1280 Reviews Is it truly perfect? Well, no book, much less a multiauthor compendium, can quite be. Everyone will find some omission. A largish one is that the new “Translational neuroscience” section on clinical applications is almost wholly focused on the ophthalmology of the retina; neurological and neuropsychological issues are largely omitted both here and in the other sections , with ‘neglect’ and ‘blindsight’ absent from the index, and ageing restricted to macular degeneration. Human neuroimaging is the main subject of 4 chapters out of 112, and while it figures in a number of others, this still doesn’t seem to fully represent its impact on the visual neurosciences in the last decade. And a somewhat surprising omission (given the emphasis on single-unit studies elsewhere in the volume) is recent work unravelling representations in the primate ventral stream (for example, Pasupathy and O’Connor on shape descriptors, and Tsao on the network of multiple face areas). Assembling and organising 200-odd authors must have been a herculean effort for the editors, not to mention a triumph of good judgment and ferocious networking. Inevitably, there is some unevenness of treatment. Some chapters present a focused argument, while others are more like catalogues of topics or results where one might welcome a few more paragraphs of synthesis. However, my sampling (this reviewer cannot lie; he has not read every page) revealed no duds or potboilers, and overall there is a remarkable degree of coherence and well-planned organisation. The end product is rather like having a bumper classified collection of well-chosen articles from Trends in … or Current Opinion in …: a taster of hot topics and key controversies, and a tremendous route into the current literature. Readers who find themselves engaged in any of the topics will find a wealth of guidance for that route, and will need to follow it if they are to judge the full significance of the issues they encounter in the chapters here. We can be very grateful for that guidance: you would not have to plough through many issues of Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Vision, or Vision Research to exceed the 1600 pages here; your indigestion would be much worse, and you would have learned much less. The volume is designed and produced to the usual high standard of the MIT Press. A change from the first edition is that the colour illustrations are no longer segregated in a glossy insert, but appear like other figures close to the relevant material in the main text. The resulting quality is not quite as good, but the gain in convenience, and in the use of colour material to illustrate results and theories, is well worth it. So far only the previous edition seems to be available on MIT Press CogNet system. It is not clear whether this is a commercial decision or just a slow process: but for those lucky enough to have institutional access to CogNet, an iPad would certainly be easier than 3.5 kg of paper, for happy and rewarding browsing in bed. Book Review Oliver Braddick Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK; e-mail: oliver.braddick@psy.ox.ac.uk Galileo’s visions: Piercing the spheres of the heavens by eye and mind by M Piccolino, N J Wade; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, 336 pages, £39.99 cloth (US $65.00) ISBN 9780199554355 In 1609 an optical instrument consisting of two lenses mounted at the extremities of a long tube, which permitted seeing things far up in the sky so clearly that they appeared as if they were right in front of the observer, was delivered to the city of Venice. Although this strange new object was much admired by the Venetian socialites, essentially for the beauty of its design, nobody seemed to see much more in it, or would have guessed what was going to happen. One man saw the object’s potential, took it, and set it to work. He began observing the moon and the stars through it for long hours. The man’s name was Galileo, a professor of mathematics from Padua who was about to change the course of history and, in the process, was to become a heretic in the eyes of the Church. Through that optical instrument, the telescope, Galileo would gain knowledge that was to shatter the established vision of the cosmos and give way to a new world order, one where man was to occupy a much more peripheral place. Looking at the heavens through that telescope, with a piercing mind behind his eyes, would enable Galileo to predict how the Earth was likely to look when seen from the moon, centuries before NASA was to produce the first satellite images. It would lead him to understand some of the most fundamental interactions between light and matter, the limited ability of our senses, and the many ways in which the physical environment determines our perception of reality. Should you be tempted to think “oh no, not another book about Galileo”, you should reconsider. This new book entitled Galileo’s Visions, by Marco Piccolino and Nick Wade, starts where other books Reviews 1281 have stopped. It tells us everything about Galileo that you will not find on Wikipedia. Beginning with the tale of the delivery of the telescope to Venice, the authors take us on a journey through Galileo’s private intellectual universe, from his thought experiments about the luminance of the moon to the man’s early insights into the complex interactions between light and matter, based on his observations of nature. These preceded Newton’s (1704) conclusion that there is no colour without light, and Newton’s own colour theory, by almost a century, and the discovery of structural colour in biological tissue of animal species (eg Dresp & Langley, 2006; Osorio & Ham, 2002) by four centuries. Step by step, accompanied by witty visual artwork by Nick Wade, we are made familiar with Galileo’s early intuitions about physical and perceptual phenomena, addressed by science only centuries later. Transcripts of the man’s private writings include fictive conversations where his alter ego Salviati addresses Sagredo, a Venetian aristocrat and like-minded friend, frequently interrupted by Simplicio, a fictional character, eager defender of classic cosmology. In those days of intellectual darkness, when Simplicio and the rest of the world believed that the Earth was flat and that there was a day and a night because the sun travelled around it, Galileo nursed his own ideas about the universe and physical reality, and he produced a series of texts, which are the basis of this book. These texts deal with man’s extraordinary ability to gain insight into complex physical phenomena through systematic observation of nature. Such ability provided him with an understanding, well ahead of its time, of the ways in which our brain perceives the world. In the allegorical language of fables, Galileo recounts the voyage that leads the human mind to knowledge. Through extracts from these fables, we discover what he already knew then, about the importance of individual experience in our capacity to discriminate and produce sounds (eg Claude, 2007), for example. We learn about different, diffuse or mirror-like, reflections of the world, and that there is a difference between the visual mechanisms of seeing objects that reflect light and objects that do not (eg Jacobs, 2008). In a series of thought experiments, Galileo articulates comparisons between the brightness of the sun and that of the moon, under varying conditions. These thought experiments not only led him to infer that the Earth illuminates the dark part of the moon more than the moon illuminates the earth, but also led him to understand lightness constancy (Gilchrist, 2006) and simultaneous contrast (Chevreul, 1839), physiological optics, and the importance of being able to recognize objects under varying conditions of illumination, or reflection of light from these objects. Galileo had insight into the effects of aerial perspective (Ross, 1967) and relative object size on our perception of what appears nearer and what appears further away from us, well before Leonardo da Vinci (1651) listed them in his Trattato della Pittura as two of the most important monocular cues to visual depth. He knew a lot about the physical nature of light and the phenomenon of diffraction (Bragg & Bragg, 1915) well before ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, which the human senses cannot perceive, were discovered and measured. Also, it appears that Galileo had opinions on Copernicus’s and Kepler’s theories which may surprise more than a few. Galileo knew that the size of the moon and the stars would be overestimated when viewed through a telescope at night, and one of the problems he set out to resolve late in life was that of determining the relative position of the moon and the stars more accurately, on the basis of experiments comparing observations at night and during the day. However, this was not to be, as his failing vision finally compromised these plans. I very much enjoyed reading this book, which is all about a professor of mathematics with an aversion to formalism, and a strong attraction to nature, to the animal kingdom, to phenomena of lights and shadows, to art, and to literature. I would have enjoyed the pictures in the book even more had they been printed in colour. The lacklustre monochrome representations do not seem to do their author justice. Yet, what the image reproduction lacks in hue, the storytelling makes up for by an entertaining style, rich in details and references. You will not tire of it. Recently, scientists have discovered new particles that do not seem to obey conventional laws of physics (Bazavov et al., 2014). Phenomena such as brain-to-brain communication (Grau et al., 2014) are now being investigated in respectable research laboratories, and it seems that there are still so many limitations to our knowledge, maybe more than we realize—be it about the universe or about the capacity of our brains to perceive and communicate. If Galileo lived today, his piercing mind would definitely have to be reckoned with! Birgitta Dresp-Langley ICube, UMR 7357 CNRS, Université de Strasbourg; e-mail: birgitta.dresp@icube.unistra.fr 1282 Reviews References Bazavov, A., Ding, H. T., Hegde, P., Kaczmarek, O., Karsch, F., Laermann E., … Wagner, M. (2014). Additional strange Hadrons from QCD thermodynamics and strangeness freezeout in heavy ion collisions. Physical Review Letters, 113, 072001. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.072001 Bragg, W. H., Bragg, W. L. (1915). X-rays and crystal structure. London: G Bell, London. Chevreul, M. E. (1839). De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, et de l’assortiment des objets colorés. Paris: Pitois-Levrault). [English translation by J Spanton (1854). The laws of contrast of color. Reprinted by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, Bucks] Claude, A. (2007). Breaking the wave: Effects of attention and learning on concurrent sound perception. Hearing Research, 229, 225–236 Da Vinci, L. (1651). Trattato della pittura di Leonardo da Vinci. Scritta da Raffaelle du Fresne. Paris: Langlois. Dresp, B., Langley, K. (2006). Fine structural dependence of ultraviolet reflections in the King Penguin beak horn. The Anatomical Record A, 288, 213–222. Gilchrist, A. (2006). Seeing black and white. New York: Oxford University Press. Grau, C., Ginhoux, R., Riera, A., Nguyen, T. L., Chauvat, H., Berg M., … Ruffini, G. (2014). Conscious brain-to-brain communication in humans using non-invasive technologies. PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0105225 Jacobs, G. H. (2008). Primate color vision: A comparative perspective. Visual Neuroscience, 25, 619– 633. Newton, I. (1704). Optics (1st ed.). London: W Innys & J Innys. Osorio, D., Ham, A. D. (2002). Spectral reflectance and directional properties of structural coloration in bird plumage. Journal of Experimental Biology, 205, 2017–2027 Ross, H. E. (1967). Water, fog, and the size–distance invariance hypotheses. British Journal of Psychology, 58, 301–313.