Arts
Can a blind astronomer, who claims to use the longest telescope in the world, accurately predict an eclipse? Does it take a madman to truly "see" reality? What is the nature of tasty dumplings? On this episode, we speak with author Adam Ehrlich Sachs who explores these questions in his satiric novel The Organs of Sense . In the novel, a young nineteen-year-old G. W. Leibniz, after failing his dissertation, treks through the snowy mountains of Bohemia to investigate a mystery: can a blind astronomer, who claims to use the longest telescope in the world, accurately predict an eclipse? "In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who'd predicted that on noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of the day at nearly the