“This probably sounds obscure but what I mean will become perfectly clear,” the astronomer told Leibniz. He pressed an empty socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a long string of numbers.

Since this belief turned out to be true, it didn’t matter, according to the astronomer, who got credit for inventing the telescope, it was petty and absurd to go on and on about the credit he deserved but did not get, he said. Who cares! Let Galileo have credit, or Lipperhey, or Kepler, or Della Porta, or whomever else, “Seriously, who cares?” cried the astronomer. Who cares! Who cares! Who cares! Who cares! Still, it was slightly better, he supposed, for the last two-odd hours of the world to possess a smidgen more truth and a smidgen less falsity, and, in any case, the young man had asked what happened to his eyes, and how he could see the firmament without them, questions that were of course intimately connected to the question of the development of the telescope, which was of course a variant of the question of who truly invented the telescope, i.e., me, the astronomer said, these three questions are really one question, so here, he said, in Leibniz’s written account, is the fact of the matter.

TWO