We know what Galileo saw when he peered through his telescope, but Lawrence Lipking reminds us that the astronomer drew pictures of the worlds revealed in his lens. Galileo was not just a narrowly focused scientific explorer, but was also an accomplished painter and musician as well as a poet and prose author. Lipking makes similar points about other great figures in the Scientific Revolution of the 1500 and 1600s in expounding his thesis that the key advances in science were acts of imagination and creativity, not simply observation and experimentation. The divide between science and the humanities, whose hairline cracks evident during this period, would only widen into a chasm in the centuries that followed. Lipking’s book is revelatory in its effort to sketch a more complete history of science, which is to say, an understanding of the universe in which we imagine ourselves.
