Discover Edinburgh’s and Glasgow’s most famous scientific thinkers, and how their work underpinned emerging ideas for understanding the world from the 16th century onwards. Explore key sites and moments from the Scottish Enlightenment, a period of unprecedented scientific and intellectual creativity in the 18th and early 19th century. Where leading practitioners in medicine, maths, physics, astronomy, economics and philosophy exchanged and developed scientific thought.

Learn about the wide cast of protagonists including such luminaries as James Watt (inventor), Lord Kelvin (temperature), Mary Somerville (polymath), John Napier (logarithms), James Clerk Maxwell (electromagnetism), Sir Charles Bell (spinal nerves), James Hutton (geology), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author), Robert Burns (poet) and even Charles Darwin, as he was exposed to early ideas on the evolution of life whilst studying in Edinburgh.