Between 1608 and 1610 the canopy of the night sky changed forever, ripped open by an object created almost by accident: a cylinder with lenses at both ends. Galileo's Telescope tells the story of how an ingenious optical device evolved from a toy-like curiosity into a precision scientific instrument, all in a few years. In transcending the limits of human vision, the telescope transformed humanity's view of itself and knowledge of the cosmos. Galileo plays a leading-but by no means solo-part in this riveting tale. He shares the stage with mathematicians, astronomers, and theologians from Paolo Sarpi to Johannes Kepler and Cardinal Bellarmine, sovereigns such as Rudolph II and James I, as well as craftsmen, courtiers, poets, and painters. Starting in the Netherlands, where a spectacle-maker created a spyglass with the modest magnifying power of three, the telescope spread like technological wildfire to Venice, Rome, Prague, Paris, London, and ultimately India and China. Galileo's celestial discoveries-hundreds of stars previously invisible to the naked eye, lunar mountains, and moons orbiting Jupiter-were announced to the world in his revolutionary treatise Sidereus Nuncius. Combining science, politics, religion, and the arts, Galileo's Telescope rewrites the early history of a world-shattering innovation whose visual power ultimately came to embody meanings far beyond the science of the stars.

Light symbols are the basis of the same alphabet, as well as geometry is a geometry of light: the geometrical point is a star-light point and the straight line is a light ray. Rightness and righteousness and all related concepts have this symbolical origin. The first words are ideograms, icons, images, and the word itself is conceived on the model of manifestation of light, it's isomorphic to light as a theophany. Light is not only the central archetype of the diurnal regime of imagination, but also, through contrast, of the nocturnal regime of imagination. Every literary text is all-pervaded by the semantic field of light and of all which is related to it. Every scientific theory is a theory of light or presupposes one. Semiotics and rhetoric of light are operating and are the means to operate within every literary text and every scientific practice. This book focuses on the analysis of the entanglement between science and literature within literary texts and scientific theories through the perspective of light as archetype and absolute metaphor.