What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution Paperback – March 21, 2016 by Lawrence Lipking (Cornell University Press)

What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution is an insightful, intelligent look at the time period that saw so many advances in natural philosophy/science. In particular, Lawrence Lipking focuses on several familiar names, including Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Hook, Bacon, Descartes, and Boyle, though he often ranges further afield to place these actors in their proper context, adding smaller discussions of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus, for instance, among others.

Lipking’s explanations of the advancements in knowledge, as well as what those advancements were built upon, are clear and eminently readable. But what made this book stand out for me was not his survey of the various experiments/concepts/theories, excellent as those segments were. No, what made it stand out were three other aspects of the book.

One was Lipking’s refusal to focus too narrowly on the natural philosophers/scientists. These men did not work in a cultural vacuum; their ideas both were both inspired and also inspired the artists of their day. And so Lipking also delves quite formidably into Milton, Shakespeare (Lear especially), Donne, and others, highlighting the connective tissue of “imagination” that links these spirits together. And when I say, “delve,” I mean just that. This is not some surface level discussion of Milton’s poetry or Shakespeare’s stage plays. Lipking dives in deep, boring into the language, the use of simile and metaphor, the imagery. I confess, his section on literary birds went a bit too far for me—both in length and in the points being made—but outside of those few pages, this English major loved the ease with which Lipking pivoted from the sciences to the humanities and the insights he brought to bear on the art and literature of the time.

Secondly, he points out that as much as the story of the Scientific Revolution likes to hold these men up as paragons of rationality, of “science,” they were, despite their visionary nature, products of their time, and too often the mythologizing glosses over or simply ignores their “less rational” beliefs, such as alchemy, sympathetic magic, and the like. If Newton’s obsession with alchemy is by now well known, others’ similar beliefs, while logically deducible based on their time period, are far less familiar both in the generalities and the specific details.

Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed how Lipking constantly questions the “story” of the Scientific Revolution itself—how it first came about, how the story has been passed on, maintained, changed over time. He questions its starting points, its ending points, its objects of focus, its very existence as a meaningful term. No matter one’s views on the matter, a healthy skepticism (skepticism being something else he discuss, particularly in the section on Descartes) almost always raises the level of discussion and thought, and it does so here as well.

Engaging, readable, insightful, fluid and wide-ranging, this is an excellent examination of the time period—its natural philosophy, its science (once that word came about), its larger-than-life figures and those whose work preceded theirs, its writers and artists, and the general manner in which “imagination” became much the dominant mode of thought that drove all this. Highly recommended.