WHAT could be clearer than the distinction between science and superstition? On the one hand there was the notion that flowering plants reproduce sexually; on the other, the belief that bees are a by-product of decaying carcasses. Yet the ancient Greco-Roman world, from which these examples come, also threw up more ambiguous ideas, such as the suggestion by the philosopher Anaxagoras that the stars were stones heated by their motion through the heavens – a view seemingly confirmed by the fall of a large meteorite around 467 BC.
Surveying hundreds of bizarre and prescient ideas between 700 BC and AD 300…
