Which book meets this description: “could be read in an hour and its effect was like a punch in the solar plexus,” whose discoveries were thrown “like a bomb into the arena of the learned world”?
Would you like to read that book?
Is it even possible that such a book could be written today? Do wonder and amazement still exist in the 21st century?
When was the last time you were awestruck, literally struck with an overwhelming sense of awe, about something newly discovered?
The book described above is Galileo’s The Starry Messenger What made this book so amazing?
Imagine growing up at any time before 1610. Obviously you looked up at the sky. You saw the moon—a big white circle. You saw stars. You saw a few bright lights you heard were other planets.
It doesn’t matter when you grew up—before the discovery of agriculture and writing, at the time of Socrates or Jesus or Genghis Khan—no matter when you looked up, you saw the same thing as everyone else did or ever had.
Then Galileo publishes a book, a simple book. He built a telescope, a better telescope than anyone had built before. He looked up at the sky with his telescope and he discovered:
1. That white circle in the sky everyone saw had mountains and craters.
2. There are stars up there that nobody had ever seen before. And, not just a few new stars: “these are so numerous as to almost surpass belief.”
3. Jupiter had moons that nobody had ever seen before or even suspected might exist.
Try to imagine the shock of that book. Everyone knew what was in the sky. Everyone—peasants, kings, and philosophers—all saw exactly the same things in the sky and always had seen exactly the same things in the sky.
Suddenly, it is announced: there are more things in the sky than anyone ever knew. Suddenly a man with a telescope saw things never before seen by any human, things that were always there, but nobody knew even existed.
Galileo writes about the newly discovered moons around Jupiter:
There remains the matter which in my opinion deserves to be considered the most important of all—the disclosure of four PLANETS never seen from the creation of the world up to our own time, together with the occasion of my having discovered and studied them, their arrangements , and the observations made of their movements and alterations during the past two months.
Note Galileo’s all-caps PLANETS. Can you feel the excitement?
Galileo also wants you to notice the “occasion of my having discovered and studied them.” Galileo was a bit of an egomaniac, which got him into that trouble later in life about which you might have heard. But, we can give him a pass here; he really did discover something exciting.
(The quotations in the first paragraph are from Arthur Koestler’s marvelous tome, The Sleepwalkers.
I highly recommend this book if you have any interest at all in the history of science…and you should have a huge interest in the history of science.)
It is hard to recreate that feeling of excitement at the discovery of something new. Part of the problem is that we live in an age of technological wonder.
There is also the fact that scientific discoveries are no longer announced in pamphlets which can be read in a hour by any educated person. Scientific journal articles are…dense.
The recent book that comes closest to enabling an educated person in the modern world to approximate the wonder people must have felt reading Galileo in 1610 is a very short little book (also easily read in an hour or so) by Carlo Rovelli: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
Short chapters explaining the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the universe, elementary particles, quantum gravity, and time. You need absolutely zero scientific background to read and appreciate this book; if you are afraid of science and think it is above your head, fear not—this book is still perfect for you.
We need to cultivate our sense of wonder. Look out at this world and be amazed.
I highly recommend this book if you have any interest at all in the history of science…and you should have a huge interest in the history of science.)
Jim Hartley is aptly named. I love your excitement for excitement, among your many, many other hearty excitements.
Doing a stretch here – I feel the way you wrote about this kind of excitement when I study scripture and think to myself, “No one has ever shown me THIS PLANET ever before. Does anyone other than me know that this planet exists?”
Not being funny – while not minding being funny: I highly recommend beating your head against the Bible if you have any interest at all in the Bible…and you should have a huge interest in the Bible.