Alain de Botton once said that the least interesting thing about religion is whether it’s true or not, and I feel that way about Shlain’s thesis that great artists anticipated leaps in physics — sometimes by several centuries. What is thrilling to me as a reader is to watch a sharp mind work through the history of these two fields and juxtapose their developments. (There’s a nice afterword in new editions about how the surgeon came to be a writer.) I also enjoyed his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.