Everything Sir Christopher Wren undertook, he envisaged on a grander scale -- bigger, better, more enduring than anything that had gone before. A versatile genius who could have pursued a number of brilliant careers with equal virtuosity, he was a mathematical prodigy, an accomplished astronomer, a skillful anatomist, and a founder of the Royal Society. Eventually, he made a career in what he described disparagingly in later life as "Rubbish" -- the architecture, design, and construction of public buildings. Through the prism of Wren's tumultuous life and brilliant intellect, historian Lisa Jardine unfolds the vibrant, extraordinary emerging new world of late-seventeenth-century science and ideas.