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Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel, Penguin, 420 pp.; $14
The artificial barriers we have created to define academic disciplines often blind us to the hydrodynamics of human history, which is, by nature, a fluid medium. Religion, economics, politics, agriculture, art, domestic arrangements, science—every aspect of civilization constantly exerts or yields to pressure, gains or loses velocity, spurts ahead, eddies sideways, or stagnates, according to what's happening elsewhere in the river.
The artificial barriers were inevitable, of course. Even the most erudite among us cannot carry around inside their heads the great flood of human civilization. Cybernetic overload makes it difficult to remember, for example, that Galileo published his Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, and the second folio of Shakespeare's plays appeared during the same year—1632. Or that Galileo and Shakespeare were born the same year, 1564—the year that Michelangelo died. Or that during Galileo's house arrest for his publication of the Dialogue, he was visited by luminaries no less bright or politically contrary than Thomas Hobbes and the young John Milton.
Yet that string of births, deaths, and encounters gives us a better sense than do period labels of how Time, like an ever-rolling stream, not only bears all its sons away but ceaselessly alters the contours of civilization. Handy though the terms "Renaissance" and "Enlightenment" may be, they give the unfortunate impression that history arrives in discrete chunks rather than as events so seamless we are rarely aware of their significance at the time. This is, after all, the way we experience our own lives, as a wash of contingency.
It is this sense of how historical watersheds emerge from the murky quotidian that Dava Sobel (author of Longitude) captures so deftly in Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love. Most people are unaware that Galileo even had a daughter. In fact, he had a brace of them, as well as a son, though never a wife. Italian scholars, Sobel tells us, customarily did not marry, a cultural vestige of the Middle Ages when learning was almost entirely a monastic endeavor. Instead, when he was 35, Galileo took a mistress, Marina Gamba, who within a year gave birth to a daughter, baptized Virginia. The next year, another daughter, Livia, was born and a few years afterward, a son, Vincenzio. Galileo did not live in the same house with Marina and his children but supported them in a separate establishment, first in Padua, where he held the chair of mathematics at the university, and later in Pisa. When his own father died, Galileo became the paterfamilias, not only of his own irregular family but also for his younger brothers and sisters as well as various cousins, arranging marriages and careers for them as the need arose.
How did these familial exigencies affect the future of science and the way you and I picture the universe? Without them Galileo might have been content with his meager university stipend and thus never set up a workshop in his house to supplement his income by manufacturing and marketing his inventions. The first was a "geometric and military compass," much like the protractors long used in beginning geometry classes. His entrepreneurial appetite whetted, Galileo, upon hearing about a "spyglass" recently patented in The Hague by Hans Lipperhey, tried his hand at grinding lenses. His telescopes of steadily increasing magnitudes were soon the rage all over Europe. It was through a three-lens telescope of his own devising that Galileo observed and correctly identified the four moons of Jupiter. And when that event coincided neatly with Cosimo II de' Medici becoming Grand Duke of Tuscany, what better use could a hard-pressed scholar make of his discovery than to name the satellites the "Medician Stars"? As Galileo had hoped, Cosimo became his patron, appointing him Chief Mathematician of the University of Pisa and Philosopher and Mathematician to the Grand Duke, a lifetime sinecure.
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