The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook byMichael Brooks review – maths contests and the nature of the universe

This superb book by Michael Brooks is in part a biography of the mathematician Jerome Cardano. But it delves into the most fundamental questions

What, you might ask, is a quantum astrologer? This beautifully written book is a kind of experimental scientific biography that mashes up science with what seems to be non"science, the better to explore the boundaries of what we still don't know. If quantum astrology were a thing, after all, it wouldn't be any more ridiculous than what modern physics asks us to believe.

The book's hero, the alleged quantum astrologer, is one of those Renaissance men for whom the term "Renaissance man" itself seems insufficient. Jerome (or Gerolamo) Cardano was a 16th-century doctor and mathematician from Milan. He produced horoscopes for the great and the good, but he also invented the mathematics of probability to help him win at gambling, so that he could pay his way through medical school. He invented the "cardan joint", which to this day is used in the power transmission of cars. He was, too, the first to accept the existence of imaginary numbers, which are the square roots of negative numbers. In so doing, Brooks argues, he laid the necessary foundations for modern quantum theory.