I finished reading this today:

(Beautiful cover or beautiful cover?)

I’ve pretty much decided that my favorite time period/place has to be mid 16th- to mid 17th-century Europe. The intelligence that poured out of that region of the world during that time is downright ridiculous, not to mention the interactions of all the main intellectual players of the period: Newton, Leibniz, Kepler, Hooke, Pascal, Halley, Pepys, and Descartes, to name a few.

Edward Dolnick’s The Clockwork Universe is a pretty great discussion of how all these dudes—Newton, mainly—helped in the formation of the new methods of thought that developed during this time. There’s talk about the bubonic plague, there’s talk about Galileo, there’s talk about the various attempts to explain why the planets orbited the sun in ellipses rather than circles…and, of course, there’s talk about the Royal Society and how it got its start. The calculus debate’s in there, too, ’cause how could it not be?

The book ends with a rather beautiful little compendium of both facts and anecdotes about how the Principia truly impacted the scientific world, which I think was actually my favorite part  of the book (apart from the little author’s note in the end where Dolnick proclaims proudly that he’s a Leibniz fan. Rock on!).

I recommend it if you’re at all interested in that fascinating period of time.