Blaise Pascal

A child prodigy in 17th-century France learns all too quickly that intelligence is not enough for living. Blaise Pascal invents, argues, and transforms science while his body becomes a cage and his faith a fire. Between the Pascaline, the vacuum, probability, and the moral wars of his era, this book traces his lights and shadows with an underlying question: what happens to a brilliant mind when it can no longer trust the world, or itself?