Galileo

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015), managed to clarify the unsettling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and other physical exotica. It sold more than a million copies in English translation alone. Not since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had there been such a consensual success in the science book market. In later bestsellers such as The Order of Time and White Holes, Rovelli continued a tradition of popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. The French call it haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. Rovelli excels at it.

The question of why things fall has puzzled our species since we crawled out from the darkness of our primitive ignorance. Aristotle was the first to offer a serious theory. He proposed that each of the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) had a natural place to which it innately wanted to return. Fire and air rise because their place is in the heavens, whereas earth and water return to the Earth. Aristotelian philosophy had such a profound impact on human thought that this view prevailed for nearly 2,000 years. Only with the Renaissance and the ideas of Kepler and Galileo was it finally challenged; and only by standing on the shoulders of these giants was Isaac Newton able to make probably the greatest intellectual leap ever.