In The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke examines eight periods in histo r y when our view of the wo r ld shifted dramatically: in the eleventh century, when extrao r dinary discoveries were made by Spanish crusaders, in fourteenth-century Flo r ence, wh ere perspective in painting emerged, in the fifteenth century, when the advent of the printing press shook the foundations of an o r al society, in the sixteenth century, when gunnery developments triggered the birth of modern science, in the early eighteenth century, when hot English summers brought on the Industrial Revolution, in the battlefield surgery stations of the French revolutionary armies, wh ere people first became statistics, in the nineteenth century, when the discovery of dinosaur fossils led to the theo r y of evolution, a nd in the 1820s, when electrical experiments heralded the end of scientific certainty. ba sed on the popular television documentary series, The Day the Universe Changed is a bestselling histo r y that challenges the reader to decide whether there is absolute knowledge to discover - o r whether the universe is ",ultimately what we say it is.",