Galileo's Daughter

I wrote a while back about accepting the Astronomy Reading Challenge. I just finished one of the books I picked to read about an astronomer, Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel. I've been wanting to read this book for a while now, but for some reason I was under the impression it was a novel, not a biography. That was probably because I've read both of the Rashi's Daughters novels (and waiting patiently for the third one to be written). This also explains why I never found it when I looked for it several times in the fiction section of the library.

Anyway, it is a biography, and it's more of a biography of Galileo than his daughter, which is just as well, because Galileo was the famous astronomer, not his daughter. The book is uses the correspondence between Galileo and his daughter, who was a nun, to frame the story of Galileo's life. There are 124 surviving letters, all of them from Suor Marie Celeste to her father Galileo; none of Galileo's letters to his daughter have survived.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it is well-written, interesting and informative. I was especially interested in Galileo's thoughts on the intersection of science and religion. Even though he was convicted of heresy by the Inquisition for expounding the view that the earth moves around the sun, Galileo remained a faithful believer in the Scriptures and in the God-given ability of man to discover by means of his senses and intellect the way the universe works.

“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation, such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of those sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”