{"id":9762,"date":"2011-05-17T18:51:05","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T17:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/?p=9762"},"modified":"2011-05-31T18:00:30","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T17:00:30","slug":"book-review-the-skys-dark-labyrinth-by-stuart-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2011\/05\/17\/book-review-the-skys-dark-labyrinth-by-stuart-clark\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Sky&#8217;s Dark Labyrinth, by Stuart Clark"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/skysdark.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"10050\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2011\/05\/17\/book-review-the-skys-dark-labyrinth-by-stuart-clark\/skysdark\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/skysdark.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"500,709\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"skysdark\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/skysdark.jpg\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-10050\" title=\"skysdark\" src=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/skysdark-335x476.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"227\" height=\"322\" srcset=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/skysdark-335x476.jpg 335w, https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/skysdark.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 227px) 100vw, 227px\" \/><\/a><strong>Hardcover:<\/strong> 272 pages<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Publisher:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.polygonbooks.co.uk\/main\/\">Polygon<\/a> (1 May 2011)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Language<\/strong> English<\/li>\n<li><strong>ISBN-10:<\/strong> 1846971748<\/li>\n<li><strong>ISBN-13:<\/strong> 978-1846971747<\/li>\n<li><strong> Product Dimensions: <\/strong> 20.6 x 15.4 x 3 cm<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Galileo Galilei&#8217;s scrape with the Roman Catholic Church is well known.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">His suggestion that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits around the Sun was an afront to scripture that got him branded as a heretic and almost burnt at the stake.  How he first became aware of the full peril of his situation is less well known: on a rooftop in Rome, eavesdropping whilst taking a pee behind a bush.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Maybe that&#8217;s how it happened, maybe not &#8211; either way, the Earth won&#8217;t stop turning.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s through these touches of imaginative license: sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, on occasion disturbingly vivid, that Stuart Clark breathes life into the characters of his first novel, The Sky&#8217;s Dark Labyrinth.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The title comes from an episode in the book, where Galileo explains the hopelessness of trying to understand the universe without the correct language &#8211; mathematics; to do so is to &#8220;wander about lost in the dark labyrinth of the sky.&#8221;\u00a0 But don&#8217;t panic, it&#8217;s an equationless drama.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In this first part of a trilogy that reaches from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, we follow the lives of the astronomers Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as they challenge the religiously inspired orthodoxy of the times: an Earth-centered universe with the Sun and planets orbiting around in perfect circles &#8211; just as God intended.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Each astronomer has special skills and his own ideas about the cosmos:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Tycho, the meticulous naked-eye observer, happy for the Sun to orbit the Earth, yet convinced the other planets revolve around the Sun.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Galileo, arguably the father of evidence-based thinking, points his telescope skyward to see mountains on the moon, satellites around Jupiter, moon-like phases on Venus and Mercury, and spots on the Sun (Clark reminds us Galileo didn&#8217;t actually invent the telescope) &#8211; each observation a blow to the accepted model of the universe and Aristotle&#8217;s concept of a perfect heaven.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">And Kepler, obsessed with geometry, turns a rigorous mathematical eye to his compatriots&#8217; data to derive a model of eliptical planetary motion that, relativistic effects aside, is valid to this day.<\/p>\n<p>On the journey, we share starry rooftop nights with Tycho and his armillary spheres and sextants; and with Galileo and his telescope.  We encounter scientific concepts, painlessly embedded in the story, from stellar parallax to Kepler&#8217;s  defining relationship for a planet&#8217;s distance and period round the Sun.\u00a0 <em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">We meet the landmark publications that captured these ideas: Kepler&#8217;s discussion of perfect polygons <em>Mysterium cosmographicum<\/em>, his treatise on Mars: the <em>Astronomia nova<\/em>, and the <em>Rudolphine Tables <\/em>of star positions; Galileo&#8217;s telescope observations in <em>Sidereus Nuncius <\/em>and his more troublesome endorsement of Copernican ideas in <em>Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>The whole is delivered through a pacey narrative that switches back and forth through time and space.\u00a0 One moment we&#8217;re in Rome, then Prague, then Florence, then Rome again.\u00a0 Thus Clark weaves his factually-based interplay of lives and ideas.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As in any drama, characters are developed in contexts that resonate with our personal experience: relationships, families, squabbles, births, marriages and deaths &#8211; as far  as that&#8217;s possible 400 years on. \u00a0 Is that illusory?\u00a0 Can we ever really see from behind 16th century eyes?\u00a0\u00a0 No, we can&#8217;t.\u00a0 But how else to share Kepler&#8217;s wonder as he steps out onto the observatory roof, or taste Tycho&#8217;s not-so-scientific bon vivre lifestyle and lordly pride, or feel Galileo&#8217;s chill dread as he anticipates what a rabid Inquisition has in store?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">And that, in a nutshell, is Clark&#8217;s proposition.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">It&#8217;s one where he&#8217;s shown due respect for the underlying history, reflected perhaps in a favouring of credible human vignettes over elaborate manufactured sub-plots.\u00a0 So, lots of expansion on the meetings, schemes, and conflicts that must have taken  place but would never be recorded &#8211; scenes that\u00a0 can  be directed and embellished to divert and entertain without  compromising the main account.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In this regard, it&#8217;s a very different  book to, say, Edward Rutherfurd&#8217;s London, where the main story lines are totally fictional.\u00a0 Clark&#8217;s work comes over as based on historical record and scientific fact.\u00a0 It&#8217;s important, as historians of science in particular can, understandably, take issue with inaccurate or controversial portrayals; I&#8217;m  thinking of a recent defence of Nevil Maskelyne, the 18th century Astronomer Royal, demonised in the film version of Dava Sobel&#8217;s Longitude.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The Sky&#8217;s Dark Labyrinth begins in Rome, where a defiant Giordano Bruno, comfortable only with his conscience, waits in a cell to be burnt at the stake for heresy.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Johannes Kepler, an outcast Lutheran, arrives in Bohemian Prague to join the service of Tycho Brahe, and get a first sniff of the observational data he&#8217;ll one day build into a planetary model.\u00a0 He also hears about one Galileo Galilei of Padua, and the wonderful discoveries he&#8217;s made with his telescope (before long Kepler will have one of his own).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">And all the time the Roman Catholic Church is watching, keeping tabs on these dangerous individuals, their troubling independence and inconvenient appeal to evidence.\u00a0\u00a0 Kepler is spyed on &#8211; his mail intercepted.   Galileo, at first encouraged by the Pope, is told in no uncertain terms to leave theological interpretation to the Church; but his thoughts are already committed to print.  Thus the slippery slide to persecution, recantation, and repression is joined.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The plot moves between the bloody war-torn streets of Prague and the red robed intrigue of Vatican corridors.\u00a0 Current events in Reformation Europe are dominated by the struggle between an increasingly Jesuit-influenced Catholic Church and a rising tide of Lutherism.\u00a0 And our astronomers are in the thick of it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Far from being godless atheists, they aim to explain God&#8217;s works &#8211; not undo them.\u00a0 Yet a Catholic Galileo and a Lutheran Kepler still each grapple to rationalise their ideas to themselves and to a world of dogmatic orthodoxy.\u00a0 A world where political, theological, and philosophical considerations hold sway over rationalism; where solidarity of belief and allegiance to the group is prized over individual will, conscience, or even physical proof; where mathematical descriptions are acceptable as professional tricks, but will never define truth; where witchcraft is a burning issue, and astronomy is inseparably tied up with the superstition of astrology.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Indeed, Kepler makes a good living drawing up horoscopes for wealthy patrons and courtly sponsors &#8211; a trade he revisits as the need arises (Clark actually credit&#8217;s him with a rather modern pragmatism on these issues).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Reformation Europe is also a great background for some of Clark&#8217;s more vivid visualisations, reminiscent of a Terry Gilliam movie in their medievalism.\u00a0\u00a0 I love the &#8220;gobs   of some thick unguent&#8221; Kepler spies clinging at the margins of Tycho&#8217;s prosthetic nose when they first meet, and the mood-setting &#8216;unpleasant tang of tallow&#8217; in Kepler&#8217;s study.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Life is dirty, smelly, and not a little   dangerous.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">On the downside, I occasionally lose track in the switching interplay of events and locations, feeling the need to draw little timeline diagrams &#8211; lest I get totally lost in the labyrinth.\u00a0 And oblivious to any description or other literary signposting, I only ever thought of our heros as bearded old men.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll call it William Shakespeare syndrome- there just aren&#8217;t enough &#8216;before they were famous&#8217; portraits out there.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">But none of that detracted from The Sky&#8217;s Dark Labyrinth as a thoroughly entertaining and recommended read.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In capturing that essential excitement of the night sky, unchanged over the centuries, Clark has created a work accessible to all comers, and one that astronomers and history fans in particular will doubtless lap up.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I look forward to meeting Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble in future installments.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Stuart Clark&#8217;s website is at <a href=\"http:\/\/stuartclark.com\/\">stuartclark.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=zoonomian-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=1846971748&#038;ref=qf_sp_asin_til&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=zoonomian-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0691141266&#038;ref=qf_sp_asin_til&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Polygon (1 May 2011) Language English ISBN-10: 1846971748 ISBN-13: 978-1846971747 Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 15.4 x 3 cm &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Galileo Galilei&#8217;s scrape with the Roman Catholic Church is well known. His suggestion that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits around the Sun was an afront to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2011\/05\/17\/book-review-the-skys-dark-labyrinth-by-stuart-clark\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Book Review: The Sky&#8217;s Dark Labyrinth, by Stuart Clark<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[638,102,843,5,1109,13],"tags":[861,1173,1172,1174,1169,1168,1171],"class_list":["post-9762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-books","category-history-of-science-history","category-religion","tag-book-review","tag-galileo-galilei","tag-johannes-kepler","tag-polygon","tag-stuart-clark","tag-the-skys-dark-labyrinth","tag-tycho-brahe"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkpOr-2xs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9762"}],"version-history":[{"count":202,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10137,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9762\/revisions\/10137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}