His biography of Galileo won the Brage Award for best Norwegian non-fiction book in 2001

The Norwegian edition has sold nearly 6000 copies

Biographies as a genre are very popular

Prologue: A journey to Rome 5

The musician's son 7

A gifted young Tuscan 11

To Rome and the Jesuits 14

A Surveyor of Inferno 17

The spheres from the tower 19

From Pisa to Padua 22

Signs in the sky 24

De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium 28

Lecturer and designer 31

A professor's commitments 33

Modern physics is born 35

A new star in an unchanging sky? 38

Drawing close to a court 40

The balls fall into place 43

The Roman style 45

The tube with the long perspective 47

A new world 49

Jupiter's sons 53

Johann Kepler, Imperial Mathematician 56

Several signs in the sky 60

Friendship and power 64

A dispute about objects that float in water 68

Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon! 71

The letter to Castelli 74

"How to go to heaven, not how the heavens go" 77

Foolish and absurd in philosophy, formally heretical 80

The hammer of the heretics 83

Deaths and omens 86

Comets portend disaster 91

Weighing the words of others on gold-scales 95

A marvellous combination of circumstances 99

War and heresy 102

European power struggle and Roman nephews 105

The old and the new 107

"An advantageous decree" 111

Two wise men - and a third 113

The Inquisition's chambers 117

Diplomacy in the time of the plague 122

An order from the top 126

"Nor further to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever" 131

Convinced with reasons 135

"I, Galileo Galilei" 139

Eternity 143

A death and two new sciences 148

The meeting with infinity 152

"That universe ... is not any greater than the space I occupy" 156

Epilogue 159

Postscript 164

Appendix 166

Sources 167

Name Index 172

References 175

"I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years ...kneeling before you Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals ...I abjure, curse, detest the aforesaid errors and heresies."

Galileo Galilei in Rome, 22 June 1633, before the men of the Inquisition.

In the small village of Arcetri, on a wooded hillside just south of Florence, an old man sat writing his will. He had to make a journey to Rome and wanted to be prepared for every eventuality. If the plague did not get him on the road, the strain of travelling might finish him off; in addition he had been ill most of the autumn, with dizziness, stomach pains and a serious hernia. And even if he survived these difficulties, and the cold winter wind from the Apennines did not give him pneumonia, he had no idea what awaited him in Rome, only that his arrival was unlikely to be celebrated with a special mass.

The mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei is one of the most famous scientists of all times. The story of his life and times, of his epoch-making experiments and discoveries, of his stubbornness and pride, of his patrons in the house of Medici, of his enemies and friends in their struggle for truth - all is brought vividly to life in this book. Atle Næss has written a gripping account of one of the great figures in European history.
He was awarded the Brage Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Norway.