Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds [antikvár]

IntroductionFontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes or Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds became an instant best-seller three hundred years ago. But the author, introducing these ideas for the first time to a broad public, courted danger when he wrote his pioneering work in 1686. Less than a century earlier, in 1600, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for, among other offenses, desacrilizing the Earth by suggesting the possibility of multiple inhabited worlds in the universe. Only fifty years before Fontenelle wrote, Galileo had lost his freedom and had been placed under permanent house arrest for writing on daring astronomical theories. So while much of Fontenelle sounds matter-of-fact to ushis talk of a boundless universe, his speculations on intelligent extraterrestrial and extragalactic life, his discussion of space travelwe have to remember that publishing his book three centuries ago was very risky business. The ideas he was bandying about were bold, controversial, even forbidden. As they had been scarcely known to the average reader before he explained and disseminated them, these astonishing ideas suddenly became the rage. Since its first appearance in French, there have been approximately one hundred editions of the Entretiens. It has been translated into English, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Thus there is a very real sense in which Fontenelle's work