"This beautifully written book is a kind of experimental scientific biography that mashes up science with what seems to be non‑science, the better to explore the boundaries of what we still don’t know … a quite superb book." —The Guardian
"An enthralling biography of the polymath Jerome Cardano, which doubles as a primer on the strangeness of quantum physics ... This vivid book offers belated recompense to a gambler who lost more than he won in an eventful and turbulent life." —The Sunday Times
"The most original non-fiction book I’ve read in years." —Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature and Founding Gardeners
“A near-novelistic account that’s part quantum science, part biography, and part history, this story of 16th-century polymath Jerome Cardano delivers enjoyment on every level..." —Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
"Michael Brooks is the canniest science writer around. He writes, above all, with attitude." —The Independent
A book of science like no other, about a scientist like no other.
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 blasphemer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors and popes. This stubborn and unworldly man was the son of a lawyer and a brothel keeper, but also a gifted physician and the unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. 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.
