The Man Who Knew Everything: The Strange Life of Athanasius Kircher

The Man Who Knew Everything: The Strange Life of Athanasius Kircher

The Man Who Knew Everything is a biography of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century German Jesuit and scientist. He was one of the modern world’s first scientific celebrities―the Einstein or Stephen Hawking of his time. In 1638, Kircher was lowered into the smoking crater of Mt. Vesuvius to observe how volcanoes work. After thirty years, he published an 800-page volume of his findings―along with theories about fossils, geography, the Earth’s core, dragons, the location of the lost city of Atlantis, and more.