This ran in Time, and I just decided it was germane to this blog. Just like that.

It’s a piece about a book — no wait, hear me out — about late 18th century scientists, who were working at a time when the field was so wide open, anybody with a basement lab and some free time could make major discoveries.

The book is called Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, and the title makes it sound like a YA novel about a young girl’s erotic flowering at summer camp, but it’s actually about hardcore hacking, or what passed for it in the 1780s, and I couldn’t put it down.