But the apocalyptic vibe in Texas, home to both David Koresh and a very big plant for assembling nuclear weapons, felt like a more condensed version of a zeitgeist that was abroad in the culture more generally. Anxieties about jihadi terror, global warming and the decline of the West were widespread, and zombie plague movies were just starting to take off. Society, it seemed, was in a state of apocalyptic arousal, and I detected a weird undercurrent of yearning, as if some people liked it. But why?

I started taking the bus to the Austin public library to read whatever they had about the end of the world. This being Texas, they had rather a lot, and I have fond memories of sitting among the homeless people and the hippy burnouts, leafing through the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, absorbing endless factoids about strange religious movements, cults and prophets.

The theme would follow me home; on the way back to the bus I would always pick up a free street newspaper that informed me that the Maitreya, a messianic figure from Buddhism, was already among us. (He still is, apparently, although his prophet has since died, alas.)

I soon realised why some people seemed to crave the end of the world; they want this terrible world of suffering to pass away and be replaced by a new world (and some people really want to see the wicked punished). I also discovered that belief in an earthly heaven on earth — Millennialism — had inspired some extraordinary behaviour over the centuries. Why had nobody ever taught me about the naked Adamites of Bohemia, or Sabattai Zevi, the mysterious messiah who aroused the hopes of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire only to convert to Islam, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the enormous devastation it wrought in the dying days of the Qing dynasty.

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Come to think of it, why was it not better known that Isaac Newton and James Napier were profoundly apocalyptic thinkers? The neat line between their scientific-mathematical studies and their religious obsessions was an anachronism imposed by revisionist historians. Then there were the obvious millennial aspects to the French Revolution, and communism, as well as Nazism; throw in the messianic-apocalyptic aspects of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and it seemed as though maybe this whole end of the world thing was one of the most important ideas going…

It was as if I had discovered an alternate history of humanity, where the dream of a happy apocalypse had inspired prophets, saints, scientists, madmen and martyrs to repeatedly attempt to birth new, better worlds out of the flawed ones they lived in. I liked how strange, and wild it was, and how ambiguous it was in its legacy. There was a whiff of the disrespectable about it, which appealed to me; but that in turn meant that many “serious” writers ignored the theme, or quarantined it in the “mad cult” category.

Maybe digging into this stuff wasn’t good for your academic career. And as for those who did write about it, well they talked about Protestant Europe and the USA a lot. Even Russia, with profoundly deep millennial tradition, barely got a look in. Clearly somebody needed to write a book that would tie all these strange events and threads together, clearly articulating why the End was so important, and why.

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Then, in 2011, that book appeared: Heaven and Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, written by Richard Landes, the editor of Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements. Landes is a mediaevalist and he could easily have turned out a book focusing on the likes of Joachim of Fiore and Rodulfus Glaber but instead he took inspiration from Georges Perec’s novel A Void which omits the letter “e” entirely, and wrote a book about the millennialism that didn’t include Jewish or Christian case studies. This radical exclusion enabled him to more clearly highlight just how much the phenomenon cuts across time, space and culture.

Thus Landes highlights the tale of Nongqawuse the Xhosa prophetess in southern Africa, who told her followers to slaughter their cattle that the dead might arise and drive out the British; the Taiping Heavenly kingdom, cargo cults, the French and Russian Revolutions, UFO cults and the Pharaoh Akhenaten.

We see millenniums pursued from the top down as well as from the bottom up, and Landes explores how an accelerated sense of “apocalyptic time” acts upon those who welcome the advent of an earthly paradise and those who resist it. We read of great and terrible deeds, and of course, the repeated experience of failure, disappointment and what follows it.

After reading the book, I was left with an unshakeable sense that apocalyptic and millennial undercurrents are always running through our societies, but that it is practically impossible to tell when they will erupt to the surface. Yet when they do, hitherto rejected and bizarre ideas can move to the centre rapidly, turning everything upside down. Thus Heaven and Earth powerfully underscores the importance of ancient dreams, phantoms and prophecies as motivating factors in human affairs.

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That, no doubt, is why Landes wrote a very long introduction in which he defended himself against anticipated criticisms from his academic peers. Having taken such a bold stance, he clearly expected strong pushback. Instead the book shared the same fate as so many others: it entered the world, got some reviews, but not too many, and that was that. Not many people were outraged; not many people were paying attention. If they did pay too much attention they would see how deep these currents run even in themselves, and that might prove a difficult pill to swallow.

But Landes’s book does deserve a wider audience, and to be read, and debated. He provides powerful tools for thinking about the allure of the apocalypse and the millennium, and enables us to detect patterns, categorise types and recognise symptoms. I don’t think that the world has become less apocalyptic since I started getting into the end back in 2006; with the sudden rise of Extinction Rebellion we see a movement that is living in accelerated apocalyptic time, albeit without much hope of anything nice happening on the other end, unless you like wearing hair shirts.

But who knows how it will mutate, or what other ideas will emerge to surprise, disappoint or perhaps transform us. From reading Heaven on Earth it is clear that such ideas will emerge, though — as example after example in the book proves — we should hope it doesn’t happen in our lifetimes.

Look more closely, though, and Cecco’s scientific credentials start to unravel. Although nothing excuses the inquisitors who sent him to his terrible death, it is important to understand why they acted as they did. It turns out that Cecco was teaching demonology to his students at Bologna: his lectures were full of references to binding immaterial beings.

Even more damning, according to an inquisitor, he cast the horoscope for Jesus of Nazareth, noting that the Messiah’s poverty and suffering were written in the stars. To assert that God himself was subject to astrological influences sounds like an unforgivable heresy, but in fact Cecco was forgiven. Stripped of his lectureship and heavily fined, he nonetheless escaped with his life. Only after a second offence, in Florence a couple of years later, was the full force of the law brought to bear.

Cecco owes his fame entirely to his execution, which enabled 19th-century historians to laud him as a martyr for science. However, not only was he more magician than scientist, the manner of his death is unique among medieval astrologers.

You will search in vain for records of scientists being arraigned by the inquisition in the Middle Ages, and even occultists like Cecco were rarely condemned until after their death. (The most notorious instances of inquisitors clashing with natural philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, date from the 1600s and even these cases are very far from straight conflicts between science and religion).

The surprising truth is that the medieval Church was generally supportive of science and mathematics. For example, it ensured these subjects were compulsory for students who wanted to graduate to the higher faculties at university, especially if they wanted to become theologians.

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The universities themselves were a medieval invention. They were structured as self-governing corporations that could set their own internal rules and did not rely on royal or ecclesiastical patronage. Universities became adept at playing off secular and sacred powers against one another. When the Bishop of Paris banned the works of Aristotle in the early 13th century, the new University of Toulouse began advertising for students who wanted to study those very books.

It wasn’t long before the pope rescinded the ban and there is little evidence anyone took much notice of it anyway. Besides which, if things became intolerable a university could simply up sticks and move elsewhere. In 1209, an Oxford student murdered his mistress before making himself scarce; the townsfolk strung up his housemates in revenge, so a large group of masters and students felt it sensible to decamp to a town deep in the East Anglian marshes. Thus, was the University of Cambridge born.

The science of the Middle Ages was based on ancient Greek antecedents, especially the philosopher Aristotle, the astronomer Ptolemy and the mathematician Euclid. This legacy was seasoned with learning from the Islamic world, including commentary on Aristotle by the Andalusian Muslim Averroes and algebra using Arabic (actually Indian) numerals.

The first translation of Euclid’s Elements had been made from an Arabic version while the Latin edition of Ptolemy’s great synthesis of astronomy retained its Arabic title of Almagest. The Greek and Islamic inheritance meant that people in the Middle Ages were well aware that the earth is a sphere and even had a reasonable idea of how big it is.

The myth that the medieval papacy insisted that the world is flat appears to date from the 17th century, when Protestants used it as an example of Catholic backwardness. Indeed, our modern conception of the Middle Ages as a dark age of superstition is largely an invention of Protestant authors such as Francis Bacon and Pierre Bayle.

In reality, the Middle Ages saw technological breakthroughs such as spectacles and the mechanical clock, as well as the adaptation of eastern inventions like paper, the compass, gunpowder and printing. Far from being a closed society, medieval Europe welcomed outside influences and did its best to improve on them.

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In the field of theoretical science, many of the most notable developments took place at the universities. The thousands of students attending Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Cologne, Bologna and elsewhere needed teachers, and their fees provided a steady income for those wanting to devote their lives to science or mathematics.

The result was a flowering of scientific speculation in the fourteenth century that challenged the dominance of Aristotle. For instance, at Merton College, Oxford, a group of scholars developed mathematical techniques to describe moving objects. The earliest of their number, Thomas Bradwardine, who went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, derived a formula that enabled him to calculate the speed of a body in accordance with the theories of Aristotle.

The formula is wrong because Aristotle’s mechanics is also in error, but the use of an algebraic function to describe the physical world was a novel idea. Other Merton mathematicians discovered a means of calculating the distance travelled by a uniformly accelerating object. This formula was later adopted by Galileo, without attribution, as a core part of his own work on falling bodies.

Meanwhile, Jean Buridan, rector at the University of Paris, set out to show that it is not physically possible to show that the earth is rotating. In other words, from our standpoint, we can’t tell whether the globe is moving or the heavens are turning around us.

He compared the situation to a boat floating along a calm river. When observing a stationary vessel, it isn’t possible for a passenger on the boat to tell whether he is moving or the other vessel is. We are all familiar with a similar experience when on board a train that has stopped at the station, next to another train that is leaving. Buridan’s arguments about relative motion were later used (again, without attribution) by Nicolas Copernicus to explain why we cannot directly detect the earth orbiting the sun.

Buridan also developed the concept of impetus and showed that, in the absence of friction, once an object has been set in motion, it should keep going forever. This was true of the planets, he thought, which should continue their orbits around the earth for eternity once God had given them the requisite shove at the moment of creation. Buridan’s theory of impetus, which anticipated Isaac Newton’s First Law, challenged Aristotle’s dictum that all moving objects need something else to move them.

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The Church looked upon this work benignly. Mathematics was considered good training for young minds that needed to be raised from mere ephemeral concerns before they were fit to contemplate divine truths. Science was valuable because medieval people thought of the world as God’s handiwork. To study it was a way of glorifying its creator.

A useful metaphor, picked up by Galileo, was to speak of God having written two books — the Bible and nature. As they both had the same author, they could not conflict and the Church had nothing to fear from science properly practised.

Science also provided a useful bulwark against heresy. The most feared sect of medieval heretics, the Cathars of southern France, claimed that the material world was the work of the devil. The Church encouraged its missionaries to use the wonders of nature as proof that the universe was created by God and that the Cathars were mistaken to dismiss it as evil.

Premodern science always served an agenda, and things were no different in the Middle Ages. No one was pursuing the disinterested study of nature; even Jean Buridan, when noting that the planets needed nothing except an initial impetus from God to keep them moving, sought to dismiss the spirits with which the likes of Cecco D’Ascoli populated the sky. By disenchanting the world, science reinforced monotheism.

Historians of science compare the role of medieval natural philosophy to that of a handmaiden, serving theology. Despite the subservient position, this afforded scientific practitioners a degree of protection and allowed them to advance theories that turned out to be essential to the work of famous figures like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Far from being cowed by the Church, medieval natural philosophers could explore new concepts that, perhaps unintentionally, laid the foundations of modern science.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

So wrote Isaac Newton in a letter to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke. But what appears to be an eloquent appeal to humility is anything but. Ironies drip from its layered meanings like custard from a vanilla slice.

The context is one of rivalry. As so often, the two men were in dispute as to who had thought of an idea first. Newton was downplaying the issue by suggesting that all progress is largely owed to achievements of our forebears – so why squabble over the little that the living might add to the sum total of human knowledge?

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Some scholars interpret Newton’s reference to ‘giants’ as a sly dig at the physically unimposing Hooke. Certainly, there’s the implication that seeking recognition for the originality of one’s ideas is the petty obsession of small men. But that’s all rather convenient for Newton, whose high reputation – though hardly undeserved – has been enhanced by having other people’s achievements attributed to him.

Appropriately enough, the shoulders of giants line is not really his. In fact, it dates back to the Middle Ages (and perhaps earlier to ancient Rome) Here’s the 12th-century version (attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury):

“Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

But there’s a bigger irony here. Hooke, Newton and the other ‘natural philosophers’ of their era were so much more than inheritors of an ancient tradition. In fact, they stood at the beginning of something wholly new – the great endeavour that we today call science.

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Nullius in verba was the motto of the Royal Society founded in 1660. It means ‘on the word of no one’ – a rejection of argument by authority in favour of evidence obtained by experiment.

This was a profound break with the past. For the first time in the history of thought, the dwarves had permission to not only stand upon the shoulders of giants, but also – if the evidence required it – to topple them over. It was a scientific revolution – the Scientific Revolution, in fact.

It’s hard to over-estimate Hooke’s role in all of this. Indeed, he spent much of his life (and centuries thereafter) being under-estimated. As a mere curate’s son from the Isle of Wight, he was of humble birth and modest means. Nevertheless, in 1653, at the age of 18, he managed to secure a place at Oxford.

His intellectual and practical talents won him various roles in service to scholarly gentlemen, including the founders of Royal Society. In 1661, Hooke was appointed as the Society’s curator of experiments, a role in which he worked with skilled craftsmen to develop the technology on which scientific progress really does depend – telescopes, microscopes, vacuum pumps and many other scientific instruments.

While others looked on, he got his hands dirty – doing more than anyone to ensure that science in its formative years stayed honestly experimental.

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He was a great theoretician as well a great experimentalist. What we now call Boyle’s Law of gases and Newton’s First Law of Gravitation can be more fairly attributed to Hooke – as are the engineering principles that allowed Christopher Wren to build the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Some of his more speculative ideas foreshadowed the scientific knowledge of much later times – the theory of evolution, plate tectonics and the study of how memory is formed.

Hooke did get credit for naming the ‘cells’ that are the building blocks of living creatures – which he observed through the microscopes he invented. In 1665, he published Micrographia, in which his brilliant drawings gave the general public with their first view of life at the microscopic scale. It was, quite rightly, a sensation – Hooke had unveiled a hidden world and in the process invented popular science.

*

The following year, something else of great importance was ignited – the Great Fire of London. Raging over four days it consumed almost everything between Temple Bar in the west and the Tower of London in the east. It did, however, stop just short of Gresham college – HQ of the Royal Society and home of Robert Hooke.

The college was commandeered by the Corporation of London. The fellows of Royal Society decamped to the safety of Oxford, but Hooke was asked to stay. Faced with greatest challenge in the Corporation’s history, it was him they turned to for help.

City fires were a perennial danger in medieval and early modern Europe, but the conflagration of 1666 was on a scale that would not be exceeded until the 20th century. Witnessing the extent of the devastation, a despairing Samuel Pepys feared that London would never be rebuilt.

Over 13,000 houses were destroyed, 87 churches, the medieval St Paul’s cathedral, the Royal Exchange, three city gates and much else. Though 80,000 people were homeless, their houses weren’t quite razed to the ground, but lying in heaps of rubble that obliterated the streets. Even today, the country would struggle with such a disaster, so how did the fragile government of a deeply divided Restoration England, surrounded by enemies, cope?

The answer is that they just got on with it.

With astonishing rapidity the key decisions were made and stuck too. Schemes to reshape the city around grand radiating boulevards or a grid-like pattern of streets and avenues were swiftly drawn up and just as swiftly rejected. Rather than pre-empting the future development of Paris or New York, London chose to remain London – but a better version of London.

The established street pattern was retained, but key thoroughfares widened and the steepest gradients ameliorated. Property rights were respected, but replacement buildings had to be constructed out of brick and stone. Tenants paid for the reconstruction of their homes, but landlords accepted decades of greatly reduced rents. It was one of the great compromises of history – reconciling tradition and modernity.

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All very wise and farsighted; but while Hooke played his part in the counsels of the mighty, he was also on the ground making things happen. Indeed, before the scorched earth had even cooled, he and his helpers were out on the streets (or what used to be the streets) clearing away rubble and physically staking out the outlines of the new city that would rise from the ashes.

His tireless work helped settle disputes – securing support for the realignment of street plans and boundaries through meticulous surveying and scrupulous accounting. And if that weren’t enough, he found time to design several of the City’s new churches and other grand buildings (including the help he provided to Wren on St Paul’s ).

With Wren he also designed the Monument to the Great Fire of London – which is similar in form, but older and taller than the better known Nelson’s Column. In a typically Hookean flourish the Monument incorporated a zenith telescope, while the new cathedral was equipped with an observatory.

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How much of a difference did Robert Hooke make in his life? If he’d succumbed to his frail health as a child how much of a hole would that have left in the subsequent history of science and London?

Hooke, his towering intellect allied to superlative craftsmanship and relentless effort, was throughout his career a unique and vital link between theory and practice, idea and experiment, thought and action.

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I don’t think it too fanciful to suppose that he greatly accelerated both the progress of science and the reconstruction of London. Furthermore, his twin achievements compounded one another – catalysing the emergence of England as a world power.

He deserves a more prominent place in our national story than he’s received. Indeed for most of the three centuries following his death in 1703 he was all but written out. Newton, who became President of Royal Society (also in 1703), played a part in that – and possibly the mysterious disappearance of Hooke’s portrait. It is only in much more recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars like Alan Chapman, Lisa Jardine and John and Mary Gribbin that his true greatness has been rediscovered.

It was Chapman who described him as “England’s Leonardo”. Hooke is worthy of the comparison, but it’s a shame that he needs to be compared to anyone. He should be remembered for his own sake – a giant who stands in no one’s shadow.