The literary conceit here is that periodically throughout the text Brooks (himself a trained physicist) speaks directly to his subject, visiting Cardano in his cell where, now an old man, he is held by the Inquisition. In so doing, Brooks argues, he laid the necessary foundations for modern quantum theory. He was, too, the first to accept the existence of imaginary numbers, which are the square roots of negative numbers. He invented the “cardan joint”, which to this day is used in the power transmission of cars. He produced horoscopes for the great and the good, but he also invented the mathematics of probability to help him win at gambling, so that he could pay his way through medical school. Jerome (or Gerolamo) Cardano was a 16th-century doctor and mathematician from Milan. The book’s hero, the alleged quantum astrologer, is one of those Renaissance men for whom the term “Renaissance man” itself seems insufficient. ![]() ![]() ![]() If quantum astrology were a thing, after all, it wouldn’t be any more ridiculous than what modern physics asks us to believe. What, you might ask, is a quantum astrologer? This beautifully written book is a kind of experimental scientific biography that mashes up science with what seems to be non‑science, the better to explore the boundaries of what we still don’t know.
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