With the scholarly ardour and elegant lucidity that made Longitude such a phenomenal success, Dava Sobel has revealed a wonderful story of intellectual courage supported by filial devotion.
When Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) demonstrated the truth of Copernicus's hypothesis that the centre of our planetary system is the Sun, not the Earth, the Holy Office of the Inquisition charged him with blasphemy, and confined him under house arrest for the last several years of his life. Although Galileo was a good Catholic (his Italian family name was derived from Galilee), when he proved heliocentrism by astronomical observation and mathematical logic, he came up against the implacable power of Rome's dogmatic prejudice. At the time of Pope Urban VIII, a former admirer and friend of Galileo's, the Church ruled that to deny that the Earth was the fixed centre of the universe was to repudiate scriptural authority. Catholic doctrine and new scientific discovery were then mutually opposed.
Galileo published his principal written work, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, in 1632. The following year, the Holy Office found him guilty of heresy and banned the book. It was not dropped from the Index of Prohibited Books until 1835; and it was finally rehabilitated, by Pope John Paul II, in 1992. In spite of the long-lasting anathema, however, Galileo's scientific ideas became known and endorsed throughout Europe even during his lifetime. They inspired Newton, who was born the year Galileo died. Einstein called Galileo "the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science altogether." In 1989, NASA named the spacecraft Galileo that was sent to Jupiter to study the satellites he discovered with the telescope he invented. The Jovian satellites are now generally known as Galilean.
Sobel recounts the history of Galileo's achievements in the context of major disasters - the Thirty Years War and epidemics of bubonic plague. He was handicapped also by chronic ill health, culminating in blindness. As he lost his sight, he noted ironically, Sobel writes, that "no son of Adam had seen further than he."
So far, so good. But what especially enriches this fine biography is Sobel's account of Galileo's relationship with his elder daughter. He committed both his illegitimate daughters as girls to the Convent of San Matteo, a foundation of the Poor Clares, at Arcetri, his own final home, near Florence. Virginia assumed the name Maria Celeste - Celeste in honour of her father's interest in the stars. She was the most zealous of nuns and a devoted daughter.
Immured for life in poverty, she worked hard in the hours free from liturgical duties. With the other nuns, she cooked and cleaned and cultivated fruit and vegetables. She produced lace and embroidery and prepared herbal medicines to augment the convent's meagre income. She directed the choir. When the abbess had important letters to write, Maria Celeste wrote them. And somehow she found time to write frequent, long letters to her father. Sobel gained access to 124 of them. She has translated them, for the first time, into English.
The letters are both formal and intimate, beginning "Most Illustrious and Beloved Lord Father," telling him about the convent's domestic problems, and expressing her admiration for his work and her concern for his material and spiritual well-being. Her prose is clear and graceful, and there are occasional glints of humour.
She died when he was old and she was still young. She was a woman, he wrote, "of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me." Just how close they were and how close they remain are revealed in Dava Sobel's very last sentence.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic