In 1679, a Jesuit scholar in Rome published a large illustrated book to answer a question that seemed simple: could the Tower of Babel really have reached the heavens? Athanasius Kircher, then seventy-seven years old, did not answer with a sermon. He answered with arithmetic. The book, called Turris Babel , calculated the size of such a tower, the number of bricks needed and the weight it would have to bear. His conclusion was that the work could never have been completed, and that the earth itself would have been thrown off balance by the load. It is a strange and fascinating example of a mind that tried to measure a myth. The Story in Genesis The tale occupies only nine verses in the Book of Genesis (11:1-9). The whole earth had one language and one speech. The people migrated to a plain in the land of Shinar and said: "Let us build a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves." God came down to see the city and the tower, and h...

In Rome, around 1650, a Jesuit priest stood before a broken obelisk and told the pope that he could read it. Nobody alive could read the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the writing on the stone looked like a puzzle of birds, eyes, snakes and reeds. The priest, Athanasius Kircher, said that those pictures were not simply words. They were sacred symbols in which the oldest wisdom of mankind had been locked, and he had the key. He was wrong about the key. But the story of how he got it wrong is one of the most revealing in the history of learning. A Jesuit of Many Talents Kircher was born in 1602 in Geisa, in the German lands, and joined the Jesuits as a youth. The Thirty Years' War drove him from place to place, and in 1633 he settled in Rome, where he taught at the Jesuit Roman College. He stayed there for the rest of his life and died in 1680. His curiosity was enormous. He wrote on magnetism, on music, on volcanoes, on China, on languages, on the sun and moon, and on the Ark of No...