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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: 

#1 The astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc was the conductor of the eclipse. He was a self-disciplinarian who never wore silk, drank only white wine, and ate only lightly. He was also a connector of Europe’s greatest minds.

#2 Peiresc was a scientist who wrote and dictated letters to his friends and colleagues. He published no books, but he left behind 100,000 pieces of paper in the form of dispatches, memoranda, and reading notes, which represented his life’s work.

#3 Peiresc’s experiment was to see how many people could accurately observe the moon, and he sent letters to a bunch of people all over the world. He was hoping that the mechanics of the natural world would be understood collectively over generations.

#4 Peiresc was able to calculate longitude by having many people watch the same phenomenon in the sky and mark when they saw it. He first imagined such an orchestra of observation in 1610 when he was thirty and had just finished reading Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus nuncius, in which the astronomer detailed his telescopic discoveries.

Summary of Gal Beckerman's The Quiet Before

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