Reddit mentions of The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors

You should try this book. Really changed my world view on Newton.

While it's easy to dismiss the question as stupid, it actually is an interesting one without a good answer. Galileo is often credited with the invention of the scientific method, which, using experiments and real world observation, can prove or disprove a hypothesis. Before that, people either relied on what they were told or what they thought made sense, usually not bothering to check if it was true. For instance, it was a commonly held belief in Galileo's time that heavier objects fell faster. Today we know this is incorrect and can easily be proven wrong with a simple experiment, but for thousands of years people believed this because it made sense to them.

I'm actually reading this book right now, and it talks a lot about the origins of some of the first scientists, so if you want to know more I suggest you take a peek.

Hawking's On The Shoulders of Giants

Gribbin's The Scientists

Smithsonian's Timelines of Science

There are also a ton of good historical books on almost every major milestone in physics - a few I enjoyed:

The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electric Field by Nancy Forbes

E=MC2 by David Bodanis

Quantum by Manjit Kumar

The Big Bang by Simon Singh

I can't link you to any histories of biology or chemistry, sorry, those aren't my areas of knowledge.

The Scientists book looks interesting.

I've read a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy that have made me think deeply, but I don't think they've enlightened me in any specific way, so the three here are the ones that have had the most effect on how I think.

• The Discoverers, The Creators, and [The Seekers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seekers_(book) by Daniel Boorstin. A Western viewpoint on the development of society, ideas, and technology (but not too Western-centric as to be ignorant). My dad turned me onto these when I was 10 or so (and I've read them more recently too), and to this day they remain the most personally influential academic works I've ever read.
  
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and what I consider to be its companion (although slightly drier), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, both by Jared Diamond. A lot of people have already mentioned/talked about GG&S, but Collapse is an analysis of how societies have failed and the main reasons for those failures from cultural ans geographical perspectives.
  
  
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I have no idea why I read this, and parts of this book are exceedingly dry, but (especially with the annotated version) ideas are laid out clearly, and it is important as essentially the foundation work in the study of economics.
  
  Along with these, I could mention A Short History of Nearly Everything, [The Mother Tongue](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue_(book), and [Made in America](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_America_(book), all by Bill Bryson, The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, The Prince by Machiavelli, The Art of War by Sun Tzu and a dozen classical discourses and histories. A Short History should really be grouped with the top three, but I feel like I chose the most enlightening ones for me, at least (my family is filled with scientists, so a lot of A Short History of Nearly Everything was more of a well written piece containing a lot of facts I already had some idea about, rather than truly enlightening).
  
  As an aside, if you really enjoyed learning about the eccentricities of many scientists from A Short History of Nearly Everything (along with some of the facts), I would really recommend buying The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors by John Gribbin. It's a fantastic anthology of a bunch of biographies of scientists, from the Enlightenment in Europe almost up to modern times, containing some of the wierdest bits of information about well-known and less well-known (but very important) scientists, mathematicians, and engineers and their most famous and not-so-famous work.
  
  Edit: Formatting. Sorry if some of the links don't work (just add a closed paranthesis to the end of the link in the address bar to make it work). Check out the Amazon pages for the books that I've given Wikipedia links for to get reader reviews (and not analysis) if you plan on buying them.

A tiny bit in the sciences? If by "tiny" you mean 99.9999% I would agree with you. (I am thinking about pre 1800, which I assume the OP is referring to).

Remember, back then simply to be educated at all meant you came from a family with money.

Here is a great book on the subject, which I highly recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Scientists-History-Science-Greatest-Inventors/dp/0812967887