Book. The cosmologist Jean-Pierre Luminet, a specialist in black holes, would gladly plunge his pen into them if they contained ink. Poet in his spare time, author of numerous popular works, he also wrote several novels featuring famous scholars, setting down on paper the adventures of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and a few others. As he acknowledges in the foreword to his latest book, Extraordinary and unusual stories of astronomers, Jean-Pierre Luminet would have continued his momentum, with less renowned characters. But, he says from the height of his 70 springs, “time, which is definitely flying at full speed, would not allow me to carry out such works of literary Hercules”.
Here, then, instead of novels, nine short stories or rather nine portraits of astronomers from the past, between the Renaissance and the end of the 19th century.e century. It begins with Regiomontanus, born Johannes Müller von Königsberg, but who Latinized his name as was customary, since Latin was the “universal” language of the time. Jean-Pierre Luminet does not hesitate to qualify him as “most important astronomer of the XVe century “while recalling that he was also an astrologer, just as one can be both a baker and a pastry chef… Which does not prevent him, according to the author, from not supporting “roughness, vagueness, amateurism, verbiage, indemonstrable speculations”, an intransigence that will bring him many quarrels and perhaps death. Jean-Pierre Luminet reopens the file of the premature death of Regiomontanus, attributed to the plague but perhaps due to poisoning…
Money, pride, fame
The French have the best part in this book, two of the chapters of which are devoted to the distant expeditions that France of the Enlightenment launched to determine if the Earth was flattened at the poles, as Newton asserted, or if, on the contrary, it was there. rounded as Descartes maintained. In order to find out if the planet looked like a tangerine (the answer is yes) or a lemon, one team was sent to Scandinavia while the other went to South America. Jean-Pierre Luminet delights in the adventures that his heroes encounter in Lapland and Peru, while often chronicling their shenanigans, often not very glorious, because it is also a lot about money, pride, fame… and women. .
For lack of space we will not review each of the nine stories. Just know that even Victor Hugo makes a passage there, that there is also question of a book bound in human skin, of an astronomer who paid the price for the machine to shorten humans invented by his friend Guillotin. Or the hypothetical planet Vulcan. The Frenchman Urbain Le Verrier, who had acquired worldwide fame by discovering Neptune by calculation, had indeed believed to repeat the feat by announcing the existence of this planet located between Mercury and the Sun… which did not exist.
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