Piergiorgio Odifreddi - Dalla Terra alle Lune

Piloting the spacecraft on this journey among the stars will be Piergiorgio Odifreddi, who has enlisted as crew members Plutarch, the great ancient historian and philosopher; Kepler, one of the founders of modern astronomy; and Huygens, the greatest scientist who lived in the half-century that separated Kepler and Galileo from Newton.

During his mission, Odifreddi translates three of their short masterpieces, surprisingly related to each other, highlighting their wonderful anticipations and intriguing errors. He also takes the opportunity to explore everything from mythology to science fiction, from literature to cinema, and from the primordial ideas of ancient physics to the sophisticated photographs of modern astronomy.

Reading Plutarch's The Face of the Moon, we discover just how much the Greeks knew about mechanics and optics. This vast knowledge allowed them not only to correctly explain eclipses and tides, but also to scientifically address a series of imaginative humanistic issues regarding the Moon, from the presence of the seas to the existence of the Selenites, starting with the question: why does the Moon appear to us as a human face?

A millennium and a half later, Kepler was inspired by reading The Face of the Moon and drew inspiration from it for his Dream, which Borges considered the birth of modern science fiction. In his story, he posed another challenging question: what would the Earth look like from the Moon? And he provided the correct answer, now confirmed by astronauts, but largely ignored by the public.

Half a century later, Huygens, in turn, took inspiration from The Dream, and in The Cosmic Observer, he posed a question even more ambitious than Kepler's: how would the sky be seen from the other planets and satellites of the Solar System? In particular, from Saturn, whose rings he himself had conjectured, and from Titan, which he himself had discovered?

Reading this book, therefore, means embarking on a journey through historical time and cosmic space alongside Plutarch, Kepler, and Huygens. For centuries, they merely conversed remotely, but now Odifreddi brings them together on the same spacecraft, comparing them in a work that combines humanism and classical antiquity with science and modernity. Happy countdown, then, and happy takeoff for an extraordinary cosmic voyage with an exceptional crew.