There seems to be an unending stream of books focused on the philosopher-scientists and how they advanced thinking. This one takes a slightly different angle, but still ends up examining the same things. The angle here is how we came to the age of the earth, how we came to understand the movement of the earth, and how we determined the distance from the earth to the sun. It includes all the usual suspects: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Newton, Kelvin, but also references to India, China, Egypt and Arabia, which is refreshing.

This angle is expressed as overcoming institutional obstacles. In the case of the age of the earth, overcoming the stories of the Christian bible. In the case of the movement of the earth, first overcoming the incorrect laws of Aristotle, then the stories of the Christian bible. The bulk of the argument is the treatment by the Catholic church, right up to Benedict XVI.

Krivine covers a tremendous amount in quite remarkable detail, but the book attempts so much, it must inevitably fail certain audiences. It has the history of science and of the scientists who made it. It has the influence of religions worldwide, and how they impeded progress (even if only in the minds of the scientists themselves). It has how different religions faced and handled different facts and theories. It has the math, the geometry and the calculations to demonstrate how numbers were arrived at. It even has how those numbers have changed over the centuries as science became more confident and more sophisticated. At any given point, some of these aspects will not appeal to a reader. Then, the whole effort gets subsumed by the very definition of “fact”. What is a fact? How is a scientific fact better or worse than say, a legal fact? How do we justify so-called facts changing over time? Can we trust “scientific fact”?

And after all this philosophical uncertainty (the specialty of philosophy after all), the book ends with summaries of the equations and formulas used to arrive at the facts. So Krivine’s The Earth is hard to categorize, and harder to read than it should be.

David Wineberg ( )