Yet by the end of the year his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics he had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would contribute over a thousand pages of articles. At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-established reputation in the British scientific establishment.