GALILEO
By J.L. Heilbron
Oxford Unuiversity Press. 508 pages. £20.00
ISBN 978 0 199 583 522
Asked to name a famous scientist, most people would come up with Galileo, Newton or Einstein. But Galileo is special. He is also known as the martyr of science; a champion of reason over faith, persecuted by obscurantist Christianity. The dust jacket of this book has just this flavour. Happily, Heilbron is better informed than his dust jacket suggests. He elsewhere notes that the dogmatic opposition between Church and Science ‘makes too good and simple a story to ruin with facts’, but ruin it he does, for this biography is very well informed indeed.1
It has been said that Galileo is best known for the things he never did, such as inventing the telescope. This is a shame, as his real achievements are well worth the telling.
