Summary: How did I miss this masterpiece? Perhaps, because it is not referenced in all the histories of astonomy and cosmology I have read; it gets short shrift from the academics. Koestler was not an astronomer. Thank heavens! May we have more such amateurs!
This is the best history of asronomy and one of the wisest books I have ever read. . Koestler applies his knowledge, his life, his experiences, to this topic, and places the astonomy of each period beautifully within the context of the politics, religion and philosophy of the time. And shows, with crystalline clarity, how one (philosophy) could pollute the rest.
It is the best written book I have ever read on a scientific topic. On almost every page, the eloquence, intelligence and skill of Koestler illuminates a point obscured or ignored in other treatments. He brilliantly shows how astonomy suffered the same decline as the other sciences and technologies, for the same reasons, and puts this in the context of a collapsed Grecian and a collapsing Roman world seeking refuge in religious obscurantism for 1,200 years.
He laments the same point Carl Sagan makes in "Cosmos"; Plato and Aristotle cost us a thousand years of technical progress..Sagan points out that the people who built the medieval cathedrals lived in housing and health conditions worse than the Greeks. Koestler wryly observes that we were delayed the benefits of Satellites and Hydrogen bombs for the same interval.
He treats evenly with all the icons we have learned to revere. Copernicus was a coward and a lecherouos churchman, who opens his great book with a clumsy lie. Kepler was almost a raving lunatic (for good reason). Galileo is described as one of the truly offensive and annoying men of science, rarely giving credit, treated better than he deserved by the Church, and finally caught up by his defence of a book which he probably did not read. Amazingly, Galileo was no astonomer at all; just one who happened to do some early telescopic observations, and then attempted to establish a monopoly on observations for himself.
My eternal thanks to Owen Gingerich for his reference to this book. The jury is out, in my mind, on the other two volumes of his technical triptych, but this is an undoubted masterpiece. |
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