Stewart Brand once said: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” He had just launched the first Whole Earth Catalog, the year was 1968 and the cover showed the Earth from space, a dizzying view of a fragile planet taken by the Apollo Moon mission that year. It seemed like escape, but it wasn't totally new.

Richard Holmes, in his new book, The Age of Wonder, describes the 18th-century balloonists as they first escaped the confines of terra firma in their envelopes of gas.

John Jeffries described the world “like a beautifully coloured map or carpet”, while Monsieur Robert murmured, “I'm finished with the Earth. From now on it's the sky for me! Such utter calm. Such immensity!”

Stewart Brand co-founded the Long Now Foundation, among other things. It's a group of people trying to prompt conversations about time and our place in it.

“Civilisation is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,” Brand said, so he and his collaborators made a clock that will run for 10,000 years. It's a work of wonder, and that excitement, that optimism (who knows where we'll be in the year 12008?) is just what Holmes describes so eloquently in this book.

If ever there was an argument for a biographical analysis of complex scientific and technological history, this is it. Its treatment of the familiar figures of 18th-century science (Joseph Banks, the Herschel family) alongside the lesser-known but no less intriguing characters (Alexander Aubert, Count Rumford) is well paced and rich in detail.

Yet the broad historical sweep is always apparent. This is history writ both huge and tiny. In a single passage we move from the daily grind of mirror-grinding in William and Caroline Herschel's basement telescope workshop to the moon-gazing wonder that was the result.

Heartbreaking accounts of hopes and fears, ambitions and disappointments dance along the pages. Even the choice of pictures gives us new insights into old favourites. Michael Faraday is a young man, all boyish curls and wide-eyed wonder. Humphry Davy blushes and poses. Astronomers are modish and hungry before they are, in Holmes's words, “knighted, powdered and famous”.

There is no dry page in this visceral, spirited and sexy account. We watch tattooing in Tahiti and surgery without anaesthetic in Paris. Knives slice flesh, organs explode, corpses laugh and walk. Caroline Herschel trips and impales herself on a butcher's hook. In an age of wonder, science walks hand-in-hand with spectacle and sensation.

Importantly for Holmes's convincing thesis, the “natural philosophers” (as scientists were known) are joined by Byron and Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. It is exactly as it should be, but often these links are lost (or simply never made). A glance at Holmes's list of references and further reading shows just what an academic and intellectual feat this is.

The astronomer John Herschel is reported as saying, “God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives, or that capacity, that enviable capacity, of husbanding every atom of time, which some possess, and which enables them to do ten times as much in one life.” Reading Holmes's own book I have the same feeling. How on earth did he find the time to write so much and so fluently?

Humphry Davy remarked, “Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer.”

This month CERN switched on its Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, hoping to untangle the mysteries of the building blocks of matter. Some people thought we might be lost to some monstrous black hole, but they weren't the first to worry. Holmes introduces us to an 18th-century astronomer who nursed the strange idea of holes in space from which nothing, not even light, could escape. Plus ça change.

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft is orbiting Saturn and the images it has sent of Titan, its giant, planet-sized moon, show rivers, lakes and oceans of liquid methane.

The Rosetta spacecraft flew past the asteroid Steins recently and pictured it as a giant cut diamond floating in the hugeness of space. In a few years it will plonk a lander on to a comet and ride it into our solar system, clinging on with harpoons.

In his prologue, Holmes expresses the hope that we have not outgrown the age of wonder. It would be fatal if we had; but I wonder if there is really anything to worry about. We'll be riding comets, soon. From now on it's the sky for us.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
HarperPress, £25; 380pp Buy the book

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