Galileo's Daughter -- January 2017

2 hour Nova based on book

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/galileo-battle-for-the-heavens.html

Not available for streaming here, but there is a transcript of the program

DVD available from PLS.

Galileo’s place in science

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/galileo-sobel.html

https://dava-sobel-twf5.squarespace.com/about-dava-sobel/

Nice bio

http://www.davasobel.com/books-by-dava-sobel/2016/9/2/galileos-daughter

I often think this was the book I was born to write. I felt a bond with the title character, though she was a Catholic nun living in Tuscany in the early sixteenth century, and I was raised Jewish in the Bronx in the mid-twentieth. From my first encounter with Suor Maria Celeste (Virginia Galilei), reading the letter in which she implored her father for help fixing the convent clock, I was enthralled by her prose style, her humor, and her moxie.

The realization that Galileo had fathered two nuns made me question everything I’d been taught about him in school. What if he did everything he did as a believing Catholic? I wondered. Isn’t that a much more nuanced, interesting story? And how would his daughter nuns have reacted to his unorthodox notions about the heavens? To his trial for heresy by the Roman Inquisition?

Finding the answers to those questions occupied me for five very happy years. I made four trips to Italy to read the original handwritten letters, held in Florence, and visit every place that Galileo and his children had lived. See this travel piece I wrote for the Sunday Times

Ironically, Galileo’s definition of the relationship between science and religion dovetails with the Church’s current official stance.

You may also be interested in Letters to Father.

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Letters to Father

Galileo’s Daughter quoted liberally from the 124 surviving letters that Suor Maria Celeste wrote to her famous father from the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, where she lived from age thirteen until her death. Unable to include all my translations in the text, I gave the full set to The Galileo Project.

It soon became apparent, however, that the people who most wanted to read all the letters did not want to read them on-line. The compromise was Letters to Father, which presented the original Italian with English translation on facing pages. Proceeds from the hardcover edition—a gorgeous, expensive volume, with real cloth covers and a ribbon bookmark—went to support the Poor Clares, the religious order to which both of Galileo’s daughters belonged. Although the hardcover is out of print, Letters to Father is still available (English text only) as a Penguin Classic.

OTHER EDITIONS

British edition of the bi-lingual original, with a shortened title, To Father, and a different cover.

Locations

Library	Where is it:
Palo Alto Public Library	Mitchell Park - Adult - Non-Fiction	520.92 GALILEI	AVAILABLE
Santa Clara University	University Library Main Stacks, Lower Level	QB36.G2 A4 2003	AVAILABLE
Univ of Nevada Las Vegas	UNLV Book Stacks	QB36.G213 A4 2003	AVAILABLE

Locations

Library	Where is it:
Berkeley Public	Central Library	816 G133L	AVAILABLE
Contra Costa County Public Library	biog	B GALILEI	AVAILABLE
Contra Costa County Public Library	phl	B GALILEI	AVAILABLE
CSU East Bay	Book Stacks	QB36.G2 A4 2001	AVAILABLE
Mountain View Public	Adult Non-Fiction - 2nd Floor	520.92 GALILEI	AVAILABLE
Napa Valley College	Napa Valley College	920.92 GALILEI	AVAILABLE
Sacramento Public	Central Library	520.92 G1582L 2001	AVAILABLE
San Francisco Public	MAIN - 3rd Floor	B G133L2	AVAILABLE
Santa Clara City Public	Central	520 G15	AVAILABLE
Sonoma State Univ	3rd FLOOR STACKS	QB36.G2 A4 2001	AVAILABLE
Univ of Nevada Las Vegas	UNLV Book Stacks	QB36.G2 A4 2001	AVAILABLE
Yolo County Library	Davis NonFiction	B GALILEI	AVAILABLE

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Dava Sobel

Jonathan Derbyshire

New Statesman. 140.5073 (Oct. 3, 2011): p55. From Literature Resource Center.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 New Statesman, Ltd.

http://www.newstatesman.com/

Listen

Full Text:

Before you began writing books, you worked as a science journalist. What did that involve?

In the early 1970s, I worked for Cornell University -1 was the science writer in its news bureau. I had responsibility for reporting on any kind of research. It was a wonderful job.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What was the relationship like between reporters and practising scientists?

At the university, it was very cordial -I had to show them everything. I was the only science writer there. They wanted their work to be written about. There was an idea that it would help them get more grant money if they could show there'd been newspaper or magazine interest.

Later, when I worked for the New York Times, only one person ever refused me an interview. Mostly, people would drop whatever they were doing if there was a chance of being interviewed by the Times.

Do you miss the daily grind of journalism?

No. I much prefer the chance to do things in depth. And not to be in such a rush. I find that I've gotten slower. To go to interview someone in the morning and then come back and write the article in the afternoon -I can hardly imagine I ever did that, though I used to do it all the time.

Your life changed with the publication, in 1995, of Longitude--about John Harrison, who invented the marine chronometer. How did that book come about?

It was originally a magazine article but my editor at Walker & Company took a risk on it. It was a big gamble for the company -it was a family-run business at that time.

Although my advance was very small, because they knew that they were doing something new and unusual, they stretched themselves. They hired an outside designer to make the book very beautiful; then they printed maybe 1,500 advance reading copies and gave them away at the booksellers' convention. And people knew that the company could not really afford to do something like that.

Your new book, A More Perfect Heaven, is about the relationship between Copernicus and a mathematician named Georg Joachim Rheticus. Is it important for you always to have a relationship at the centre of the story?

That certainly helps. In Harrison's story, you've got his relationship with the Board of Longitude, his fight with the astronomer royal, and so on.

I found that my book The Planets did not resonate with as large a public, and I'm sure that part of the reason was that there was no central character who could be followed. People seem to like stories about people.

You originally decided to write Copernicus's story as a play. Why?

The part of the story that interested me was the interaction between two people who were very different from each other--so it immediately suggested a dramatic tension. And the historical record is very thin, compared to that of someone like Galileo. So I thought it would be burdensome constantly to be weighing possibilities and not to be able to say for certain that this happened or that happened.

Would you say that Copernicus was the first modern scientist?

I really don't think that he was a modern scientist. He was trying to rectify ancient science. When he began, he had no intention of doing anything quite so revolutionary [as setting out his heliocentric theory].