Schema Builder- Passionate Minds

Passionate Minds

Over the break, I did a lot of reading and research in the early hours of the morning when my mind was spinning too fast to sleep. I read about the Grateful Dead, Vietnam, Van Gogh, and religion among many other things. Throughout my early morning informational sessions, my friend and I would facetime and talk about whatever it was he or I had discovered. He was doing just as much, if not more, research as I was. After doing a little reading on the French Revolution, he suggested a book titled Passionate Minds written by David Bodanis. 

The book explores the lives of enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire and the rarely heard about Émilie du Châtelet. But more specifically, the love affair they had together. The book explores the relationship between the two, both passionate and intellectual. In fact, much of the passion they held for one another was through the ideas they would ponder and share. What many people don't know is that Émilie du Châtelet was a brilliant mathematician who loved to study the stars and planets in the night sky and wrote math equations to describe the gravitational pull of the sun. Although she is rarely credited for it, her extensions of Newton’s laws are what made Einstein’s equation E=mc2 possible. She also helped Volatire shape many of his opinions on current French society along with religion. 

This novel took me a long time to get through. The writing is not terribly hard, but much of the book is letters and accounts from Voltaire and Émilie’s close family and friends. It's also hard to keep many of the supporting characters straight because they are seldom mentioned but important to the storyline. The book allowed me to dive deeper into what French Society in the Enlightenment era was like for a female. She was looked down upon, even by her own mother, for wanting to know things and educate herself. Her high society friends shook their heads at her for thinking their petty gossip was stupid and shallow. Voltaire was the only one, aside from her late father, who encouraged her thinking and was amazed by the capabilities of her mind. I had just learned about this part of the world’s history in class, and it helped me understand a lot of what the people in France were feeling on a more personal level. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has some free time this quarantine season.