The Imperfect Telescope
JANUARY 16, 2020
The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the main character of Adam Sachs’s debut novel, The Organs of Sense, had a minor obsession with telescopes. His hero was Johannes Kepler, the mathematician who had invented the refracting astronomical telescope in 1611. “Kepler, thanks to the force of his genius, has discovered a telescope whose glasses are convex,” Leibniz announced in a letter to a friend in 1679. Kepler’s glasses were…