Five years ago, author Dava Sobel surprised the literary world with her unlikely hit Longitude. An award-winning former science reporter for the New York Times, and a frequent contributor to Audubon, Discover, Life, and Omni, Sobel has become the leader in a new field that might be called "historical scientific narrative." It's a wonderful way of bringing the world's great scientific discoveries to those who might otherwise pass the subject matter by.
In Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, Sobel took the reader along on John Harrison's 40-year journey to find a solution to the "longitude problem"—the inability of sailors to find their east/west position at sea.
The problem had stumped the greatest scientific minds for more than 200 years with everyone from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton giving it a go. The need for a solution was so great that in 1714 the English Parliament issued the now-famous Longitude Act, which offered a King's Ransom (£20,000, or about $12 million in today's currency) to anyone who could find the answer.
Seems less than interesting, right? That's why everyone was surprised when Sobel's book came out of nowhere and established itself as a hit.
While Longitude retraced the efforts of 18th-century minds to solve this navigational enigma, her new novel Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love is less a scientific story than a spiritual one. Rather than dwell primarily on Galileo's scientific contributions, which it does cover well, it focuses more on his dealings with the Catholic Church and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. It also brings to life a seldom talked about aspect of the great scientist's life—his incredible bond with his convent-bound daughter, Suor Maria Celeste.
The idea for the book came from Sobel's longtime interest in Galileo coupled with the discovery of surviving letters written to the scientist by his daughter that chronicle his devotion to science and family; as well as the more mundane aspects of daily life.
In researching the book, Sobel has gone to the painstaking effort of translating all of these letters into English from Italian herself. The time she has spent with the material is quite obvious and her intimate knowledge of the subject matter allows her to bring to life the story better than anyone.
At the center of the scientific plot is Galileo's support for the Copernican model of the heavens—that the earth orbits the sun and is not the center of the Universe. This is, of course, quite obvious in this day and age, but when
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