Prologue: A journey to Rome -- The musician's son -- A gifted young Tuscan -- To Rome and the Jesuits -- A Surveyor of Inferno -- The spheres from the tower -- From Pisa to Padua -- Signs in the sky -- De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium -- Lecturer and designer -- A professor's commitments -- Modern physics is born -- A new star in an unchanging sky?- Drawing close to a court -- The balls fall into place -- The Roman style -- The tube with the long perspective -- A new world -- Jupiter's sons -- Johann Kepler, Imperial Mathematician -- Several signs in the sky -- Friendship and power -- A dispute about objects that float in water -- Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon!- The letter to Castelli -- "How to go to heaven, not how the heavens go" -- Foolish and absurd in philosophy, formally heretical -- The hammer of the heretics -- Deaths and omens -- Comets portend disaster -- Weighing the words of others on gold-scales -- A marvellous combination of circumstances -- War and heresy -- European power struggle and Roman nephews -- The old and the new -- "An advantageous decree" -- Two wise men - and a third -- The Inquisition's chambers -- Diplomacy in the time of the plague -- An order from the top -- "Nor further to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever" -- Convinced with reasons -- "I, Galileo Galilei" -- Eternity -- A death and two new sciences -- The meeting with infinity -- "That universe ... is not any greater than the space I occupy" -- Epilogue -- Postscript -- Appendix -- Sources -- Name Index -- References.