In 1800, scientists thought they had little left to learn.The universe and the laws it obeyed lay before them like an open book, and then an Italian called Volta invented an electric battery and began a series of events across Europe and the United States that slowly undermined the whole elaborate scientific structure. By 1900, the structure was in ruins. The geniuses who put the universe back together created a new science divorced from common sense. Their science has given us the digital watch and the computer - but for most of us its language is gobbledegook. And worst of all, it suggests that the truth that we have been searching for all this time isn't there....