An account of how scientific thinking developed from its Pythagorean origins to the present day. The story unfolds through the tales of both scientific instruments and musical ones: the organ, the microscope, the still, scales, violins and cellos, computers and electronic synthesisers. Yet the tools that have enabled us to scrutinize nature have also revealed to us the limitations of the scientific approach. In every age they have provided new answers, but in the process they have rewritten the questions we thought we were asking, altering the scope and shape of scientific enquiry.