Quote from Galileo's Daughter

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

by Dava Sobel 

Penguin Books, New York, New York, 2000        420 pages

The day after his sister Virginia's funeral, the already world-renowned scientist Galileo Galilei received the first of 124 surviving letters from the once-voluminous correspondence he carried on with his elder daughter. She alone of Galileo's three children mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante.

Galileo's daughter, born of his long illicit liaison with the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice, entered the world in the summer heat of a new century, on August 13, 1600 -- the same year the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for insisting, among his many heresies and blasphemies, that the Earth traveled around the Sun, instead of remaining motionless at the center of the universe. In a world that did not yet know its place, Galileo would engage this same cosmic conflict with the Church, treading a dangerous path between the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic and the heavens he revealed through his telescope. (pp. 4-5)

-- quote submitted by Jennifer K.

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