By the middle of the 18th century two French savants, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, could still gather a group of knowledgeable contributors to sum up the era’s understanding in fairly exhaustive entries in their multi-volume Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. A few generations later the extent and the specialization of our knowledge advanced by orders of magnitude, with fundamental discoveries ranging from magnetic induction (Michael Faraday in 1831, the basis of electricity generation) to plant metabolism (Justus von Liebig, 1840, the
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