





October 17, 1999 The Other End of the Telescope The story of the life and trials of Galileo as seen through the eyes of his cloistered, illegitimate daughter. Related Links Audio Special: An Interview With Dava Sobel (Taped Oct. 12, 1999) First Chapter: 'Galileo's Daughter' By ALAN LIGHTMAN GALILEO'S DAUGHTER

A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love.

By Dava Sobel.

Illustrated. 420 pp. New York:

Walker & Company. $27.

n 1641, old and blind and under house arrest for suspicion of heresy, Galileo Galilei wrote to his most beloved student: ''I spend my fruitless days which are so long because of my continuous inactivity and yet so brief compared with all the months and years which have passed; I am left with no other comfort than the memory of the sweetness of former friendships.'' Part of Galileo's grief was the loss of his illegitimate daughter Suor Maria Celeste, at the age of 33. After her death, he wrote to a family friend that he felt ''immense sadness and melancholy,'' had lost his appetite and continually heard his daughter calling to him. This was the daughter who, from her own prison within a convent since her 13th birthday, had lovingly bleached her father's collars. At times, she had copied over his correspondence, or made his favorite confections from the lemons and chartreuse citrons he sent her from his garden. The father, in turn, delivered to his daughter special spinach dishes that he cooked himself. He gave her a warm quilt to replace the one she had given to her younger sister. He improved her windows by refitting the frames with newly waxed linens. Such personal expressions of devotion and character, often in the small details of everyday life, form the literary motif of Dava Sobel's beautifully written new book. Sobel is a master storyteller. Her elegant previous book, ''Longitude,'' described the search for accurate clocks to locate positions at sea. Here, she turns her talent to creating an exceptionally human narrative of the physicist whose achievements and thought have been equaled only by Newton and Einstein. Galileo began modern science as we know it. Yet what the great thinkers of this world struggle with intellectually is often matched by the inner struggles of their hearts. ''Galileo's Daughter'' is organized around a series of letters that Suor Maria Celeste wrote to Galileo from May 1623, when Galileo was 59 and already celebrated throughout Europe, until April 1634, when she died of dysentary. Unfortunately, none of the physicist's corresponding letters to his daughter have survived. Sobel includes many of Suor Maria Celeste's letters in full. For the most part they deal with the daughter's concern for her father's constant illnesses and difficulties with his enemies, expressions of love and devotion, requests for money, details of the brutally spare life in the convent of San Matteo and routine household matters while Galileo was on trial in Rome. The daughter's letters reveal little about the father's thoughts, yet they add texture to his world. Where we learn much more about the scientist is in the letters he wrote and received from friends, students, churchmen and other scientists, all deftly woven into Sobel's narrative along with excerpts from court transcripts and monastic decrees from the Rule of St. Clare and from his own books.

Ken Robbins/Walker and Company Dava Sobel "[Galileo's 'Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems' (1632)] was read by many people in the Church, most of whom rather liked it. That's part of what we forget: that it really did go through proper channels. . . . The book was about a subject that . . . had been deemed unsuitable for writing about . . . And yet he managed to write an entire book comparing the sun-centered system with the earth-centered system. The deal was, he was to talk about this hypothetically . . . But then he just went too far. When you read the book, it is such a compelling argument in favor of Copernicus."

-- Dava Sobel, in an audio interview, Oct. 13, 1999. Although ''Galileo's Daughter'' focuses on the daughter, its real center of gravity rests with the father and the gripping battle that enveloped him. Galileo's powerful arguments in favor of a sun-centered cosmos, in apparent violation of the Bible and Christian doctrine, led not only to his examination of his own beliefs but also to a clash between modern science and the old armchair authority of Aristotle and the church. The reverberations have echoed through centuries. It was not until 1835 that Galileo's ''Dialogues'' was dropped from the Index of Prohibited Books. It was not until 1982 that Pope John Paul II established the Galileo Commission to reinvestigate the Galileo affair, finally endorsing the physicist's philosophy in 1992. The bare facts of the story are these: The system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which placed the earth motionless at the center of the cosmos, explained the movement of the sun and stars across the sky as a daily rotation of the heavens about a celestial axis. A yearly revolution of the sun about the earth explained the seasons. The idea of a static and central earth accorded well with various passages in the Bible, for example Psalm 103: ''O Lord my God, Thou art great indeed. . . . Thou fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.'' In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a more economical system: let the small earth, rather than the immense sky, rotate once every day about its own axis, and let the earth orbit the sun. Galileo convinced himself that Copernicus had to be right. In 1610, Galileo pointed his new telescope at the heavens, to discover pockmarks on the moon and other moons around Jupiter, all diminishing the specialness of the earth and its central position. Later, Galileo employed evidence like the daily slosh of the tides and annually repeating sunspots to support the Copernican worldview. Aware of the perception of conflict between discovered truth in nature and revealed truth in the Bible, Galileo wrote to his former student Benedetto Castelli, ''that though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways . . . when they would base themselves always on the literal meaning of the words.'' He went farther to say that he did not believe that ''the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves.'' In this way, Galileo reconciled the independence of the human mind with a loyalty to God and Scripture, and he privately held to this view, despite public recantings, for the rest of his life. In 1616, at the request of Pope Paul V, the cardinals of the Holy Office in Rome examined the Copernican system and found it to be heretical. Galileo was summoned by officers of the Inquisition and ordered to abandon his support of the sun-centered cosmos. A few years later, Pope Urban VIII, an admirer of Galileo and his telescope, told the physicist that he could use the Copernican system as a tool for astronomical calculations -- even write about it -- as long as he considered it only as a hypothetical and mathematical device. Galileo slyly responded to this leniency by writing his great treatise in the form of a dialogue between fictional characters, who debate the relative merits of the competing world systems without backing either. Many churchmen, however, saw through Galileo's ruse. Dragged to Rome in 1633 while he was ill with gout, arthritis, kidney stones, vertigo and hernias, Galileo was forced to stand trial. Now Urban could show no mercy. The Thirty Years' War against the German Protestants was raging through Europe, and the Pope had been openly censured for not defending the Catholic faith. Despite his official recanting of his scientific beliefs, Galileo was convicted of challenging the authority of the Church. His books were permanently banned and he was imprisoned, first in Siena and later under house arrest at his home in Arcetri, near Florence. But Galileo's decreed isolation was no more effective than Salman Rushdie's. He continued to correspond with and receive personal visits from the leading lights of Europe, including Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. More important, he continued his work. Like so many scientists, and others, Galileo was able to compartmentalize his mind in the face of emotional stress. While under arrest, he returned to his studies of motion, acceleration and gravity. (For some of his experiments, he devised an ingenious clock that measured time by the quantity of water ejected from a small hole in the bottom of a vessel.) His findings, written up in a book titled ''Two New Sciences,'' were smuggled to the Netherlands and published, at which he feigned surprise. Still, the physicist was deeply hurt by the indignities he had suffered. He believed he had been faithful in the true sense, and he felt betrayed: God ''knows that in this cause for which I suffer . . . none, not even the ancient Fathers, have spoken with more piety or with greater zeal for the church than I.'' Sobel's Galileo is a man both proud and humble, religious yet free thinking, stubborn yet giving, politically astute yet sensitive, tender yet full of wit, a man later described by his son as ''easily angered but more easily calmed.'' There are dozens of books about Galileo and his science. This one offers no new biographical facts or scientific discussions; furthermore, a number of his daughter's letters have been previously published in English and are well known to scholars. What Sobel has done, with her choice of excerpts and her strong sense of story, is bring a great scientist to life. Reading ''Galileo's Daughter,'' we hear Galileo's voice, we sense his pain and share his excitement, and once again we marvel at how the human mind, and heart, can lift so much.

Alan Lightman is Burchard Professor of Humanities and senior lecturer in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new novel, ''The Diagnosis,'' will be published next year. Return to the Books Home Page



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