The World Machine is the second volume Piero Boitani devotes to the
way in which the sciences and the arts interact when it comes to
modern consideration of the stars and the cosmos (the first, also
published in English by Nova Science Publishers, is entitled
Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures). This is
not a history of astronomy or astrophysics, but the story arranged
in chronological order of how humans have reacted to fundamental
changes in astronomy by means of poetry, narrative, painting,
architecture, and music over the last five hundred years. This
time, the story is basically European (and American), as all the
relevant scientific discoveries were made in Europe, and it is the
European imaginaire that dominates world culture (non-European
images of the universe are dealt with in Looking Upwards). The
historical development of this image and of the ideas that
contribute to its formation is rather complex and diversified, but
two major turning points are clearly identifiable one lies between
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and one at the very
beginning of the twentieth century. Concerning the former, the
observation of the sky was revolutionized by the telescope.
Galileo, Kepler and Newton could thus base their new models of the
universe on much more precise experiences, and mathematics became
the new language of astronomy. The cosmos increasingly tended to be
viewed as a machine, a mechanism like a clock (hence the books
title). Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century the second scientific revolution took place. The
instruments became so refined that they began to detect
increasingly remote objects, and the phenomena found in the sky, as
well as their behavior, no longer fully responded to Newtonian
laws. New theories relativity and quantum mechanics were
elaborated, the mathematics needed for them becoming much more
difficult for the layman, and the whole structure of matter, with
the discovery of the atom, its constituent parts, and its particles
was gradually uncovered. Things reached a critical moment with
Heisenbergs and Hubbles formulation of, respectively, the
uncertainty principle and of the increasing speed at which galaxies
recede from us the further they are and finally with the conflict
between relativity and quantum theories. Some recent poets (notably
in South America) and many painters and musicians in Europe and
North America have tried to describe this new cosmos, but the same
happened after the first scientific revolution. In short, The
Machine of the World recounts an exciting adventure whose
protagonists are the likes of Tasso and Milton, Goethe and Wallace
Stevens, Canaletto and Friedrich, Verdi and Puccini, Van Gogh and
Schoenberg, Joyce and Thomas Mann.
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