Word: koestlers
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...SLEEPWALKERS (624 pp.)-Arthur Koestler-Macmillan...
...Arthur Koestler, 53, is an ex-rebel without a cause. In the '305, he was a Communist; in the '40s and well into the '50s, a trenchant antiCommunist. While he remains as firmly anti-Red as ever, he seems to have wearied of the battle. A few years ago, the author of Darkness at Noon announced: "Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change." Lately, the polemicist has turned pedagogue. The Sleepwalkers is an animated and diverting lecture on cosmology, man's vision of the universe from the Babylonians to Newton...
...failure of nerve, Koestler believes, sabotaged these true starts toward knowledge. Faced with a Greek society already in decline, Plato equated any change with decay. For philosophic reasons, he decided that the sphere was the only perfect shape, that the world must be a perfect sphere and that the motion of heavenly bodies must be in perfect circles at uniform speed. Aristotle returned to the idea of an immobile earth and placed it in the center of nine concentric, transparent spheres, outside which was the Unmoved Mover who kept the whole machinery turning. To make the heavens jibe with Aristotle...
...recording the hammer blows of 16th and 17th century discoveries that finally put Ptolemy's epicycle machine on science's junk heap, Author Koestler offers personable profiles of the leading cosmologists-Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo-as well as lively popularizations of their thought. He also makes his book's mildly controversial point, which is almost beside the point, that these scientific greats sleepwalked their way to profound insights, with a kind of intuitive genius that turned even wrong questions into right answers...
...four new planets (they were actually satellites of Jupiter), Kepler was the first scientist in Europe to believe, and generously offered himself as "your shield-bearer." It is Galileo's disregard of Kepler, even to the point of not sending him a telescope he asked for, that influences Koestler's frank distaste for Galileo. Far from being a martyr, Koestler believes, Galileo was a pompous megalomaniac, who alienated his Jesuit friends and the benevolence of Pope Urban VIII, until he forced his own trial. But in the main, Author Koestler is equable-tempered and gives Galileo full marks...