The Man Who Knew Everything: The Strange Life of Athanasius Kircher
Finally the queen’s carriage stopped before a long pale-pink marble building and her coachman opened the heavy gilded carriage door A man in dark priest’s robes stood by the build ing’s massive carved entrance But this was no ordinary priest This was the most famous scientist in all of Europe Athanasius Kircher Queen Christina exclaimed as she raced up the steps toward him I’ve been dying to meet you 4
The Man Who Knew Everything S tep inside the Kircherian Museum Feast your eyes upon the strangest wonders ever collected under one roof A mermaid’s bones A brick from the Tower of Babel A statue that speaks Marvel at strange fossils and exotic animals at mag netic clocks and musical machines Behold Egyptian obelisks covered in mysterious hieroglyphics a hall of mirrors and more curiosities than you could ever dream of
How did the Kircherian Museum come to hold all these bizarre and fantastical objects And who was its mysterious owner the man Queen Christina had turned down all Rome’s wealthy and powerful to meet Athanasius Kircher was more than a scientist He was a star No single description could contain him He was an inventor an author an adventurer He published books on music math travel and medi cine He built microscopes and machines He spoke dozens of languages and could break secret codes He claimed to know what lay under the earth why the sky was blue and how to tell time using sun flowers and magnets He had even descended inside an active volcano and lived to tell the tale People called him The Man Who Knew Everything Kircher was a curious man living in a time when there were many more questions about the world than there were answers And he believed that by asking the right questions he could understand all the mysteries of the universe Did he always get it right Not even close His translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics were nonsense His speaking statue was a fraud He gave stories and myths the same weight as facts Kircher was a show man as much as a scientist closer to P T Barnum than to Albert Einstein So how did he become his era’s biggest scientific celebrity and why are people still fascinated by him today 7
