Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm
Michael Brooks resurrects the extraordinary story of Jerome Cardano. This 16th century Renaissance Italian was a gambler who invented the theory of probability, an astrologer to popes and emperors who taught the public how to map the heavens, a doctor consulted by kings, archbishops and senators, a mathematician who discovered the secrets of imaginary numbers – and a victim of the Inquisition whose punishment was to disappear from history.
In this talk, Brooks will tell the forgotten story of Cardano’s life, and trace the astrologer’s legacy all the way to the frontiers of modern physics, uncovering some extraordinary insights along the way.
Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a consultant at New Scientist, a magazine with over three quarters of a million readers worldwide,and writes a weekly column for the New Statesman. He is the author of At The Edge of Uncertainty, The Secret Anarchy of Science and the bestselling non-fiction title 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense. His writing has also appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, the Times Higher Education, the Philadelphia Inquirer and many other newspapers and magazines. He has lectured at various places, including New York University, The American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University.
His website is here.