“[Bettini] leads us from the dawn of scientific thought, among Arabs and Greeks and Hellenists, to the crucial century of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler and Galileo.”
——Corriere della Sera, La Lettura

How did we discover that, despite what our senses tell us, the Earth is round? How did we determine the dimensions involved and discover the distances between Earth, Sun and Moon, predict the movements of the planets with precision, and come up with a complete model of how the cosmos works? How did we arrive at the experimental method and the first fundamental laws of physics?
The road that has led modern-day physics to understanding of the principal laws that govern the heavens and the Earth has been long and winding and, above all, incredibly interesting. Popular physics in general is concerned only with what has happened since Galilei and Newton, and, admittedly, in the four centuries since the former’s discovery of the experimental method, unbelievable scientific discoveries have been made at an exponential rate. But in the two thousand years before that, by gradually developing the necessary theoretical and technical tools, humanity made steps forward that were so revolutionary and difficult, and had intuitions that were so visionary that the history of science is not complete if it fails to recount the first part of this extraordinary saga. The ‘prehistory’ of physics lasted for more than two thousand years, during which debates and subtle argumentations followed one after another, rival theories were disputed and giants of thinking, from Thales of Miletus to Newton, all had their say. Then once the scientific method was consolidated in the modern era, science progressed ever more rapidly. Alessandro Bettini explains this fantastic thousand-year history with great clarity, giving priority to the actual words and texts of its protagonists. In this essay, he opens our eyes to a special world, from the Greek and Hellenist philosophers through Arab science to the crucial century of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler and Galilei. This outstanding intellectual adventure saw history-making discoveries, but also false starts, regressions and blind alleys before arriving at Newton’s Great Synthesis, which eventually allowed man to look at the world and no longer see ghosts but – after learning a method to interrogate nature and its mysteries properly – what it effectively contains. By drawing directly on original sources, from Greek antiquity to the threshold of Modernity, and enabling us to read – firsthand, at last – the texts of authors who are rarely cited, Alessandro Bettini tells the story of the process that has brought us to what we know today as physics.

Alessandro Bettini is professor emeritus of Physics at the University of Padua and an experimental researcher in elementary particle physics. Vice-president of the Italian Physics Society, for six years director of the Grans Sasso National Laboratory and, before that, vice-president of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, he has written more than 200 scientific articles in major international journals and university textbooks. They include: Elettromagnetismo (Electromagnetism) (Zanichelli 2001), Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics (Cambridge University Press 2008) and A Course in Classical Physics (4 vv., Springer 2016-2017). He has already written articles about physics for the general public and this is his first educational book on the subject.