Galileo's Daughter

While researching Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, I rented an apartment a few blocks from a house where Galileo lived in Florence. I could stand outside its door every day, but this book transported me inside—not just a building but a family, a home, and an era. 

Dava Sobel’s meticulous research reveals not just new dimensions of Galileo’s life and work as an intrepid scientist but the often hidden realm inhabited by his daughter. Illegitimate and unmarriageable, she entered a convent at age 13 to live in poverty and simplicity. And yet, as her letters demonstrate, Sister Marie Celeste’s soul… show more.

I found this beautiful book to be simultaneously uplifting and heartbreaking.

Often, science is taught as if it descended from heaven on stone tablets, devoid of the human drama involved in its discovery and explication. Sobel captures the agony and ecstasy of the drama in the life of Galileo, the father of experimental physics and the first astronomer to use the telescope.

Summoned late in life to face the Inquisition because of his unabashed promotion of heliocentric cosmology, considered heretical by the Church, Galileo survived but died broken and blind, no longer able to see the heavenly wonders he had… show more.

We all know the cartoon version of the story of Galileo. He used one of the first telescopes to show that the earth was not the center of the universe and the Catholic Church condemned him for it. But the real story is much more intricate and much more interesting. Dava Sobel is a master storyteller who not only explains the science, but gives us a fully human Galileo living a very complicated life.

In 1609, Galileo Galilei pointed his hand-made 30-power telescope at the sky and became the first person to see the craters and mountains on the moon, the phases of Venus, the dynamic moons of Jupiter, and a new multitude of faint stars hidden in the Milky Way. This beautiful book is a historical memoir of science, faith, and devotion. It is a triumphant story of love shared between a father and daughter who may have been a polymath like her famous dad who was dubbed “The greatest light of our time”.

Dava Sobel is a master storyteller and through the… show more.

Galileo has come down to us as a story of science versus religion. For years I had students tell me they couldn’t believe in evolution or the Big Bang theory because they believed in God. As a result, for 10 years I took students to Italy and walked in Galileo’s footsteps while reading this book that revealed his life and times were awash in politics, religion, intrigue, revolution, and strong personalities - exactly like our world today. Galileo, a firm Catholic, was adamant that good science was nothing more than accurately revealing the universe God built. This is a profoundly… show more.