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About the author
Michael Brooks who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a consultant at New Scientist, and writes weekly for the New Statesman. He is the author of At The Edge of Uncertainty, The Secret Anarchy of Science and the bestselling non-fiction title 13 Things That Don't Make Sense. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, THE, Philadelphia Inquirer and many magazines. He has lectured at, amongst others, NYU, the American Museum of Natural History, and the University of Cambridge.
Summary
This is a landmark in science writing. It resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century. Who is he? A gambler and self-harmer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors and popes, stubborn and unworldly, the son of a mathematician and a brothel keeper, but also unacknowledged discoverer of so much: probability theory, imaginary numbers, statistics, atomic physics, and even quantum theory. That is the argument of this charming and intoxicatingly clever book, which is truly original in its style, and in the manner of the modernists embodies in its very form its theories about the world.
The Quantum Astrologer's Handbook is a science book with the panache of a novel, for readers of Carlo Rovelli or Umberto Eco. It is a work of and about genius.
Foreword
A book of science like no other, about a scientist like no other.
