Reddit reviews The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

I find that science history and biography gives a good understanding of scientific methods, and when written for the lay-person, doesn't get so bogged down in technical jargon.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
  
• Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick
  (Also check out his biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman)
  
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach
  
  And here are a few on my to read list:
  
  
• Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society - Bill Bryson
  
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
  
• The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine - Lindsey Fitzharris
  
• Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus - Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy
  
• The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring - Richard Preston
  
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - Richard Holmes
  
• The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution - David Wootton
  
  I hope that helps.

> At the core of this book is a linguistic argument: that the emergence of these words in the 16th and 17th centuries proves that significantly new ideas had emerged. Wootton puts forward a very strong version of this thesis.

> (...)

> Overall, Wootton justifies nicely his argument that we “tend to overestimate the importance of new technology and underestimate the rate of production and the impact of new intellectual tools”.

> (...)

> The Invention of Science is not only a history of science but a revisionist historiography of science, in which Wootton attacks allegedly homogeneous schools called “the sociologists of science” and “the cultural determinists”, expending thousands of testy words situating himself carefully between two implausible views, the extreme versions of which are held by almost no one.

Amazon link.