanding of how we create new tools and research agendas for tool development—a general theory of the main force for its own progress. Without it, researchers until now have had to experiment and work out on their own—researcher by researcher—how to trigger a breakthrough and which new tools we need. Much time is lost, researchers continue in stagnant fields and breakthroughs go unrealised, just because the current system has not yet had a roadmap for building better tools.Relying on familiar methods simply because they are familiar is the reason why much research does not advance science. Future scientists may view the advent of this revolution as the moment at which the entire scientific community became self-aware about how it progresses. It is the point at which we began to deliberately refine, combine, restructure and invent methods and instruments that accelerate breakthroughs. The beginning of the revolution would be the moment when we collectively realise the fact that methods and tools themselves are perhaps the most powerful frontier we have yet fully explored . No more would our tools be studied by a small group of methodologically interested researchers who diverged from their initial training in established fields. The tool revolution in science would be driven by a new understanding across scientists: tools are not neutral, and advancing our tools changes the very kinds of questions we can ask and answers we can imagine. As the periodic table transformed chemistry by mapping its fundamental building blocks, science now needs an evolving periodic table of methods: a living map of the methods, tools and their vast recombinations that power discoveries across domains. The proposed field of Methodology of Science has the potential to transform science by speeding the pace at which we can produce new breakthrough research. But realising this transformation depends on a bold reorientation that challenges the status quo—the current scientific system that deeply prioritises scientific outputs, not inputs. These large reforms may face resistance especially from those established institutions benefitting most from the traditional, output-oriented system. Academic inertia can be a challenge to large-scale reform. Once the first institutions, journals and agencies begin to prioritise innovations in tools, others will more easily follow suit. Once methods labs and hubs begin to take root and spread, a new scientific culture can emerge. Ultimately, the pace of scientific progress is dictated by the pace of method progress. Science has traditionally taken an indirect route to discovery: researchers have explored scientific questions that we often did not quite yet have the methods and technologies to answer. But imagine what would happen when we flip the research direction: when researchers pursue method questions first, designing and selecting new tools not just to answer today's questions, but to unlock tomorrow's. This is frontier science and would be a direct route to many discoveries. Our tools should no longer be seen as just means to do research, but as active sources of innovation and inspiration that continually open new questions. We sketched the pathways we can take to drive innovations in tools. But this opens new questions: how can we begin to better assess the impact of new methods and discoveries on society, policy and people's lives? How can we better evaluate their benefits on new medical treatments, technologies and environmental solutions? Until we place our powerful toolbox at the centre of science, we will continue to think of scientific discoveries as the most important feature of science—and not also the incredible tools that make them possible and largely determine their scope. We will keep viewing scientific discoveries as just being made by brilliant discoverers— and not also the brilliant tool inventors who enable triggering them. Our great toolmakers are often the unsung discoverers and can no longer be pushed into the footnotes of history. Establishing the field of Methodology of Science would mark a vast leap forward for science. It would signal that we finally recognise methods, tools and their combinations across fields as a frontier in their own right—deserving the same priority and intellectual rigour as any other scientific domain. After all, with what we know about the world so far largely driven by the tools we have developed so far, the Methodology of Science is—by expanding our very tools of discovery—as important as any other scientific field and long overdue. In Part I of the book, we asked the big questions about how we drive new discoveries, scientific fields and science in general: the answer lies in developing powerful new tools. Our ever-expanding scientific toolbox is what triggers our transformative breakthroughs, can explain much serendipity in science, makes scientific progress highly cumulative and fundamentally defines how we do science. In a logical circle, we then asked the key question: how do we upgrade our powerful toolbox? In answering that, we uncovered the dynamics of toolmaking and how it powers science. By tackling these foundational questions of scientific progress, new fascinating questions arise: where did science itself and our ability to develop tools come from in the first place? What are their early roots? And looking forward, what are our current boundaries of science? Does extending our toolbox play as powerful a role in explaining science's deeper past and its future as it does the present? Understanding how we became able to create knowledge and methods and start science helps us understand how we arrived at the present and can vastly advance science in the future. Tracing the broad history of science and discovery helps us understand their evolution, providing key insights into how we can build a stronger scientific system for tomorrow. In Part II of the book, we now turn to the deeper origins of science—where it began and why it emerged. In Part III, we then explore the current limits of science and how we can push these limits.