Book Review: Fictional Tools in Seventeenth-Century Science, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

FICTIONAL TOOLS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE Fictions of Cosmos: Science and Literature in Seventeenth Century. Frederique Ait-Touati, translated by Susan Emanuel (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 201 1). Pp. ? + 261. $45. ISBN 978-0-226-01 122-6.It is a truism that nothing can exasperate us like things or people we love. And there is much indeed to love in a book by an observant scholar immersed in some of most bracing seventeenth-century writing about space travel, lunar and stellar prospects, and a universe in which a planetary Earth is truly conceived to move. Thus I shall begin here by admiring Frederique Ait-Touati's contributions to our understanding of literature and history of astronomy, only afterwards glancing briefly at her book's exasperating faults.Ait-Touati surveys how fictional tools employed by Johannes Kepler, John Wilkins, William Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, and Margaret Cavendish enriched and to a degree enabled science in seventeenth century. Recognizing the incertitude inherent in cosmological discourse, Ait-Touati sketches how fictional poetic . . . were adopted to accredit a discourse with a fragile epistemological and ontological status (p. 191). The poetic responses to which she refers are closely akin to thought experiments such as Einstein's famous imaginative account a century ago of the man in accelerated chest, which illustrates, as well as lending credibility to, his theory of relativity (p. 191). For her part, Ait-Touati aims to describe role played in seventeenth century by what she denominates as imaginary, theoretical, and optical voyages, principal among them lunar tale recounted by Kepler, story-teller par excellence.Kepler's posthumous Somnium (or Dream), according to Ait-Touati, functions as a hypotyposis - a vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bringing it, as it were, before eyes of hearer or reader (OED). That imagined voyage to Moon delivers a vision of moving Earth, an autopsy in that word's etymological sense of firsthand observation. Thus fiction of Dream servesto dramatize, to visualize, an experiment that cannot be performed on Earth, by imagining physical consequences of displacement of a body in space. In this sense, Dream's fable is a thought-experiment. The role of lunar fiction is then a textual test . . .: What would be consequences of sending a human body into space? What would traveler see from Moon? . . . While it can be realized only in form of a game of fiction, this is a game played according to laws of physics (p. …