A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change
Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Copernicus all lived around the same time as Athanasius Kircher, the subject of this excellent biography. As a thinker and writer, Kircher (ca. 1601–80) was at least as tireless as those guys, so how come we haven’t heard of him? As it turns out, Kircher, who conducted research into such fields as magnetism, optics, acoustics, and hieroglyphics (and plenty more), had what Glassie calls a “major susceptibility to nonsense.” He was, frankly, flat wrong—sometimes hugely, comically wrong—about a lot of things. His translations of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example, turned out to be “wildly inaccurate.” But Kircher is no buffoon. For, among his many stumblings, there were also some genuine contributions to science: a book on optics, to name one, contained one of the earliest descriptions of a microscope. And, even though his translations of the hieroglyphics were off base, he did help to show that the (relatively) modern Coptic languages could be used to decipher the ancient Egyptian language. An entertaining and enlightening biography of a man who has been, probably unfairly, almost entirely left out of the history of science. --David Pitt