Thomas de Padova was born in 1965 to German-Italian parents in Neuwied am Rhein. His studies of physics and astronomy in Bonn and Bologna opened up to him a variety of perspectives from which researchers view the world. He has made it his mission to bring these perspectives closer to a reading public, first as an editor at the "Tagesspiegel" and since 2005 as a freelance author and publicist.

In books such as "Alles wird Zahl," "Leibniz, Newton und die Erfindung der Zeit" and "Das Weltgeheimnis," he questions how knowledge and skills that pass from one country to another can, under the respective local conditions, be transformed into something unprecedented, be it an astronomical telescope, the balance wheel of a pocket watch or a symbol such as "=" for an arithmetic operation, in short: how the new comes into the world. With "Nonna," a book about his southern Italian grandmother, the story of a summer that unites all other summers, he has expanded his narrative repertoire.

In Wiepersdorf, he wants to build on this development and transport himself back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His particular focus will be on the gradual discovery of a deep time that goes back tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years and into which man entered late.