Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

Some authors are very good telling you about history. Others are very good at putting you into history. Both have their place. But an author who can do the latter is special and Dava Sobel is one of the latter.Her book, Longitude, was her first and is excellent, bringing to light a crucial and little known part of scientific history. The story of Galileo is better known but often misunderstood by even science teachers like myself. However, by framing the Galileo's story around his daughter's letters (Galileo's replies are lost) we get the feeling of being there in the early 17th century and a real taste of Galileo's successes and setbacks.I suppose that many people might be put off by this style of history-telling. It is often difficult for a 21st century person to understand the interests and cares of people 25 years ago let alone 400 years ago. I think it's fascinating, however, to see the differences: a time when science was new, creating an awe that is lost on modern people, and religion permeated peoples lives, God's world being as present as the physical one.As a Catholic, I was particularly interested in Galileo's struggles with the Church. I have often felt this period to be in many ways a low point in Church history. Interestingly, it turns out to be what these things often are: a struggle between both high- and low-minded Church officials, where political issues end up winning out over theological and philosophical ones. Galileo's conviction by the Inquisition (on what appears to be a vote of 7-3) was caused by many factors and his continued support by many highly placed Catholics even after his conviction shows the lack of unanimity in opinion. If I have one disappointment in the Church, it is that Galileo's book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, was reviewed and given an imprimatur by Church officials who then backtracked and put the book on the Index and Galileo to trial.In any case, despite these negatives in Galileo's life, it was nice to see the important role that his daughter, Suor Mary Celeste, played in his life. I have stood before Galileo's tomb in Florence and yet I never realized that his daughter is buried there with him--certainly a sign of her importance to him. And certainly a sign that Sobel has made a wise choice is how to tell Galileo's story.

Galileo's Daughter is a rare gift. This marvelous duo biography of Galileo Galilei and his daughter Virginia evokes a sense of time and place, character and action and of cosmic importance that are usually the province of great works of fiction. Author Dava Sobel's meticulous scholarship and keen insights provide us a literary microscope with which we can examine Galileo's seventeenth-century world as the great astronomer explored the heavens with his telescope. Galileo's numerous scientific discoveries and his condemnation by the Church for heretically teaching the earth moved around the sun are familiar to most school children. Galileo's Daughter does much more than chronicle these familiar events. Sobel transports us to the Florence of Grand Duke Ferninando de Medici, the Rome of Pope Urban VIII, the Covent of San Matteo where Virginia Galilei became Suor Maria Celeste and breathes life into Galileo's Italy during the era of The Thirty Years War. Superstition and science, loyalty and treachery, generosity and selfishness, the ridiculous and the sublime each combine in a rich Italinate tapestry of seventeenth-century life. I recommend this wonderful book to men and women of all ages. It will satisfy even those with little interest in history, science or biography. If you are looking for a good story, well told, that illuminates the human condition, this book is for you.

This is a super book which brings to life the daily routines of the 17th century -- including those life of a cloistered nun -- while telling a great love story, recounting the development in Europe and Italy of modern physics, and describing the political and academic intrigues and jealousies that led to the banning in Italy of the Copernican theory of the universe. Yet, at the same time as Galileo endured persecution by the inquisition and was forced to recant his ideas, buoyed by the love of his friends and, especially, his remarkable daughter, Marie Celeste, he retained both his religious faith and his confidence in science, and continued to work, producing some of his finest work even while under house arrest. Galileo's story continues to have significance in our present era, when science, and particularly biology, is under attack by political and religious fundamentalists. Sobel's book shows the pettiness and ultimate impotence of such attacks in the face of courageous, ethical minds such as Galileo's and the force and beauty of nature. Best of all, she brings this point home without pedantry or proselytizing, but rather by telling the story simply, as it occurred: and indeed, "Eppur, si muove."

Dava Sobel has accomplished what is nearly impossible when dealing with a subject who is as well known, and documented as the life of Galileo. There must be literally hundreds of books on the man, and his works. Dava Sobel not only finds new source information, the letters of Galileo's eldest Daughter Sister Maria Celeste, but also uses them to expand on what is commonly known about Galileo the Scientist, the accused Heretic, and gives us Galileo the Father. It could be argued that the book is as much about Galileo as his Daughter, but that would be misplacing the emphasis of the book. We learn of the extremely harsh life of Cloistered Nuns, the medicines that Galileo's Daughter made and treated him with. This to me was fascinating as opposed to just knowing that Galileo was often sickly. From the detail in the book one could recreate these medicinal treatments if one chose to. This type of detail would not normally interest me, but here it is presented as a Daughter trying to maintain the physical health, as well as constantly buttressing the man's faith as he was accused, tried, sentenced, and watched his life's greatest work banned by his own Church. And to have this torment take place with the consent of a man that Galileo counted as a friend, both prior to his being Pope, and when he became Pope Urban VIII. I feel the Authoress did a brilliant job of handling the religious issue. Rarely can this be attempted without the writer being branded anti-Catholic. She was able to state the facts, without editorial comment, by which she successfully navigated a secular minefield. Some of the facts are so petty and mean-spirited that was it not for the fact they came from Vatican Records, Dava Sobel would find herself the target of the narrow-minded. She often will let the testimony speak for itself. When accused of publishing that which was considered Heresy, Galileo produces written permission granted by the Church Authorities prior to publication of his work. Hard to argue with that, but the Church not only ignored it, but convicted him in spite of it. This is not a Science book yet the Authoress includes enough without discouraging the non-scientist with math formulae. This is not a textbook that recites facts to be memorized and then repeated by rote repetition. What this is, is a gem of a book that makes a familiar historical figure new and fresh to the reader. She expands Galileo from one of history's great scientists, to a man, a man cruelly hurt, the head of a Family, a man betrayed by someone he called a friend. And finally, portrays a devoted Daughter that suffered along with, and did what she could, to support her Father spiritually and physically with a devoted Daughter's love. As I mentioned in the title this book has an outstanding surprise that I was never aware of. Dava Sobel brings it to light with such subtlety and grace that it is a touching revelation, rather than a cheap trick of literary devi

In her previous book, Longitude, Dava Sobel showed how technology (the construction of a sea-worthy clock) solved the problem of determining a ship's longitudinal position in the ocean. In Galileo's Daughter, we see how technology, i.e. the invention of the telescope, gave rise to a an intellectual problem -- how to reconcile truths of science with those of faith. Galileo never intended to contradict the church, but hoped to present the Copernican system of the world as merely an alternative hypothesis to the Ptolemaic view that the earth was at the center of the world. Sobel uses his correspondence with his daughter, a nun, to provide the context of his struggles that ultimately led to his conviction by the Inquisition. As a resuslt of his house arrest, Galileo worked during the last years of his life on Two New Sciences, a work perhaps even more important than the Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, and one that laid the foundation for Newton's Principia. Beautifully woven into Galileo's story are the events of the 17th century: the Thirty Years' War, the bubonic plague, the role of the Medicis and that of Pope Urban VIII