eonardo da Vinci was an artist who became a scientist by asking what underlay the world he so brilliantly depicted. Behind the asymmetric smile of the “Mona Lisa” lay a complex interplay of facial muscles; in sketching a waterfall, Da Vinci became fascinated by fluid dynamics. (Stefan Klein’s thought-provoking book, Leonardo’s Legacy, provides a persuasive account of this process of discovery.) The exact extent of Da Vinci’s innovations are a matter of debate, but surely there is no dispute that he was one of western civilisation’s great geniuses.

Yet there is no escaping the fact that Da Vinci was able to achieve so much, so broadly, because so little was known. It was possible to make leaps forward in scientific understanding armed with little more than a keen eye and a vivid imagination.

Those times are long gone. Approximately 3,000 scientific articles are published per day – roughly one every 10 seconds of a working day. We can now expect that these papers will, each year, cite around five million previous publications. And the rate of production of scientific papers is quadrupling every generation. (All these estimates are based on data from the Institute for Scientific Information.) The percentage of human knowledge that one scientist can absorb is rapidly heading towards zero. This side of a new Dark Age, there will never be another Da Vinci.