The Sleepwalkers

"Arthur Koestler was a journalist with an interest in science. He really got fascinated by this subject. So this book traces the early history of astronomy because he too found it fascinating. Unfortunately, as you say, he didn’t like Copernicus, or Galileo for that matter. The only one he seems to really have liked was Kepler. So one reads his book sceptically. But it is a book that was widely read and it had a tremendous influence on people. Even though it came out in the 1950s you still meet people who will talk about that book. And for many it was the book that got them interested in astronomy. I read it years ago as well and it has stayed with me. It is hard to say. He found Copernicus dull, and I admit that his book On the Revolution makes dull reading for a person who is not capable of understanding the maths. But Copernicus is far from dull. From my own research I can tell you that he was incomparable. He did all this work for his own interest – he was not part of a university but working completely alone. He was also a medical doctor and had a job with the church that actually involved him in active warfare. So his life was rich and colourful, although admittedly his book would probably put you to sleep. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What was needed was someone to come along and make physical and mathematical sense of it all. And that person was Johannes Kepler and later Isaac Newton. Kepler was the one who had access to truly exceptional data gathered by Tycho Brahe. The two scientists made an interesting pair. They had no personality traits in common, but their work united them. They began their collaboration in the early 17th century. Tycho was Danish and Kepler was German but they worked together in Prague for the Emperor Rudolf II. Tycho died soon after their collaboration began. And Kepler won a fight to have access to the data. Tycho’s family were a bit difficult on that score but he managed to win the right to use the data and he was able to create tables that were the best anyone had ever seen on the positions of the planets. Kepler could show that the orbits were not circular, as Copernicus believed, but were elliptical. With that breakthrough he went on to achieve the greatest, up until that point, understanding of the motion of the planets. We are all wondering what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy. These mysterious entities constitute the bulk of the universe and no one knows what they are. When they do we will have another huge, inside-out turnabout."

"Koestler was a jack-of-all-trades. He not only wrote Darkness at Noon and other novels but across a whole range of nonfiction. One moment he would be writing about the history of Judaism; the next moment he’d be writing about the nature of coincidence. But he always had an interest in science generally, and The Sleepwalkers is his work on the history of science from its earliest days through to Newton. His line is: rather than scientists sitting down and working out very rationally new discoveries in whatever particular area of science they specialised in, they were often like sleepwalkers. They would get to their great intuitions or discoveries by accident, or by wandering into an area of research and then finding out something wonderful. “As Jung says, “The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.”” A lot of people have criticised his point of view. And I wouldn’t entirely endorse it. But what you get is Koestler’s first-class mind looking at Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and really writing science history as well as it’s ever been done. For instance, on Copernicus he was the first person to play the little boy looking at the emperor’s clothes. And, actually, De Revolutionibus , the great work of Copernicus, where he states that the sun doesn’t go around the earth but the other way around, is one of the most unread and unreadable books of all time. He’s very severe on Copernicus, but he’s pretty convincing. Here is a person who was so afraid of rocking the establishment that he didn’t allow his book to be published until he was on his deathbed. He was dying when a finished copy was finally put into his hands. And although he said the crucial truth – although it had already been a truth annunciated by Greek scientists many hundreds of years before – he didn’t, actually, upset the Ptolemaic system of 55 crystal spheres going around in the heavens. He was rather a retiring figure. Well, it’s difficult, because we revere him rightly, because he still said something of earth-changing, if not earth-shattering, importance. Well, it’s extremely clear. Koestler is hugely widely read. The fact that he’s got this extraordinary inquiring mind, almost unstoppable curiosity, means he’ll delve into every area in an interesting way, and being a wonderful novelist he’s got that imaginative quality to his writing, which I think the best science writing always has."