The Sleepwalkers

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This article concerns the nonfiction book by Arthur Koestler. For the novel trilogy by Hermann Broch, see The Sleepwalkers (Broch).

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe is a book by Arthur Koestler, and one of the main accounts of the history of cosmology and astronomy in the Western World.

The book challenges the habitual idea of a progressive science working towards a definite goal. The suggestion of the title is that the scientific discoveries and the geniuses that come to them are like a game of sleepwalking. Not that they come by pure chance, but that often the genius doesn't really know that he has discovered, as it is evident for instance in the three Laws of Kepler.

A central theme of The Sleepwalkers is the changing relationship between faith and reason. Koestler explores how these seemingly contradictory threads existed harmoniously in many of the greatest intellectuals of the West. He illustrates that while the two are estranged today, in the past the most ground-breaking thinkers were often very spiritual.