GALILEO AND THE SCIENCE DENIERS
MARIO LIVIO
Simon & Schuster, 304pp, £20
‘Is there room in the crowded canon for a new biography of Galileo Galilei?” wondered Alison Abbott in Nature. ‘Astrophysicist Mario Livio is betting so. His Galileo and the Science Deniers aims to stand out by placing the original Renaissance man and his discoveries in modern scientific and social contexts. In particular, he argues, the charges of heresy that Galileo faced for his scientific claims in the 17th century have their counterparts in science deniers’ condemnations today.’
Abbott found the ‘nonchronological zigzagging of the book... hard to follow’, but thought it allowed Livio ‘to focus on themes, such as Galileo’s polymathy’, such as his ‘lifelong study of the great Italian poets Dante Alighieri, Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto’. Although ‘the parallels he draws between Galileo’s trial and contemporary science wars feel thin, and there’s a frustrating lack of examples to demonstrate the continuity of denialism through the centuries’, Livio has nonetheless ‘added to the canon an accessible and scientific narrative, in which a profound love for Galileo shines through’.
Another reviewer who found Livio’s claim of modern parallels ‘rather strained’ was Stephen M Barr in the Washington Post. ‘Nobody today has been tried and punished for defending the ideas of evolution or global warming, or coerced into recanting them.’ But Livio’s
‘occasional straying into the didactic, not to say homiletic’ does not ‘diminish the value of the rest of his book, which tells the story of Galileo in a perceptive, illuminating and balanced way’.