OK, so it’s not exactly Wikileaks: but following on from my very recent review of Albert van Helden’s monograph, a (how shall I put it?) well-placed insider has dropped me a line…

Apparently, the American Philosophical Society is planning to republish “The Invention of the Telescope” in an “augmented edition” next year (2009, the International Year of the Telescope), for which van Helden has been asked to put together a new introduction. My guess is that this will come out at about the same time as the book on Galileo’s sunspots which Eileen Reeves and van Helden have been working on (which itself was delayed by Reeves’ “Galileo’s Glassworks“, according to her acknowledgments section).

However, I should flag that a big problem with long publishing pipelines like this is that it only takes one really interesting piece of work to come out to make everything in it seem instantly outdated: and with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic breakthroughs imminently upon us, right now there are doubtless several (2? 5? 10?) historians out there finishing up their shocking alt.history revisionist accounts of the telescope’s genesis.

For me, the most surprising aspect of this whole story is that van Helden’s work has lasted 31 years without being significantly overturned (as far as I can see): but in the field of ideas, things can change (and they often do, rapidly). We shall see what happens next…

Incidentally, I wish I knew of a book like the first half of “Galileo’s Glassworks” that covered the literary prehistory of the microscope, and/or an equivalent of van Helden’s monograph covering the microscope’s birth. Was the romantic lure of seeing tiny things ever as great as that of seeing afar?

All of a sudden, I’m transported Proust-like to the Trigan Empire comic strip in the “Look & Learn”s of my childhood, where one storyline revealed whole subatomic galaxies to explore (might Oli Frey have drawn that?)…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Post navigation