In this entertaining and authoritative new biography the author examines the flair and imagination, the hard-headedness and clarity, the combativeness and penetration of the person many people call the founder of modern science - Galileo Calilei. No great scientist has excelled him in making novel ideas intelligible to nonexperts.

To follow his career as he exploited unforeseen opportunities to unseat established ways of understanding nature is to understand a crucial stage of what is now known as the scientific revolution.

Galileo was a path-breaker for the newly invented telescope, the decoder of nature's mathematical language and a quite brilliant popularizer of science. Even his reluctant excursion into theology has at last been officially and handsomely recognized in Pope John Paul's recent and widely reported 'rehabilitation' of the Inquisition's most famous victim. (This condemnation and subsequent rehabilitation is fully discussed in the last chapter.).

Galileo appears here with all his zest for living, gregariousness, impulsiveness, vulnerability, prickliness, unfairness and creativity. This book makes his lasting contributions accessible to those who are not scientists and his mistakes are not passed over. This is not a mythical story, but the biography of an innovator - one of the greatest ever known.