
Galileo Galilei (Pisa, February 15, 1564 – Arcetri, January 8, 1642), was a Tuscany astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improving the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first Newton's laws of motion#Newton's First Law: Law of Inertia, and supporting Nicolaus Copernicus effectively. He has been referred to as the "father of modern astronomy," as the "father of modern physics," and as "father of science." His experimental work is widely considered complementary to the writings of Francis Bacon in establishing the modern scientific method. Galileo's career coincided with that of Johannes Kepler. The work of Galileo is considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle. In addition, his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church is taken as a major early example of the conflict of authority and freedom of thought, particularly with science, in Western society. ==Early career== Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy, as the son of Vincenzo Galilei, a mathematician and musician. He attended the University of Pisa, but was forced to "drop out" for financial reasons. However, he was offered a position on its faculty in 1589 and taught mathematics. Soon after, he moved to the University of Padua, and served on its faculty teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610. During this time he explored science and made many landmark discoveries. ==Experimental science== In the pantheon of the scientific revolution, Galileo takes a high position because of his pioneering use of quantitative experiments with results analyzed mathematically. There was no tradition of such methods in European thought at that time; the great experimentalist who immediately preceded Galileo, William Gilbert, did not use a quantitative approach. However, Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, had performed experiments in which he discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics, between the tension and the pitch of a stretched string. Galileo also contributed to the rejection of blind allegiance to authority (like the Church) or other thinkers (such as Aristotle) in matters of science and to the separation of science from philosophy or religion. These are the primary justifications for his description as "father of science." In the 20th century some authorities challenged the reality of Galileo's experiments, in particular the distinguished French History of science and technology Alexandre Koyré. The experiments reported in ''Two New Sciences'' to determine the law of acceleration of falling bodies, for instance, required accurate measurements of time, which appeared to be impossible with the technology of the 1600s. According to Koyré, the law was arrived at deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments. Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling bodies (actually rolling balls) were replicated using the methods described by Galileo (Settle, 1961), and the precision of the results was consistent with Galileo's report. Later research into Galileo's unpublished working papers from as early as 1604 clearly showed the reality of the experiments and even indicated the particular results that led to the time-squared law (Drake, 1973). ==Astronomy== Although the popular idea of Galileo inventing the telescope is inaccurate, he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe the sky. Based on sketchy descriptions of telescopes invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made one with about 8x magnification, and then made improved models up to about 20x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venice lawmakers. His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled ''Sidereus Nuncius'' (''Sidereal Messenger''). [[image:galileo.script.arp.600pix.jpg|thumb|200px|right|It was on this page that Galileo first noted an observation of the natural satellite of Jupiter (planet). Galileo published a full description in ''Sidereus Nuncius'' in March 1610.]] On January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered three of Jupiter (planet)'s four largest natural satellite (moons): Io (moon), Europa (moon), and Callisto (moon). Ganymede (moon) he discovered four nights later. He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would occasionally disappear; something he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled Galileo's naming of these objects, changing his ''Medicean stars'' to ''Galilean satellites''. The demonstration that a planet had smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth. Galileo noted that Venus (planet) exhibited a full set of Lunar phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. By contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model. Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that China astronomers had done so before. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for either the geocentric system or that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots led to a long and bitter feud with Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there can be little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes Fabricius. He was the first to report lunar mountains and impact craters, whose existence he deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon's surface. He even estimated the mountains' heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion that the Moon was "rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself", and not a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed. Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars, packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He also located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye. Galileo observed the planet Neptune (planet) in 1611, but took no particular notice of it; it appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars. == Physics == Galileo's theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along with the largely independent work of Kepler and René Descartes, was a precursor of the Classical mechanics developed by Isaac Newton. He was a pioneer, at least in the European tradition, in performing rigorous experiments and insisting on a mathematics description of the laws of nature. One of the most famous stories about Galileo is that he dropped balls of different Mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their velocity of descent was independent of their mass (excluding the limited effect of air resistance). This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. Though the story of the tower first appeared in a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, it is not now generally accepted as true. However, Galileo did perform experiments involving rolling balls down inclined planes, which proved the same thing: falling or rolling objects (rolling is a slower version of falling) are acceleration independently of their mass. He determined the correct mathematical law for acceleration: the total distance covered, starting from rest, is proportional to the square of the time (This law is regarded as a predecessor to the many later scientific laws expressed in mathematical form.). He also concluded that objects ''retain their velocity'' unless a force —often friction— acts upon them, refuting the accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects "naturally" slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them. This principle was incorporated into Newton's laws of motion (1st law). Galileo also noted that a pendulum's swings always take the same amount of time, independently of the amplitude. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. It is good enough to regulate a clock, however, as Galileo may have been the first to realize. (See #Technology below) In the early 1600s, Galileo and an assistant tried to measure the speed of light. They stood on different hilltops, each holding a shuttered lantern. Galileo would open his shutter, and, as soon as his assistant saw the flash, he would open his shutter. At a distance of less than a mile, Galileo could detect no delay in the round-trip time greater than when he and the assistant were only a few yards apart. While he could reach no conclusion on whether light propagated instantaneously, he recognized that the distance between the hilltops was perhaps too small for a good measurement. Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with being one of the first to understand sound frequency. After scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of sound to the spacing of the chisel's skips (frequency). In his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo presented a physical theory to account for tides, based on the motion of the Earth. If correct, this would have been a strong argument for the reality of the Earth's motion. (The original title for the book, in fact, described it as a dialogue on the tides; the reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.) His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure. Galileo also put forward the basic principle of relativity. It typically states that nobody is able to determine their speed without the use of an external point of reference. This later provided the basic framework for Einstein's theory of relativity. ==Mathematics== While Galileo's application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analyses and proofs relied heavily on the Eudoxus of Cnidus theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate translations by Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo's life it was being superseded by the algebraic methods of René Descartes, which a modern finds incomparably easier to follow. Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo's paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares. Such seeming contradictions were brought under control 250 years later in the work of Georg Cantor. == Technology == Galileo made a few contributions to what we now call technology as distinct from pure physics, and suggested others. This is not the same distinction as made by Aristotle, who would have considered all Galileo's physics as ''techne'' or useful knowledge, as opposed to ''episteme'', or philosophical investigation into the causes of things. In 1595–1598, Galileo devised and improved a "Geometric and Military Compass" suitable for use by artillery and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials. As a geometric instrument, it enabled the construction of any regular polygon, computation of the area of any polygon or circular sector, and a variety of other calculations. About 1606–1607 (or possibly Timeline of temperature and pressure measurement technology), Galileo made a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube. In 1609, Galileo was among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons. In 1610, he used a telescope as a compound microscope, and he made improved microscopes in 1623 and after. This appears to be the Timeline of microscope technology clearly documented use of the compound microscope. In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter's satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for land surveys; for navigation, the first practical method was the chronometer of John Harrison. In his last year, when totally blindness, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s. He created sketches of various inventions, such as a candle and mirror combination to reflect light throughout a building, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that doubled as an eating utensil, and what appears to be a ballpoint pen. ==Church controversy== Galileo was a practicing Catholicism, yet his writings on Copernican heliocentric model disturbed some in the Catholic Church who believed in a geocentric model of the solar system. They argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible, at least as interpreted by the church fathers, and the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato (especially among the Dominican order, facilitators of the Inquisition). The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time for several reasons. By the time of the controversy, the Catholic Church had largely abandoned the Ptolemaic_system for the Tychonian_system in which the Earth was at the center of the Universe, the Sun revolved around the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun. This model is geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model and had the extra advantage that it predicted no parallax of the stars, an effect that was impossible to detect with the instruments of the time. In the view of Tycho and many others, this model explained the observable data of the time better than the geocentric model did. (That inference is valid, however, only on the assumption that no very small effect had been missed: that the instruments of the time were absolutely perfect, or that the Universe ''could'' not be much larger than was generally believed at the time. As to the latter, belief in the large, possibly infinite, size of the Universe was part of the heretical beliefs for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in 1600.) An understanding of the controversies, if it is even possible, requires attention not only to the politics of religious organizations but to those of academic philosophy. Before Galileo had trouble with the Jesuits and before the Dominican Order friar Tommasso Caccini denounced him from the pulpit, his employer heard him accused of contradicting Scripture by a professor of philosophy, Cosimo Boscaglia, who was neither a theologian nor a priest. The first to defend Galileo was a Benedictine abbot, Benedetto Castelli, who was also a professor of mathematics and a former student of Galileo's. It was this exchange that led Galileo to write the ''Letter to Grand Duchess Christina''. (Castelli remained Galileo's friend, visiting him at Arcetri near the end of Galileo's life, after months of effort to get permission from the Inquisition to do so.) However, real power lay with the Church, and Galileo's arguments were most fiercely fought on the religion level. The late 19th century and early twentieth century historian Andrew Dickson White wrote from an anti-clerical perspective: :The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" and this wretched pun upon the great astronomer's name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that "geometry is of the devil," and that "mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresy." The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion. :Father Lorini proved that Galileo's doctrine was not only heretical but "atheism," and besought the Inquisition to intervene. The Bishop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural; and Pope Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astronomer. :But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, one of the greatest theologians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin's stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth. Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that "his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation." Father Lecazre declared "it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation." Others declared, "It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?" Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. (White, 1898; [http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/White/astronomy/war.html online text]) In 1616, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to hold or defend the hypothesis asserted in Copernicus's ''On the Revolutions'', though it has been debated whether he was admonished not to "teach in any way" the heliocentric theory. When Galileo was tried in 1633, the Inquisition was proceeding on the premise that he had been ordered not to teach it at all, based on a paper in the records from 1616; but Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine that showed only the "hold or defend" order. The latter is in Bellarmine's own hand and of unquestioned authenticity; the former is an unsigned copy, violating the Inquisition's own rule that the record of such an admonition had to be signed by all parties and notarized. Leaving aside technical rules of evidence, what can one conclude as to the real events? There are two schools of thought. According to Stillman Drake, the order not to teach was delivered unofficially and improperly; Bellarmine would not allow a formal record to be made, and assured Galileo in writing that the only order in effect was not to "defend or hold". According to Giorgio di Santillana, however, the unsigned minute was simply a fabrication by the Inquisition. In 1623 Pope Gregory XV died, and Galileo's close friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. The new Pope gave Galileo vague permission to ignore the ban and write a book about his opinions, so long as he did not openly support his theory. Galileo consented, and set to work writing his masterpiece, ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'' (often shortened to ''Dialogues''). It involved an argument between two intellectuals, one geocentric, the other heliocentric, and a layman, neutral but interested. Although it presented the Church's point of view, the geocentrist was depicted foolishly, while the heliocentrist often dominated the argument and convinced the neutral member in the end. The ''Dialogues'' were published in 1632 with the approval of Catholic censors. It was applauded by intellectuals but nevertheless aroused the Church's ire. Despite his continued insistence that his work in the area was purely theoretical, despite his strict following of the church protocol for publication of works (which required prior examination by church censors and subsequent permission), and despite his close friendship with the Pope (who presided throughout the ordeal), Galileo was summoned to trial before the Roman Inquisition in 1633. The Inquisition had rejected earlier pleas by Galileo to postpone or relocate the trial because of his ill health. At a meeting presided by Pope Urban VIII, the Inquisition decided to notify Galileo that he either had to come to Rome or that he would be arrested and brought there in chains. Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition on February 13, 1633. After two weeks in quarantine, Galileo was detained at the comfortable residence of the Tuscan Ambassador (diplomacy), as a favor to the influential Grand Duke Ferdinand II de' Medici. When the ambassador reported Galileo's arrival and asked how long the proceedings would be, the Pope replied that the Holy Office proceeded slowly, and was still in the process of preparing for the formal proceedings. In the event, having responded to the urgent demands of the Inquisition that he must report to Rome immediately, Galileo was left to wait for two months before proceedings would begin. On April 12, 1633, Galileo was brought to trial, and the formal interrogation by the Inquisition began. During this interrogation Galileo stated that he did not defend the Copernican theory, and cited a letter of Cardinal Bellarmine from 1615 to support this contention. The Inquisition questioned him on whether he had been ordered in 1616 not to teach Copernican ideas in any way (see above); he denied remembering any such order, and produced a letter from Bellarmine saying only that he was not to hold or defend those doctrines. He was then detained for eighteen days in a room in the offices of the Inquisition (not in a dungeon cell). During this time the Commissary General of the Inquisition, Vincenzo (later Cardinal) Maculano, visited him for what amounted to plea bargaining, persuading Galileo to confess to having gone too far in writing the book. In a second hearing on April 30, Galileo confessed to having erred in the writing of the book, through vain ambition, ignorance, and inadvertence. He was then allowed to return to the home of the Tuscan ambassador. On May 10, he submitted his written defense, in which he defended himself against the charge of disobeying the Church's order, confessed to having erred through pride in writing the book, and asked for mercy in light of his age and ill health. A month later (June 21), by order of the Pope, he was given an examination of intention, a formal process that involved showing the accused the instruments of torture. At this proceeding, he said, "I am here to obey, and have not held this [Copernican] opinion after the determination made, as I said." On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition held the final hearing on Galileo, who was then 69 years old and pleaded for mercy, pointing to his "regrettable state of physical unwellness". Threatening him with torture, imprisonment, and death on the stake, the show trial forced Galileo to "abjure, curse and detest" his work and to promise to denounce others who held his prior viewpoint. Galileo did everything the church requested him to do, following (insofar as there is any evidence) the plea bargain of two months earlier. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Although ten Cardinal Inquisitors had heard the case, the sentence carried out on June 22 bears the signature of only seven; one of the three missing was Cardinal Barberini, the Pope's nephew. It is generally held that this indicates a refusal to endorse the sentence. The seven who signed, however, were those who were present at that day's proceedings; Cardinals Barberini and Borgia in particular, were attending an audience with the Pope on that day. Analysis of the Inquisition's records has shown that the presence of only seven of ten Cardinals was not exceptional; hence the inference that Barberini was protesting the decision may be doubted. That the threat of torture and death Galileo was facing was a real one had been proven by the church in the earlier trial against Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for holding a naturalistic view of the Universe. The tale that Galileo, rising from his knees after recanting, said "''E pur si muove!''" #fn_1 (But it does move!) cannot be accepted as true: the penalty for going back on a confession before the Inquisition was to be burned at the stake (famously, in the case of Jacques de Molay), and such a defiance would have been a ticket to follow Bruno to the stake. But the widespread belief that the whole incident is an 18th century invention is also false. (Drake, 1978, pp. 356–357). A Spanish painting, dated 1643 or possibly 1645, shows Galileo writing the phrase on the wall of a dungeon cell. Here we have a second version of the story, which also cannot be true, because Galileo was never imprisoned in a dungeon; but the painting shows that some story of "Eppur si muove"#fn_1 was circulating in Galileo's time. In the months immediately after his condemnation, Galileo resided with Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini of Siena, a learned man and a sympathetic host; the fact that Piccolomini's brother was a military attaché in Madrid, where the painting was made some years later, suggests that Galileo may have made the remark to the Archbishop, who then wrote to his family concerning the event, which later became garbled in re-telling. Galileo was sentenced to prison, but because of his advanced age (and/or Church politics) the sentence was commuted to house arrest at his villas in Arcetri and Florence #fn_2. Because of a painful hernia, he requested permission to consult physicians in Florence, which was denied by Rome, which warned that further such requests would lead to imprisonment. Under arrest, he was forced to recite penitentiary psalms regularly, and he was forced to reject house guests, but he was allowed to continue his less controversial research and the social-contact punishment was not enforced very well. Publication was another matter. His ''Dialogue'' had been put on the ''Index Librorum Prohibitorum'', the official black list of banned books, where it stayed until 1822 (Hellman, 1998). Though the sentence announced against Galileo mentioned no other works, Galileo found out two years later that publication of anything he might ever write had been quietly banned. The ban was effective in France, Poland, and Germany states, but not in the Netherlands. Placed under house-arrest, Galileo would, in 1638, be allowed to move to his home near Florence. Though by then totally blind, he continued to teach and write. He died at his villa in Arcetri, just north of Florence, in 1642. According to Andrew Dickson White, in [http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitewtc.html ''A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom'' (III.iii)], 1896, Galileo's experiences demonstrate a classic case of a scholar forced to recant a scientific insight because it offended powerful, conservative forces in society: for the church at the time, it was not the scientific method that should be used to find truth—especially in certain areas— but the doctrine as interpreted and defined by church scholars, and White documented how this doctrine was defended by the Church with torture, murder, deprivation of freedom, and censorship. In a less polemical frame, this has remained the mainstream view among the history of science. The viewpoints of White and similar-minded colleagues were never accepted by the Catholic community, partially because White's final analysis depicted Christianity as a destructive force. A fierce expression of this critical attitude can also be seen in Bertolt Brecht's play about Galileo, a source for popular ideas about the scientist. Moreover, deeper examination of the primary sources for Galileo and his trial shows that claims of deprivation were likely exaggerated. Dava Sobel's biography ''Galileo's Daughter'' offers a different set of insights into Galileo and his world, in large part through the private correspondence of Maria Celeste, the daughter of the title, and her father. In 1992, 359 years after the Galileo trial, Pope John Paul II issued an apology, lifting the edict of Inquisition against Galileo: "Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions." After the release of this report, the Pope said further that "... Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard [the relation of scientific and Biblical truths] than the theologians who opposed him." ==Galileo's family== Although a devout Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock. All were the children of Galileo and Marina Gamba. Because of their illegitimate birth, both girls were sent to the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri at exceptionally young ages. * Virginia (b. 1600) who took the name Maria Celeste upon entering a convent. Galileo's eldest child, the most beloved, and inherited her father's sharp mind. She is buried with Galileo at the Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze. * Livia (b. 1601) took the name Suor Arcangela. Was sickly for most of her life at the convent. * Vincenzio (b. 1606) was later legitimized and married Sestilia Bocchineri. ==Galileo's writings== * ''Two New Sciences'' 1638 Lowys Elsevier (Louis Elsevier) Leiden (in Italian, ''Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno á due nuoue scienze'' Leida, Appresso gli Elsevirii 1638) * ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'' 1632 (in Italian, ''Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo'') * ''Sidereus Nuncius'' 1610 Venice (in Latin, ''Sidereus Nuncius'') * ''Letter to Grand Duchess Christina'' ==Writings on Galileo== * ''Galileo Galilei (opera)'', an opera by Philip Glass * ''Galileo (play)'' a play by Bertolt Brecht ==References== * Drake, Stillman (1957). ''Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo''. New York: Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-09239-3 * Drake, Stillman (1973). "Galileo's Discovery of the Law of Free Fall". ''Scientific American'' v. 228, #5, pp. 84-92. * Drake, Stillman (1978). ''Galileo At Work''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-16226-5 * Fantoli, Annibale (2003). ''Galileo—For Copernicanism and the Church'', third English edition. Vatican Observatory Publications. ISBN 88-209-7427-4 * Hellman, Hal (1988). ''Great Feuds in Science. Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever''. New York: Wiley. * Lessl, Thomas, "[http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0138.html The Galileo Legend]". ''New Oxford Review'', 27-33 (June 2000). * Newall, Paul (2004). [http://www.galilean-library.org/hps.html "The Galileo Affair."] * Settle, Thomas B. (1961). "An Experiment in the History of Science". ''Science'', 133:19-23. * Sobel, Dava. (1999). ''Galileo's Daughter''. ISBN: 0-140-28055-3 * White, Andrew Dickson (1898). ''[http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/White/ A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom]''. New York 1898. ==Named after Galileo== * The Galileo probe to Jupiter (planet) * The Galilean moons of Jupiter (planet) * Galileo Regio on Ganymede (moon) * Galilaei (Lunar crater) on the Moon * Galilaei (crater) on Mars (planet) * Asteroid 697 Galilea (named on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the discovery of the Galilean moons) * Galileo (unit) * Galileo positioning system ==See also== *Galilean transformation *Galilean invariance *Lorentz transformation equations *Medici *Renaissance *Vincenzo Galilei *World Almanac's Ten Most Influential People of the Second Millennium ==Notes== *#fn_1_back "and yet it moves", or, "but it moves" *#fn_2_back [http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/galileo.html Galileo, Lucid Cafe Feb '96]" ==Trivia== Galileo was featured as a Jeopardy! clue on June 22, 2005 as ''The first name of this man born February 15, 1564 was derived from his parents' surname, a common Tuscan habit at that time'' ==External links== * [http://www.galilean-library.org/hps.html The Galileo Affair] by Paul Newall. * [http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/andrew_white/Chapter3.html The Warfare of Science With Theology] * [http://galileo.rice.edu/ The Galileo Project] at Rice University * [http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Galileo_Prototype/MAIN.HTM Electronic representation of Galilei's notes on motion (MS. 72)] * [http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0401/reviews/barr.html From Myth to History and Back] - Reviews of two books on Galileo * [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/galileo/ PBS Nova Online: ''Galileo's Battle for the Heavens''] * [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/galileo/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry] Italian astronomers Italian physicists Natives of Pisa Heretics 1564 births 1642 deaths bn:গ্যালিলিও গ্যালিলি la:Galilaeus Galilaei lv:Galileo Galilejs nds:Galileo Galilei scn:Galileu Galilei simple:Galileo Galilei
---- Older talk archived at: * /Archive 1 * /Archive 2 ---- == Miscellaneous new topics == (Have to have some kind of heading to get the text in a readonable place.) Removed the lead paragraph from Astronomy, as follows: :In 1600, astronomers were engaged in a great debate between the Copernican system (the planets revolved around the Sun) and the geocentric system (the planets and Sun revolved around Earth). In 1604, Galileo announced his support for the Copernican school of thought, but he lacked the means to reinforce the opinion. This, along with another passage, expresses the point of view that Galileo's work in astronomy was, at least in large part, inspired by a project to prove Copernican ideas. There is no evidence of this in his writings or other documents. The other POV is that before 1610 he didn't devote a great deal of attention to the controversy (which was, in fact, not at all hot in 1600 - 1609), but took a strong interest when the new evidence started showing up. Perhaps a section on his philosophical opinions and the history of his thoughts would be a good idea. But to "Teach the Controversy" in a lead paragraph to a section on what he actually did wouldn't work. --User:Dandrake 01:21, May 28, 2005 (UTC) It's like eating popcorn, isn't it? Also took the same POV idea out of the article lead: :He believed in Copernicus' theories leading him to search for evidence that the Sun was in the center of the solar system and not the Earth. --User:Dandrake 01:27, May 28, 2005 (UTC) Darn! I ended up doing a sizable vandalism repair while not logged in. One gets rusty. Anyway, the various repairs during the orgy of vandalism around last Dec. 12 left a couple of gaps, like the Physics heading and the entire Mathematics section, and some of the structure of the scientific part of the article. At least, I haven't found anything in the Talk page or the submission notes of the time to indicate that there was any non-malicious intent behind the changes. --User:Dandrake 03:03, May 28, 2005 (UTC) Any grounds for the claim (see change by 169.233.76.32) that Galileo ''might'' have managed to defy the Inquisition at the scene of his condemnation without any consequences? If "some believe" he might not have got away with it, where is someone who thinks he might have? User:Dandrake 06:17, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC) == Galileo as astrologer == This is yet another sad indicator why wikipedia is a doomed project. Galileo wrote treatises on astrology, he made astrological charts, he taught astrology to medical students, yet there is a "debate" about whether he was actually an astrologer and whether this should be mentioned in the opening paragraph. Good luck to all of you, and to anyone ever taking this project seriously. This is just another example of the intellectual bankruptcy of "NPOV policy" and how what really gets put on the page is just the collective wisdom or prejudice of the mob majority. :You won't get very far by making personal attacks and referring to people as "morons" in your edit summaries. ::A moment of frustration. There are people who go beyond the position you advocate below...saying that Galileo had "no use" for astrology or that he had nothing to do with it. This is patently false, and anyone who thinks so is a moron, and I have no problem saying so. :Most of the references to Galileo and astrology come from astrologers themselves, perhaps wishing to appropriate a famous name for themselves. But even if true these would not be significant enough to describe Galileo as an astrologer. ::That's not the point. The point is -- a bricklayer is someone who lays bricks, a teacher is someone who has students and delivers lectures, a farmer is someone who sells crops, a painter is someone who splashes oil on a canvas, etc., etc. The point is that ''if Galileo's astrological activities are insufficient to even warrant describing him as an "astrologer", then hardly anyone from that time period qualifies!'' You may think he was a reluctant astrologer, or an astrologer who eventually developed ideas that led to the downfall of astrology as we know it, but it's just intellectually ''dishonest'' to not even acknowledge that it's accurate to say he was a working astrologer, or that astrology was one of his activities (and not just "to put food on the table"...that doesn't explain drawing horoscopes for family). He was very active in doing things that were known as defining what an astrologer was at that time -- so it's just dishonest not to acknowledge this. Look, I don't believe in astrology, and I believe Galileo had lots of expressed doubts about it, but this hardly justifies stripping any and all mention of astrology from this article. I don't think this is a case of astrologers "appropriating" a famous name for themselves, as much as scientists "disappropriating" a label that they would rather not see connected in any way to one of their founding icons. :Galileo did not make any notable contributions to astrology, that is, he was not notable ''as an astrologer''. His claim to fame comes entirely from his scientific work. He didn't publish books or articles or writings of any kind on astrology, or make "discoveries" in the field, or found any schools of thought, or influence or teach any astrological disciples, or make his mark in any way in that field. :Yes, to a certain extent the modern clear dividing line between astronomy and astrology was much less clear in those days, and Kepler was certainly known to dabble in the "music of the spheres" and similar stuff. Galileo may have been expected by his patrons to provide horoscopes for them. So what? The fact that astrology and astronomy were not always sharply distinguished in early times is already mentioned in detail at Astrology#Relationship to astronomy and science; it's hardly necessary to repeat this fact in every single article about every single astronomer of a certain era. In the Kepler article it probably warrants a mention. In Galileo, it probably doesn't. -- User:Curps 03:43, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::The problem goes beyond mentioning the word "astrology" or acknowledging that astrology/astronomy were bound up together historically. The problem is that the article gives almost no mention of astrology at all! And when it does, it's always in the POV of the 20th-century scientist, not really a historian trying to puzzle together historically people's motivations and the turn of events of things. I understand that scientists want to present their diluted version of history, but science is not history, and to get an accurate historical picture of things, you can't look at everything through 20th-century glasses, which is what this article does. If you search books on amazon.com you will find a book or two that say Gallileo's work helped discredit astrology. "Astrology: A History" by Peter Whitfield, for one. I'm not interested in astrology so I recuse myself beyond this note. User:Jok2000 13:23, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC) ---- There's no mention at all in this article of Galileo's children. In fact, aside from one line about his father, Galileo's personal life is unmentioned in this article. ?????--User:Firsfron 01:52, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) :Well, for what it's worth (all from Dava Sobel's ''Galileo's Daughter''): :Galileo had three illegitimate children, all by Marina Gamba (d. February 1619) (she did not live with Galileo): :*Virginia, b 13 August 1600 d. 2 April 1634. She became a nun at San Matteo d'Arcetri, taking vows, and the name Suor Maria Celeste, on 28 October 1616. :*Livia, b. 18 August 1601, d. 14 June 1659, who became a nun at San Matteo d'Arcetri, taking vows and the name of Suor Arcangel on 28 October 1617 :*Vincenzio, b. 21 August 1606, d. 16 May 1629, legitimized 25 June 1619, married 29 January 1629, Sestilia di Carlo Boccherini. He had three children, Galileo, Carlo, and Cosimo :Galileo's parents were Vincenzio (1520-1591) and Giulia di Cosimo Ammannati (1538-1620); his siblings included Benedetto, Virginia, Anna, Michelangelo, Livia, and, perhaps, Lena.
:- User:Nunh-huh 01:40, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC) The date you list for Vincenzio's (Galileo's son) death cannot be right. He was married at age 23, and had 3 children, yet died just four months after his wedding? No way. Also, "Suor Archangel" isn't right. The rest of this could go on the page, if a free source can be found. --User:Firsfron 03:16, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC) ---- NB: The headings here, added after the fact, are not very accurate, but they at least allow some way of jumping down through the text. User:Dandrake 02:34, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC) ==Old telescopes== I have some facts about Galileo and the telescope that people might be interested in. The first telescopes were very unclear and had very narrow fields of vision. Most people could not see anything of any significance when they first looked down the telescope - Galileo would even offer lessons to show people how to find stars with a telescope, and then interpret what they saw. Hence, it was very easy (even legitimate) for Galileo's opponents (I'm talking individuals here, not institutions) to dispute the truth of his claims - they just said that the telescope was unreliable, what people saw wasn't actually the heavens but something in the telescope itself, or even that the telescope was a magical object. As with most 'scientific' discoveries, acceptance was due to a consensus, rather than 'proof'. A good article may be van Helden, A. "Telescopes and authority from Galileo to Cassini", in Osiris 9 (Instruments), pp 9-29 for those who wish to know more. It may also give an interesting aspect to the Church/Galileo dispute raging on above - so far, all the arguments have been interesting but, on the whole, far more vitriolic (dare I say childish?) than I expect from academics! Any chance of keeping the whole thing more relevant and less personal? User:131.111.243.37 : It's true that the early telescopes were very poor. One of the reasons that Galileo was the first to observe and publish anything significant was that his telescopes were better; Kepler at the Imperial court couldn't at first get an instrument good enough to check Galileo's claims. People who had inferior instruments were reasonable enough in being skeptical for a while, but there may be limits to reasonable skepticism there. Refusing to look (as actually happened) would be an example of exceeding the limits. : Is the belief that it might be a magical object to be considered legitimate? In the context of the magical thinking of the time, perhaps so; but if one is talking about contributions to science, I don't think so. And the suspicion that the effects were illusory invites the same sort of objection: if you want to know if the instrument shows reality, you can check it against earthly reality for starters. Failure to do so is the sort of thing that Galileo is credited with struggling against. : The statement that what happened was consensus rather than 'proof' almost begins to verge on the sort of thing you'd find in a postmodernist journal along with Sokal's article on hegemonic physics. Is the current acceptance of telescopic observations, including Galileo's, based on consensus rather than proof? It ''is'' a consensus: people who make the observations get the same results, and if any claim not to, they are properly dismissed as unreliable. But having said that, what has one said that everyone didn't already know about science? At what point would you say that the agreement on Galileo's results became proof rather than consensus? Am I asking too many rhetorical questions? : Having got a little insulting there, I'll say that I've skimmed through the now-archived discussions, and I agree that much is unscholarly and unhelpful. If either side is worse than the other, I didn't read carefully enough to notice. But Galileo remains a subject of major controversy and strong feelings. How, really, does one achieve NPOV here? (One can, though, get the available facts as right as possible, using verifiable modern scholarship (which is indeed a bit of a dig at White.))
: User:Dandrake For more on these topics look at: Albert van Helden "The telescope in the seventeenth century", ''ISIS'' 65, 1974: 39-58; "The invention of the telescope", ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'', 67,4, 1977: 1-27. Yaakov Zik "Galileo and the telescope", ''Nuncius'' 2,1999: 31-67; "Science and instruments: The telescope as a scientific instrument at the beginning of the seventeenth century", ''Perspectives on Science'', 9,3, 2001: 259-284. Albert Van Helden and Yaakov Zik, “Between discovery and disclosure: Galileo and the telescope”, in, a cura di Beretta M., Gallluzzi P., Triarico C., ''Studies on Scientific Instruments and Collections in Honour of Mara Miniati'', Bibilioteca di Nuncius Vol. 49, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2003: 173-190. ==Better than Ptolemaic?== "When Galileo was defending the copernican model, it was not scientifically superior to the Ptolemaic system." That's true but Galileo was the first to observe the satellites of Jupiter (a mini-solar system). IMO this led him to the conviction that small things should turn around around big things even if the real scientific basis requires Newton theory of gravity. User:Ericd 20:37 May 14, 2003 (UTC) ---- I've changed the statement that Galileo based his argument about the Moon's imperfect sphericity on "the occultation of stars", because most of the sources I've just looked at (admitted just some random webpages) suggest that it was his observations of shadows cast by lunar mountains that led him to this conclusion. If anyone knows that this is wrong, feel free to reword. -- User:Oliver Pereira 10:32 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) : No, you're verifiably right. Galileo described his methods in some detail in The Starry Messenger, including his calculation of the height of lunar mountains. This source, which may be considered more reliable than random websites, is available in translation: Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. ed. & tr. Stillman Drake, Doubleday Anchor, 1957, still in print. (Full disclosure: The coincidence of surnames is not coincidental. But the royalties will not put my kids through school.)
: User:Dandrake 02:35 10 Jul 2003 (UTC) ---- == GNU FDL infringement! == Argh! I've just found [http://www.malaspina.com/site/person_539.asp this biography of Galileo] at the "Malaspina Great Books" website, and it's suspiciously similar to our article. In fact, they acknowledge on the page that their article is "Adapted from Wikipedia". However, they seem to be claiming copyright of the article ("This database is maintained by Malaspina Great Books ©1995-2003"), and I can find no mention of their releasing it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Clearly they are infringing the terms of the licence. What should we do about this? Hmm... Investigating further, I see from Talk:Ernest Hemingway and Talk:Woody Guthrie that this has come up before - as early as last year, in fact. The Malaspina site has "adapted" [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22adapted+from+wikipedia%22+site%3Amalaspina.com hundreds] of our articles, with acknowledgment, but without releasing their material under the GNU FDL. It seems that nothing has been done about it, though. Not that I can talk: I could win a world championship in apathy, if there was one... :) But I think something should be done... -- User:Oliver Pereira 10:32 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :In attempt to save the evidence, I am going to go through and copy the text of all of the articles containing the string "adapted from wikipedia." In case they decide to remove them. Could someone else help me maybe, by starting at the end of [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22adapted+from+wikipedia%22+site%3Amalaspina.com the search results]? The page will be found at meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement. Just create a sub-space (like meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement/article_name), and put the text there, and link to it from meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement Thanks. User:Mbecker 14:30 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) ::I've submitted a few bot-friendly links to the http://archive.org crawler suggestion box. So as long as he doesn't have a robots.txt KEEP OUT sign, they should be archived within a few days. -- User:Tim Starling 15:01 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :::Cool. I decided that was a bit much anyhow, and I just saved the search results (since they all show that those pages contain the string "adapted from wikipedia.") See meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement if you need to see them. User:Mbecker 15:05 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :I doubt he means any harm. User:Pizza Puzzle ::Probably not. -- User:Tim Starling 15:01 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :: I don't know if it matters if he means any harm. He is profiting off of our work (his site contains links to bookstores where he gets a cut). So, I would say he owes wikipedia some money, and he definately needs to either release those articles under the GFDL, or remove them. I'm just trying to cover our bases just in case. User:Mbecker 15:05 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :: If Malaspina had simply noted that the bios were released under the GFDL (with the appropriate text), then nobody would owe anybody any money. Thus I doubt that we can get any from the site just because those notices weren't there (but IANAL). And given the links to Wikipedia, I believe that Great Books acted in good faith. We just need to point out the correct way to use the GFDL. -- User:Toby Bartels 15:50 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) Note: This has been posted to wikiEN-L, so there may be discussion there that can't be found here. -- User:Toby Bartels 15:50 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Old business== En garde. Having started the process of improving (as I think!) the organization of G's scientific work in the article (still missing a couple of categories), I'm looking at the physics. I modified the reference to experimental work in "dynamics", because Galileo's approach to the science of motion was kinetic, not dynamic. That is, he studied how things move, without developing any theory of the ''forces'' acting on them. Is this non-neutral? Maybe it needs some expansion and due hedging in the article. If you can find examples of his emphasizing the causation of motion by forces (as Descartes and Newton did), please cite. Copy to René Descartes, please, since he considered ''Two New Sciences'' to be of little value precisely because it didn't speak of the "causes" of motion. Likewise, if anyone can find a sense in which G's work in physics "paved the way" for Kepler's, please explain. Even chronologically, it's hard for work published in 1638 to have paved the way for someone who had died 8 years before. (G had done experiments 30 years earlier; but they were unpublished to such an extent that their very existence was disputed during much of the 20th century.) Galileo, to be sure, is the sort of subject that can hardly be named without starting a flame war. (At least one can walk into a Galileo clinic without fear of being shot down.) A weighing of contrary views is necessary, and it is not always easy to know what is actually controversial and what is Flat-Earth stuff. It will be no secret that I consider some aspects of Galileo's life and works to be less controversial than some people do. But need we hedge and double-hedge everything? "... is often credited with being one of the first..." Perhaps the matter of being ''one of'' the first can be established on the same sort of basis as Thomas Jefferson's being one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. The moderates might say that G is "widely believed" to have been one of the first to exploit the experimental method and to insist on mathematical descriptions; while the radicals will say he is "generally" believed to be that. But until someone shows who ''doesn't'' believe that G was "one of" the first, I incline to a still more radical view: he ''was'' one of the first. In fact, I know who might dispute the point: an expert in the history of science in Islamic civilzation. I personally woud be delighted to see a serious presentation of experimental and quantitative work in physics in the great age of Islam. Then we could present this point accurately and not vaguely, with a link to real information on earlier work. Till then—till we get something better than the irrelevant screed that an anonymous one-shot contributor put in History of physics recently, and briefly— we're stuck with the European historical record we've got. (Will the Chinese now pick up the gauntlet? All the better.)
User:Dandrake 23:02 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) ---- Being a newcomer, I have only recently got around to reading the Archives in any detail. It would be uncool to revive all the slanging matches from whenever that was— yeah, I can read the archive history, but it sure is nice now that people are sometimes signing and dating their entries— but there's a pretty remarkable amount of stuff that ignores facts, goes against that which can be established on firm evidence (if you don't like the word "facts") or simply ignores the possibility of establishing anything on firm evidence. The latter is particularly unfortunate in an encyclopedia. So here, in honor of Leo Szilard, whose posthumous memoirs use the term, is "my version of the facts" relevant to stuff that at this moment is in the Archives. In Archive 1 we find "When Galileo was defending the copernican model, it was not scientifically superior to the Ptolemaic system. Copernicus still tried to use circular orbits, and as they failed, had to use epicycles and other resources of Ptolemaic kinematics. Only after Kepler's work (that was largely ignored by Galilei) was incorporated in the theory, and Newton's law of gravity gave a sound physical basis to the whole system, was the heliocentric model undoubtedly superior." When ''Galileo'' was defending the Copernican model, it was already superior, or at least sufficiently arguably superior to be worthy of serious and unfettered argument. There is no need to give an inch on this point. It was arguably not superior in Copernicus's time, and I stress "arguably". Now why would anyone assume that ''nothing'' relevant had been discovered in the interim? The popular stuff on Galileo is full of things that supposedly bore on the argument, and the anti-Galileo crew like to argue about them (speciously); so it's hard to see how anyone can claim ignorance here. Conveniently, the Galileo article now contains some brief comments on how new astronomical discoveries affected the argument. I see in a later post, "Sunspots? No one even knew about sunspots' existence, much less their motions, until 1612, and Kepler had put forth elements for an elliptical orbit of Mars in 1609, with the other planets following thereafter, so there wasn't any time for an early Copernican system to explain sunspots. User:Shimmin " What Kepler has to do with it is not obvious. What is perfectly obvious is that the status of the argument for heliocentrism in Copernicus's time is irrelevant to the merits of the case for which Galileo was put on trial. We also find, 'Also, despite what is said, the Church did not approve the Ptolemaic system as real. It simply stated that both were simply devices to predict positions. It was Galileo who tried to force an acceptance of the Copernican system as "real."' Well, "...that the earth moves around the sun and that the sun stands still in the center of the universe without motion from east to west is contrary to Sacred Scripture..." This is Cardinal (Saint) Bellarmine, letter to Galileo, 1616. What part of ''contrary to Sacred Scripture'' don't you understand? Or are we to believe that the Church held to Scripture only as a convenient device, not as describing reality? Bellarmine did believe that it should be permissible to teach Copernican ideas as a convenient device. In this, the man who burned Bruno was a moderate; the Dominicans wanted Copernican ideas banned absolutely. But at no time during the controversy did he or the Church treat the moving sun and immobile earth as a mere device. Whether Galileo went too far in asserting the truth of heliocentrism is another question, but maybe not one of any significance to the Galileo article.
Submitted by dandrake, whose login had, curse the hasty timeouts in this system, expired before the Save page button had been hit-- User:209.204.169.149 02:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Recanation and sentence== Making some effort to keep this to things that could be relevant to the improvement (or maintenance) of the quality of the article, and not wanting to turn it into a general debating society: Ed Poor asked, and this surely is relevant to what the entry ought to say,
User:Dandrake 04:26 22 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Galileo's lack of judgment?== I make the obligatory claim that the following entry is not just my bit of a society-wide flame war, but a matter relevant to the contents of the article: the entry on Galileo treats of Galileo and the Inquisition; it should do so; who did what to whom, and on what basis, is relevant to that treatment; certain things are asserted in that matter which can be checked against evidence. In an unsigned comment that I won't take the trouble to track in the page history, /Archive 1 contains this text:
'"Lack of judgment" might be a bit strong, but if you actually read the Diologio[''sic''], you will understand exactly what whoever said that is talking about. It was more than a scientific treatise; it was also a rather vicious satire.'
NPOV time: I have read it, more than once, and I find no such thing at all. To be sure, the thing I read was a mere translation (the only full modern English translation there is); but then, the translator, having read the original Italian, also perceived no such thing [personal communication]. Going on, 'The speaker in the dialogue who represents the Aristotelean viewpoint is named Simplico (meaning buffoon or simpleton),...' This flat assertion could be made only by one entirely ignorant of the classical philosopher Simplicius. This isn't some profound obscurity dug up by Galileo's apologists to twist his meaning. Simplicius was well known and much admired around 1600, by people like Colombe and Cremonini (widely regarded as the real-life models for Simplicio). The young Galileo studied his work. By the way, ''does'' it mean simpleton in Italian? I'm not an expert and don't happen to have a good dictionary handy, but I note that Babelfish never heard of simplicio, and the word for simple is semplice with an e. Now, you may argue that Galileo was making a wicked pun here. Great, go ahead and ''argue'' it. Just don't omit relevant facts to hoodwink the non-specialists into thinking it's simple and indisputable. Picking up, 'and this character is not only portrayed as a fool, but at many points directly parodies various church officials. For example, his final lines are a direct quote from Urban VIII...'
Two problems here: "many" and "parodies". The example given is the one that's always given, and I'd like to see a few of the others. And it's not a parody: it's what Galileo was directly ordered to insert in the text in order to get the license to publish the book. Church authorities claimed he hadn't put ''enough'' in. Now, you or I might think that if we're ordered to insert the Church's official view, it would make sense to deliver it through the character who represents the conventional view throughout. And we might think it wise to give the Church the very last word. (Well, Salviati gets to express his approval of this "admirable and angelic doctrine", and even expand on it a little bit; that's pretty much like the last word, IMHO.) But when Galileo does it, it's a nasty satire? It is widely believed (I'm not sure of the documents here) that the Pope ''thought'' he was being mocked. But his opinion on Galileo's intentions is not more conclusive than another man's, assuming that he was not speaking ''ex cathedra''. There is not a shred of positive evidence of Galileo's having such an intention: nothing in G's papers, no dark hints in the words of anybody who knew him, nothing. It's one opinion, and not an opinion generally held, now or in Galileo's lifetime. By the way, if a book really and clearly insulted the Pope, do you think it likely that his nephew would take a moderate line and even vote against the Inquisition's sentence? User:Dandrake 19:52 22 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Brecht== Brecht wrote a play in which the main character is called "Galileo". It is, I suppose, no reflection on Brecht's thought or ethics that the play has little resemblance to the life of Galileo Galilei, because his theory of drama didn't have much to do with historical realism. But to apply the word "knowledge" to anything derived from that play is a bit much, so I de-applied it. User:Dandrake 02:04 23 Jul 2003 (UTC) ---- To user 210.54.108.162:
You appear to be a serious contributor (from your New Zealand edits), and you'd be welcome to discuss the question whether the Pope's position is a copout. But since that opinion is by no means universally held, simply dropping the word into a paragraph is not really NPOV at all. User:Dandrake 06:56, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC) ==Cannonballs== ----Isn't it true that *Galileo never actually performed the canonball experiment from Pisa (ambiguous here, contradicted at Classical mechanics)? ::Well, the author of the Classical Mechanics piece seems to accept that the experiment was performed; but one can find plenty of people to assert the contrary. Hence this article's position that it is "not generally believed", which is about as weak as one can get. I really don't know on what grounds anyone positively asserts that it was not performed; grounds to believe that it ''was'' are in the article. User:Dandrake 07:43, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC) *Galileo was actually in deeper trouble for proposing the immutablity of atoms, which irritated those who believed it contradicted with transubstantiation, and the Pope allowed him to confess to a lesser offense as a plea bargin? ::There is a book about that, ''Galileo Heretic''. The theory is surely even further from being unanimously accepted than the story of the cannonballs. As far as I know, the charges filed against Galileo made no mention of atomism, but treated only of heliocentrism. The bargaining between the hierarchy and Galileo didn't start till after the charges were filed, and Galileo (after being examined under oath) had raised a very strong defense against a major part of the charges. If there's any evidence of atomism coming up in the bargaining or in the trial or in the preparation of the charges (working backwards here), someone should present that. ::Though Galileo showed a good deal of sympathy for ideas of atoms as proposed in classic times, I know of nothing at all in his work, published and unpublished, that would support an inference that the miracle of the Eucharist could not be real. There still may be something somewhere; maybe someone can help out here. But is there anything in the Vatican records to support the idea that powerful officials were concerned about Galileo's position on this? Contrast this with the treatment of Copernican ideas, which were attacked early and often after 1610, at all levels in the hierarchy; Vatican records from 1616 and 1632 make it quite clear that the Popes of those times had a strong position on the matter. User:Dandrake 07:43, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC) I don't remember any references to these two statements, unfortunately. User:Paullusmagnus 14:53, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC) ==Satellite observation== Hi! I've added a pic of a Galileo publication to the article. If you click on the pic, you get what the source says is a translation of the manuscript. Since I don't know any Italian, can anyone say if the translation ''is'' of that manuscript? Thanks.
User:Arpingstone 10:58, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC) :The English text is definitely from the Sidereus Nuncius. The manuscript page isn't clear enough to be checked against the text by a person whose knowledge of Italian is below rudimentary; but I've found a reference for the page. It's Galileo's first known notes on observing moons of Jupiter, from January 7, 1610, jotted down at the bottom of an old draft of a letter. See ''Galileo at Work'', p. 149. This was a few days before he recognized them as moons; here they're perceived as three tiny stars in an odd configuration. :So the caption is not strictly right. We should probably give a translation of the actual text of the page. That's not hard to get, but I probably can't do anything till next week. User:Dandrake 21:14, Dec 16, 2003 (UTC) ::Just a minor point but I'm not sure why you say the words are not clear on the manuscript. Perhaps you didn't notice that I provided a Larger Version link at the bottom of the caption? The manuscript is then very readable (IMHO). ::User:Arpingstone 22:07, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC) :::Just meant that for me to make out the words, with a less than rudimentary knowledge of Italian, it would have to be really crystal-clear, preferably reduced to type! Anyway, I can probably dig out a usable translation next week.User:Dandrake 03:55, Dec 18, 2003 (UTC) ::::Apologies for misunderstanding you. ::::User:Arpingstone 09:26, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC) ==Secret Societies== Did anyone know that Galileo was the head of the Illuminati, one of the most famous anti-church/pro-science organisations in those days? There is a book named Angels & Demons (German title: Illuminati) by Dan Brown which deals with a plot of the Illuminati order against the Catholic Church. No, I didn't know it, and I see no reason to believe it. Since there was no particular connection in that time between anti-church and pro-science, it would be interesting to see any evidence of an anti-church position on Galileo's part. The documentary evidence, in things like his letters and his friends' letters, points the other way. User:Dandrake 00:13, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC) *Last I checked, Dan Brown writes fiction, anyway. --User:Fastfission 02:33, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC) ==Footnotes== Footnotes are, for me, one of the most vexatious subjects in Wikipedia. We can't agree on a single standard; there's no way of auto-hyperlinking them; and of course hardly anyone uses them because it's more fun to free-associate what I think I know than to document how I know it. But for this article, since we're trying to make one that's well founded in what's known, would anyone mind if the style gets changed consistently to one that's more maintainable?? What I have in mind is to replace the [1] [2] [3] system, which would be fine if it created hyperlinks, with the bulky scientific style; e.g., (Einstein, 1905) referring to an alphabetical list of documents at the end. The [4] style has drawbacks in maintainability and in conflicting with the [] notation for non-Wikipedia hypelinks. Reactions? Better ideas? The suggestion needs a little time to settle down, especially with watchlists diabled today. User:Dandrake 19:50, Jan 10, 2004 (UTC) Just to illustrate the point I've inserted text that requires 2 more footnotes before the existing one, which would require renumbering the old ones, which I haven't done pending changes in format. User:Dandrake 20:50, Jan 10, 2004 (UTC)
: I agree the format should be changed - manual renumbering is a PITA. As a policy wonk, I also think we should have clearer rules on that issue.User:Eloquence
Changed all the references, unless I missed something, to the common science-journal format like (Darwin, 1859). I think the treatment of the footnote to White, which seemed to have picked some ambiguity between the plain footnote notation [1] and the Wikipedia meaning of [http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/White/astronomy/war.html] works out all right. Comments and suggestions that it should all be done differently are solicited. User:Dandrake 07:09, Jan 13, 2004 (UTC)
I think that it is possible that Galileo Galilei belonged to the secret society the Illuminati, everything fits the profile, a scientist that couldn't express his discoveries openly for fear to the chrurch forms a secret society in which they could be protected and also exchange important information. You also have to remember that Galileo Galilei was christian, so it was not an anti-christian society at first, it became anti-christian when the chrurch started hunting the scientists after Galileo's arrest. [201.128.194.149 forgot to sign this note]
== The Trial. Again? ==
Every time more detail goes into the account of the trial, still more detail goes in, to give context and all that. I'm the first to concede that the section as it stands is repetitive, not well organized, and probably over-long. But I'm not sure what to do about it. Maybe I'll try taking a hatchet to it, or a chainsaw. If anyone tries it, including me, there should be a notice here about the project. User:Dandrake 07:40, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC)
:How about just replacing it with Eddie Izzard's summary? "Galileo said 'The earth goes around the sun!', and the pope was overjoyed at the truth of his words, and locked him up for twenty years. That pope is known to history as Pope Shit For Brains, the Ninth."
: I'd rather see more detail. We can always move it to a separate article The trial of Galileo Galileo and summarize the section if it gets too long.--User:EloquenceUser:Eloquence/CP 07:50, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC)
:: Another way to do this would be to for the "Church controversy" or "trial" section to contain a summary of only those details that are verifiable from primary sources, and then move interpretation of these events to a later section entitled "Galileo in historiography" or somesuch, which would be about what historians have had to say about the whole affair. User:Shimmin 15:44, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The separate article would be a good idea. Certainly there is a large body of verifiable thingies (one doesn't want to say ''facts'') concerning the trial; what one almost always gets is third-hand reinterpretations, and Wikipedia could do better than that. (And think of the hot edit wars we'll get when the article Examination of intention gets written. Still, it would be useful to do.) User:Dandrake 18:39, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC)
BTW does anyone have a good source concerning Galileo's defense on May 10? I don't think I've seen that text, which looks to be worth reading. User:Dandrake 19:43, Apr 14, 2004 (UTC) (Found a good source. User:Dandrake 04:16, May 10, 2004 (UTC))
The sort of rewrite I envision wouldn't so much shorten the section as totally reorganize it and replace a certain amount of material; probably the result would be longer yet. The more I learn, the more I like the idea, but I'm not at all sure I can make it happen. BTW, if one does cut a huge chunk out of an article and make a new one out of it, what happens to the edit history? Does it stay with the old article, forcing anyone who really, really cares about the ancient history to go back there for the history of what the new article started with?
Anyway, I can't resist putting in interesting new stuff. For instance, that Barberini probably didn't ''refuse'' to endorse Galileo's sentence. I don't know whose side that argues for, but that question is less interesting than the information. User:Dandrake 04:16, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
How long he lodged at the Holy Office: He was examined on April 12 and held for more questioning; after the April 30 session he was sent back to the Tuscan embassy. So says the Tuscan ambassador in a letter of May 1. That means that everybody else is wrong, saying that it was 22 days. I dunno. But the May 1 letter is in Favaro's collection, as is a confirmation from Inquisition records. See Fantoli's book, p 319. User:Dandrake 04:37, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
== Father of astronomy ==
Tsk! Here I try to be polite to the Kepler fans, who tend (not without reason) to be sensitive to snubs and to apparent over-reaching on behalf of other great scientists, and Anthony zaps it as original research. How many little philosophico-scientific bastards did Galileo sire, anyway? But it's OK with me. In fact, I'd have to cop to hiding POV under weasel words, anyway. User:Dandrake 19:53, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
== Was Galileo an astrologer? ==
Somebody has recently added that Galileo was an astrologer. Is that true?
: -- User:Sundar 08:05, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)
:Those times, about every astronomer also did astrology. After all, that was what makes you paid. If you were, say, a duke's court astronomer, then the duke would often ask you for horoscopes. But it might be a bit unfair to mention this in the article at some prominent place. At least to my knowledge, Galilei did not write any treatises about astrology. User:Sanders muc 09:45, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)
::This is precisely the point I wanted to make. User:Sundar 13:04, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)
:Before he became a celebrity, Galileo was professor of mathematics at the University of Padua. Astrology was one of the disciplines that a professional mathematician of that day would be expected to be knowledgeble of, so much so that up until the early 1600's, the word mathematician was used to mean an astrologer (which makes sense, given the amount of computation needed to determine the positions of the planets at a given date and time). Similarly, Kepler held the office of Imperial Mathemetician to two Holy Roman Emperors, a position in which his chief duty was to cast horoscopes. Kepler certainly did take the auspicious properties of the heavenly bodies seriously, and his published writings refect this.
:I don't know enough to say whether Galileo also took astrology seriously, or just did it to pay the bills, but a brief look around found a few references to papers published about Galileo and astrology, some apparently based on some of his correspondence and other posthumously published material. Someone who knows more could fill us in there.
:However, I don't see why it would be unfair to call Galileo an astrologer, even prominently. It was a serious scholarly pursuit in the early 1600s, and if he studied it, he studied it. It isn't unfair to call Kepler an astrologer; it isn't unfair to call Newton an alchemist and theologian. Many scholars tend to have somewhat rambling interests, and if centuries after the fact some of those interests no longer seem respectable, it is nonetheless disrespectful to the time they lived in to censor their lives to better reflect how we would like to remember them. User:Shimmin 18:12, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)
::Fair enough; but I don't think the analogy to Newton is very good. Newton really was interested in occult stuff (as we'd call it) and actively pursued things that we regard as a waste of his precious time. Galileo devoted extremely little attention to astrology, so far as one can tell. His dedication of ''Sidereus Muncius'' to the current Medici has a lot of astrological talk; it's also obsequious to a degree that a modern can hardly read without disgust. It's not clear that the former is any more sincerely Galileo's opinion than the latter. How much active interest he took in astrology and heavenly signs might be judged from his not having heard of the 1604 supernova till days after it appeared, and his not bothering to observe it till 18 days after. And then his interest was, according to the documents we have, in parallax: was it farther away than the Moon? It was, like Tycho's star before it, which was one in the eye for Aristotle. So I think that a listing as "astrologer" in the intro is misleading, not representing anything he paid serious attention to in his mature life. User:Dandrake 22:50, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)
I removed the astrologer reference in the article... before reading this. Nevertheless, unless someone (such as the original editor) disputes with Dandrake, I guess I'll leave it out. User:Brutannica 06:13, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
:Good. I just logged in with the idea of cleaning up the Intro characterizations by an actual principle, but it turns out that the astrologer item was the only one that would have gone, and it's already done.
:The idea, which I think should be applied to aevery article in Wikipedia, is that a wikilink characterization appears in the opening if and only if it's significant. Duhh. In a biographical article this would mean that it's significant to (a) the person's contemporary fame or (b) the reasons for the person's historical fame or importance. A rule of thumb would relate this to (c) how much treatment the thing in question merits in the main text. Astronomer, philosopher (his job title), and physicist clearly work; astrologer is irrelevant on all counts. User:Dandrake 21:42, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)
::Agree. But then what about articles that have significant references in their intros, but don't discuss it any further in their bodies? (I'm thinking of Michael Faraday here...) User:Brutannica 02:41, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
:::By the rule I just invented, they have a problem, which must be solved by deleting references or adding relevant information to the article. I Have Spoken. And seriously, I'm adopting that rule for any article I take a serious interest in. User:Dandrake 21:42, Sep 8, 2004 (UTC)
:::If you are going to say that Galileo was an astronomer, then you are aware that astronomy and astrology were the same thing until about 1750. So I think the astrology heading should stay.
::::I can see that you think that. Instead of engaging in an edit war, it would be more productive to work towards consensus. For instance, I'll set up a poll below.
::::No, I don't 'think that' Galileo was an astrologer, it is a proven fact that he was! So why not acknowledge the truth--just because one of the greatest scientists who ever lived also studied and used astrology in conjunction with astronomy. It isn't an insult to his other work or myriad of achievements in mathematics, physics, technology, philosophy, optics, free speech, etc. Who cares--as stated before: astrology was a very scholarly subject in the 1600s; but it is the truth so it should be in the article. Why not put "Galileo was an astronomer/astrologer..."? Because he studied and used both, that is only fair. I am a scientist myself, but I have wide ranging interests, so why is it hard to acknowledge that maybe more than a few great scientific geniuses of the past studied astrology, alchemy, numerology, phrenology, mysticism, etc.-- these subjects are considered offbeat and bizarre in today's world so that this information is left out of the textbooks to paint an idealized, modern portrait of the pure, rationalistic, pseudoscience hating scientific genius? I THINK: There needs to be a word coined for the combination astronomer/astrologer--because remember most if not all of the early European astronomers were also astrologers--but everywhere in modern print they are ONLY called astronomers. Basically the reason many of them turned to astronomy was to produce ephemerides that were more and more accurate, thus improving their astrological methods. Maybe astronogy or astrolomy would work? I like astrolomy better--reminds me of Ptolemy--hey wait a second! He was of course an astronomer--and an astrologer! They considered them one in the same! Just like Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, etc. WAKE UP--so why not state the facts--science is all about facts right?
::::Science isn't all about facts. Science is about the study of the natural world and the production of models that represent reality. By the way, if you're going to opine, sign your post; otherwise, shhh! User:Adraeus 22:54, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
==Astrologer poll==
Should Galileo be listed as an astrologer in the article's introductory paragraph? Please sign and date for your vote to be counted.
''Note: This vote is now closed. See the follow-up vote below.'' User:Quadell – User:Quadell (User_talk:Quadell) (User:Quadell/Request for assistance)#~~~~ " underneath the corresponding heading), and make an alternative proposal. For instance, perhaps we might agree that there should be a section titled "Astrology" – this would make it clear that this was a non-negligible aspect of Galileo's life, without labelling him an "astrologer". Many here seem to feel that this occupational description should be reserved to more central pursuits of his life. User:Fpahl 10:10, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
:*If I cook grilled cheese sandwiches, does that mean I'm a professional cook? No.
If I drive occassionally, does that mean I'm a professional driver? No.
If I put ice in a cup of water, does that mean I'm a chemist? No.
If I sing in the shower, does that mean I'm a singer? No.
If I construct a wooden doll house for my daughter, does that mean I'm a carpenter? No.
To the anonymous ones, if you think your "vote" means anything, register an account and sign your username. User:Adraeus 20:58, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC) ===Looks like we have consensus=== Alright, let's edit the article to include some of this info. Who'll step up to the plate first? User:Quadell – User:Quadell (User_talk:Quadell) (User:Quadell/Request for assistance)
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (Pisa, February 15, 1564 – Arcetri, January 8, 1642), was a Tuscany astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improving the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first Newton's laws of motion#Newton's First Law: Law of Inertia, and supporting Nicolaus Copernicus effectively. He has been referred to as the "father of modern astronomy," as the "father of modern physics," and as "father of science." His experimental work is widely considered complementary to the writings of Francis Bacon in establishing the modern scientific method. Galileo's career coincided with that of Johannes Kepler. The work of Galileo is considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle. In addition, his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church is taken as a major early example of the conflict of authority and freedom of thought, particularly with science, in Western society. ==Early career== Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy, as the son of Vincenzo Galilei, a mathematician and musician. He attended the University of Pisa, but was forced to "drop out" for financial reasons. However, he was offered a position on its faculty in 1589 and taught mathematics. Soon after, he moved to the University of Padua, and served on its faculty teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610. During this time he explored science and made many landmark discoveries. ==Experimental science== In the pantheon of the scientific revolution, Galileo takes a high position because of his pioneering use of quantitative experiments with results analyzed mathematically. There was no tradition of such methods in European thought at that time; the great experimentalist who immediately preceded Galileo, William Gilbert, did not use a quantitative approach. However, Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, had performed experiments in which he discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics, between the tension and the pitch of a stretched string. Galileo also contributed to the rejection of blind allegiance to authority (like the Church) or other thinkers (such as Aristotle) in matters of science and to the separation of science from philosophy or religion. These are the primary justifications for his description as "father of science." In the 20th century some authorities challenged the reality of Galileo's experiments, in particular the distinguished French History of science and technology Alexandre Koyré. The experiments reported in ''Two New Sciences'' to determine the law of acceleration of falling bodies, for instance, required accurate measurements of time, which appeared to be impossible with the technology of the 1600s. According to Koyré, the law was arrived at deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments. Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling bodies (actually rolling balls) were replicated using the methods described by Galileo (Settle, 1961), and the precision of the results was consistent with Galileo's report. Later research into Galileo's unpublished working papers from as early as 1604 clearly showed the reality of the experiments and even indicated the particular results that led to the time-squared law (Drake, 1973). ==Astronomy== Although the popular idea of Galileo inventing the telescope is inaccurate, he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe the sky. Based on sketchy descriptions of telescopes invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made one with about 8x magnification, and then made improved models up to about 20x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venice lawmakers. His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled ''Sidereus Nuncius'' (''Sidereal Messenger''). [[image:galileo.script.arp.600pix.jpg|thumb|200px|right|It was on this page that Galileo first noted an observation of the natural satellite of Jupiter (planet). Galileo published a full description in ''Sidereus Nuncius'' in March 1610.]] On January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered three of Jupiter (planet)'s four largest natural satellite (moons): Io (moon), Europa (moon), and Callisto (moon). Ganymede (moon) he discovered four nights later. He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would occasionally disappear; something he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled Galileo's naming of these objects, changing his ''Medicean stars'' to ''Galilean satellites''. The demonstration that a planet had smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth. Galileo noted that Venus (planet) exhibited a full set of Lunar phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. By contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model. Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that China astronomers had done so before. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for either the geocentric system or that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots led to a long and bitter feud with Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there can be little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes Fabricius. He was the first to report lunar mountains and impact craters, whose existence he deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon's surface. He even estimated the mountains' heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion that the Moon was "rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself", and not a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed. Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars, packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He also located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye. Galileo observed the planet Neptune (planet) in 1611, but took no particular notice of it; it appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars. == Physics == Galileo's theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along with the largely independent work of Kepler and René Descartes, was a precursor of the Classical mechanics developed by Isaac Newton. He was a pioneer, at least in the European tradition, in performing rigorous experiments and insisting on a mathematics description of the laws of nature. One of the most famous stories about Galileo is that he dropped balls of different Mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their velocity of descent was independent of their mass (excluding the limited effect of air resistance). This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. Though the story of the tower first appeared in a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, it is not now generally accepted as true. However, Galileo did perform experiments involving rolling balls down inclined planes, which proved the same thing: falling or rolling objects (rolling is a slower version of falling) are acceleration independently of their mass. He determined the correct mathematical law for acceleration: the total distance covered, starting from rest, is proportional to the square of the time (This law is regarded as a predecessor to the many later scientific laws expressed in mathematical form.). He also concluded that objects ''retain their velocity'' unless a force —often friction— acts upon them, refuting the accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects "naturally" slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them. This principle was incorporated into Newton's laws of motion (1st law). Galileo also noted that a pendulum's swings always take the same amount of time, independently of the amplitude. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. It is good enough to regulate a clock, however, as Galileo may have been the first to realize. (See #Technology below) In the early 1600s, Galileo and an assistant tried to measure the speed of light. They stood on different hilltops, each holding a shuttered lantern. Galileo would open his shutter, and, as soon as his assistant saw the flash, he would open his shutter. At a distance of less than a mile, Galileo could detect no delay in the round-trip time greater than when he and the assistant were only a few yards apart. While he could reach no conclusion on whether light propagated instantaneously, he recognized that the distance between the hilltops was perhaps too small for a good measurement. Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with being one of the first to understand sound frequency. After scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of sound to the spacing of the chisel's skips (frequency). In his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo presented a physical theory to account for tides, based on the motion of the Earth. If correct, this would have been a strong argument for the reality of the Earth's motion. (The original title for the book, in fact, described it as a dialogue on the tides; the reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.) His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure. Galileo also put forward the basic principle of relativity. It typically states that nobody is able to determine their speed without the use of an external point of reference. This later provided the basic framework for Einstein's theory of relativity. ==Mathematics== While Galileo's application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analyses and proofs relied heavily on the Eudoxus of Cnidus theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate translations by Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo's life it was being superseded by the algebraic methods of René Descartes, which a modern finds incomparably easier to follow. Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo's paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares. Such seeming contradictions were brought under control 250 years later in the work of Georg Cantor. == Technology == Galileo made a few contributions to what we now call technology as distinct from pure physics, and suggested others. This is not the same distinction as made by Aristotle, who would have considered all Galileo's physics as ''techne'' or useful knowledge, as opposed to ''episteme'', or philosophical investigation into the causes of things. In 1595–1598, Galileo devised and improved a "Geometric and Military Compass" suitable for use by artillery and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials. As a geometric instrument, it enabled the construction of any regular polygon, computation of the area of any polygon or circular sector, and a variety of other calculations. About 1606–1607 (or possibly Timeline of temperature and pressure measurement technology), Galileo made a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube. In 1609, Galileo was among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons. In 1610, he used a telescope as a compound microscope, and he made improved microscopes in 1623 and after. This appears to be the Timeline of microscope technology clearly documented use of the compound microscope. In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter's satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for land surveys; for navigation, the first practical method was the chronometer of John Harrison. In his last year, when totally blindness, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s. He created sketches of various inventions, such as a candle and mirror combination to reflect light throughout a building, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that doubled as an eating utensil, and what appears to be a ballpoint pen. ==Church controversy== Galileo was a practicing Catholicism, yet his writings on Copernican heliocentric model disturbed some in the Catholic Church who believed in a geocentric model of the solar system. They argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible, at least as interpreted by the church fathers, and the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato (especially among the Dominican order, facilitators of the Inquisition). The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time for several reasons. By the time of the controversy, the Catholic Church had largely abandoned the Ptolemaic_system for the Tychonian_system in which the Earth was at the center of the Universe, the Sun revolved around the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun. This model is geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model and had the extra advantage that it predicted no parallax of the stars, an effect that was impossible to detect with the instruments of the time. In the view of Tycho and many others, this model explained the observable data of the time better than the geocentric model did. (That inference is valid, however, only on the assumption that no very small effect had been missed: that the instruments of the time were absolutely perfect, or that the Universe ''could'' not be much larger than was generally believed at the time. As to the latter, belief in the large, possibly infinite, size of the Universe was part of the heretical beliefs for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in 1600.) An understanding of the controversies, if it is even possible, requires attention not only to the politics of religious organizations but to those of academic philosophy. Before Galileo had trouble with the Jesuits and before the Dominican Order friar Tommasso Caccini denounced him from the pulpit, his employer heard him accused of contradicting Scripture by a professor of philosophy, Cosimo Boscaglia, who was neither a theologian nor a priest. The first to defend Galileo was a Benedictine abbot, Benedetto Castelli, who was also a professor of mathematics and a former student of Galileo's. It was this exchange that led Galileo to write the ''Letter to Grand Duchess Christina''. (Castelli remained Galileo's friend, visiting him at Arcetri near the end of Galileo's life, after months of effort to get permission from the Inquisition to do so.) However, real power lay with the Church, and Galileo's arguments were most fiercely fought on the religion level. The late 19th century and early twentieth century historian Andrew Dickson White wrote from an anti-clerical perspective: :The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" and this wretched pun upon the great astronomer's name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that "geometry is of the devil," and that "mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresy." The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion. :Father Lorini proved that Galileo's doctrine was not only heretical but "atheism," and besought the Inquisition to intervene. The Bishop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural; and Pope Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astronomer. :But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, one of the greatest theologians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin's stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth. Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that "his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation." Father Lecazre declared "it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation." Others declared, "It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?" Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. (White, 1898; [http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/White/astronomy/war.html online text]) In 1616, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to hold or defend the hypothesis asserted in Copernicus's ''On the Revolutions'', though it has been debated whether he was admonished not to "teach in any way" the heliocentric theory. When Galileo was tried in 1633, the Inquisition was proceeding on the premise that he had been ordered not to teach it at all, based on a paper in the records from 1616; but Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine that showed only the "hold or defend" order. The latter is in Bellarmine's own hand and of unquestioned authenticity; the former is an unsigned copy, violating the Inquisition's own rule that the record of such an admonition had to be signed by all parties and notarized. Leaving aside technical rules of evidence, what can one conclude as to the real events? There are two schools of thought. According to Stillman Drake, the order not to teach was delivered unofficially and improperly; Bellarmine would not allow a formal record to be made, and assured Galileo in writing that the only order in effect was not to "defend or hold". According to Giorgio di Santillana, however, the unsigned minute was simply a fabrication by the Inquisition. In 1623 Pope Gregory XV died, and Galileo's close friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. The new Pope gave Galileo vague permission to ignore the ban and write a book about his opinions, so long as he did not openly support his theory. Galileo consented, and set to work writing his masterpiece, ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'' (often shortened to ''Dialogues''). It involved an argument between two intellectuals, one geocentric, the other heliocentric, and a layman, neutral but interested. Although it presented the Church's point of view, the geocentrist was depicted foolishly, while the heliocentrist often dominated the argument and convinced the neutral member in the end. The ''Dialogues'' were published in 1632 with the approval of Catholic censors. It was applauded by intellectuals but nevertheless aroused the Church's ire. Despite his continued insistence that his work in the area was purely theoretical, despite his strict following of the church protocol for publication of works (which required prior examination by church censors and subsequent permission), and despite his close friendship with the Pope (who presided throughout the ordeal), Galileo was summoned to trial before the Roman Inquisition in 1633. The Inquisition had rejected earlier pleas by Galileo to postpone or relocate the trial because of his ill health. At a meeting presided by Pope Urban VIII, the Inquisition decided to notify Galileo that he either had to come to Rome or that he would be arrested and brought there in chains. Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition on February 13, 1633. After two weeks in quarantine, Galileo was detained at the comfortable residence of the Tuscan Ambassador (diplomacy), as a favor to the influential Grand Duke Ferdinand II de' Medici. When the ambassador reported Galileo's arrival and asked how long the proceedings would be, the Pope replied that the Holy Office proceeded slowly, and was still in the process of preparing for the formal proceedings. In the event, having responded to the urgent demands of the Inquisition that he must report to Rome immediately, Galileo was left to wait for two months before proceedings would begin. On April 12, 1633, Galileo was brought to trial, and the formal interrogation by the Inquisition began. During this interrogation Galileo stated that he did not defend the Copernican theory, and cited a letter of Cardinal Bellarmine from 1615 to support this contention. The Inquisition questioned him on whether he had been ordered in 1616 not to teach Copernican ideas in any way (see above); he denied remembering any such order, and produced a letter from Bellarmine saying only that he was not to hold or defend those doctrines. He was then detained for eighteen days in a room in the offices of the Inquisition (not in a dungeon cell). During this time the Commissary General of the Inquisition, Vincenzo (later Cardinal) Maculano, visited him for what amounted to plea bargaining, persuading Galileo to confess to having gone too far in writing the book. In a second hearing on April 30, Galileo confessed to having erred in the writing of the book, through vain ambition, ignorance, and inadvertence. He was then allowed to return to the home of the Tuscan ambassador. On May 10, he submitted his written defense, in which he defended himself against the charge of disobeying the Church's order, confessed to having erred through pride in writing the book, and asked for mercy in light of his age and ill health. A month later (June 21), by order of the Pope, he was given an examination of intention, a formal process that involved showing the accused the instruments of torture. At this proceeding, he said, "I am here to obey, and have not held this [Copernican] opinion after the determination made, as I said." On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition held the final hearing on Galileo, who was then 69 years old and pleaded for mercy, pointing to his "regrettable state of physical unwellness". Threatening him with torture, imprisonment, and death on the stake, the show trial forced Galileo to "abjure, curse and detest" his work and to promise to denounce others who held his prior viewpoint. Galileo did everything the church requested him to do, following (insofar as there is any evidence) the plea bargain of two months earlier. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Although ten Cardinal Inquisitors had heard the case, the sentence carried out on June 22 bears the signature of only seven; one of the three missing was Cardinal Barberini, the Pope's nephew. It is generally held that this indicates a refusal to endorse the sentence. The seven who signed, however, were those who were present at that day's proceedings; Cardinals Barberini and Borgia in particular, were attending an audience with the Pope on that day. Analysis of the Inquisition's records has shown that the presence of only seven of ten Cardinals was not exceptional; hence the inference that Barberini was protesting the decision may be doubted. That the threat of torture and death Galileo was facing was a real one had been proven by the church in the earlier trial against Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for holding a naturalistic view of the Universe. The tale that Galileo, rising from his knees after recanting, said "''E pur si muove!''" #fn_1 (But it does move!) cannot be accepted as true: the penalty for going back on a confession before the Inquisition was to be burned at the stake (famously, in the case of Jacques de Molay), and such a defiance would have been a ticket to follow Bruno to the stake. But the widespread belief that the whole incident is an 18th century invention is also false. (Drake, 1978, pp. 356–357). A Spanish painting, dated 1643 or possibly 1645, shows Galileo writing the phrase on the wall of a dungeon cell. Here we have a second version of the story, which also cannot be true, because Galileo was never imprisoned in a dungeon; but the painting shows that some story of "Eppur si muove"#fn_1 was circulating in Galileo's time. In the months immediately after his condemnation, Galileo resided with Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini of Siena, a learned man and a sympathetic host; the fact that Piccolomini's brother was a military attaché in Madrid, where the painting was made some years later, suggests that Galileo may have made the remark to the Archbishop, who then wrote to his family concerning the event, which later became garbled in re-telling. Galileo was sentenced to prison, but because of his advanced age (and/or Church politics) the sentence was commuted to house arrest at his villas in Arcetri and Florence #fn_2. Because of a painful hernia, he requested permission to consult physicians in Florence, which was denied by Rome, which warned that further such requests would lead to imprisonment. Under arrest, he was forced to recite penitentiary psalms regularly, and he was forced to reject house guests, but he was allowed to continue his less controversial research and the social-contact punishment was not enforced very well. Publication was another matter. His ''Dialogue'' had been put on the ''Index Librorum Prohibitorum'', the official black list of banned books, where it stayed until 1822 (Hellman, 1998). Though the sentence announced against Galileo mentioned no other works, Galileo found out two years later that publication of anything he might ever write had been quietly banned. The ban was effective in France, Poland, and Germany states, but not in the Netherlands. Placed under house-arrest, Galileo would, in 1638, be allowed to move to his home near Florence. Though by then totally blind, he continued to teach and write. He died at his villa in Arcetri, just north of Florence, in 1642. According to Andrew Dickson White, in [http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitewtc.html ''A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom'' (III.iii)], 1896, Galileo's experiences demonstrate a classic case of a scholar forced to recant a scientific insight because it offended powerful, conservative forces in society: for the church at the time, it was not the scientific method that should be used to find truth—especially in certain areas— but the doctrine as interpreted and defined by church scholars, and White documented how this doctrine was defended by the Church with torture, murder, deprivation of freedom, and censorship. In a less polemical frame, this has remained the mainstream view among the history of science. The viewpoints of White and similar-minded colleagues were never accepted by the Catholic community, partially because White's final analysis depicted Christianity as a destructive force. A fierce expression of this critical attitude can also be seen in Bertolt Brecht's play about Galileo, a source for popular ideas about the scientist. Moreover, deeper examination of the primary sources for Galileo and his trial shows that claims of deprivation were likely exaggerated. Dava Sobel's biography ''Galileo's Daughter'' offers a different set of insights into Galileo and his world, in large part through the private correspondence of Maria Celeste, the daughter of the title, and her father. In 1992, 359 years after the Galileo trial, Pope John Paul II issued an apology, lifting the edict of Inquisition against Galileo: "Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions." After the release of this report, the Pope said further that "... Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard [the relation of scientific and Biblical truths] than the theologians who opposed him." ==Galileo's family== Although a devout Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock. All were the children of Galileo and Marina Gamba. Because of their illegitimate birth, both girls were sent to the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri at exceptionally young ages. * Virginia (b. 1600) who took the name Maria Celeste upon entering a convent. Galileo's eldest child, the most beloved, and inherited her father's sharp mind. She is buried with Galileo at the Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze. * Livia (b. 1601) took the name Suor Arcangela. Was sickly for most of her life at the convent. * Vincenzio (b. 1606) was later legitimized and married Sestilia Bocchineri. ==Galileo's writings== * ''Two New Sciences'' 1638 Lowys Elsevier (Louis Elsevier) Leiden (in Italian, ''Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno á due nuoue scienze'' Leida, Appresso gli Elsevirii 1638) * ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'' 1632 (in Italian, ''Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo'') * ''Sidereus Nuncius'' 1610 Venice (in Latin, ''Sidereus Nuncius'') * ''Letter to Grand Duchess Christina'' ==Writings on Galileo== * ''Galileo Galilei (opera)'', an opera by Philip Glass * ''Galileo (play)'' a play by Bertolt Brecht ==References== * Drake, Stillman (1957). ''Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo''. New York: Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-09239-3 * Drake, Stillman (1973). "Galileo's Discovery of the Law of Free Fall". ''Scientific American'' v. 228, #5, pp. 84-92. * Drake, Stillman (1978). ''Galileo At Work''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-16226-5 * Fantoli, Annibale (2003). ''Galileo—For Copernicanism and the Church'', third English edition. Vatican Observatory Publications. ISBN 88-209-7427-4 * Hellman, Hal (1988). ''Great Feuds in Science. Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever''. New York: Wiley. * Lessl, Thomas, "[http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0138.html The Galileo Legend]". ''New Oxford Review'', 27-33 (June 2000). * Newall, Paul (2004). [http://www.galilean-library.org/hps.html "The Galileo Affair."] * Settle, Thomas B. (1961). "An Experiment in the History of Science". ''Science'', 133:19-23. * Sobel, Dava. (1999). ''Galileo's Daughter''. ISBN: 0-140-28055-3 * White, Andrew Dickson (1898). ''[http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/White/ A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom]''. New York 1898. ==Named after Galileo== * The Galileo probe to Jupiter (planet) * The Galilean moons of Jupiter (planet) * Galileo Regio on Ganymede (moon) * Galilaei (Lunar crater) on the Moon * Galilaei (crater) on Mars (planet) * Asteroid 697 Galilea (named on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the discovery of the Galilean moons) * Galileo (unit) * Galileo positioning system ==See also== *Galilean transformation *Galilean invariance *Lorentz transformation equations *Medici *Renaissance *Vincenzo Galilei *World Almanac's Ten Most Influential People of the Second Millennium ==Notes== *#fn_1_back "and yet it moves", or, "but it moves" *#fn_2_back [http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/galileo.html Galileo, Lucid Cafe Feb '96]" ==Trivia== Galileo was featured as a Jeopardy! clue on June 22, 2005 as ''The first name of this man born February 15, 1564 was derived from his parents' surname, a common Tuscan habit at that time'' ==External links== * [http://www.galilean-library.org/hps.html The Galileo Affair] by Paul Newall. * [http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/andrew_white/Chapter3.html The Warfare of Science With Theology] * [http://galileo.rice.edu/ The Galileo Project] at Rice University * [http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Galileo_Prototype/MAIN.HTM Electronic representation of Galilei's notes on motion (MS. 72)] * [http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0401/reviews/barr.html From Myth to History and Back] - Reviews of two books on Galileo * [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/galileo/ PBS Nova Online: ''Galileo's Battle for the Heavens''] * [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/galileo/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry] Italian astronomers Italian physicists Natives of Pisa Heretics 1564 births 1642 deaths bn:গ্যালিলিও গ্যালিলি la:Galilaeus Galilaei lv:Galileo Galilejs nds:Galileo Galilei scn:Galileu Galilei simple:Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
---- Older talk archived at: * /Archive 1 * /Archive 2 ---- == Miscellaneous new topics == (Have to have some kind of heading to get the text in a readonable place.) Removed the lead paragraph from Astronomy, as follows: :In 1600, astronomers were engaged in a great debate between the Copernican system (the planets revolved around the Sun) and the geocentric system (the planets and Sun revolved around Earth). In 1604, Galileo announced his support for the Copernican school of thought, but he lacked the means to reinforce the opinion. This, along with another passage, expresses the point of view that Galileo's work in astronomy was, at least in large part, inspired by a project to prove Copernican ideas. There is no evidence of this in his writings or other documents. The other POV is that before 1610 he didn't devote a great deal of attention to the controversy (which was, in fact, not at all hot in 1600 - 1609), but took a strong interest when the new evidence started showing up. Perhaps a section on his philosophical opinions and the history of his thoughts would be a good idea. But to "Teach the Controversy" in a lead paragraph to a section on what he actually did wouldn't work. --User:Dandrake 01:21, May 28, 2005 (UTC) It's like eating popcorn, isn't it? Also took the same POV idea out of the article lead: :He believed in Copernicus' theories leading him to search for evidence that the Sun was in the center of the solar system and not the Earth. --User:Dandrake 01:27, May 28, 2005 (UTC) Darn! I ended up doing a sizable vandalism repair while not logged in. One gets rusty. Anyway, the various repairs during the orgy of vandalism around last Dec. 12 left a couple of gaps, like the Physics heading and the entire Mathematics section, and some of the structure of the scientific part of the article. At least, I haven't found anything in the Talk page or the submission notes of the time to indicate that there was any non-malicious intent behind the changes. --User:Dandrake 03:03, May 28, 2005 (UTC) Any grounds for the claim (see change by 169.233.76.32) that Galileo ''might'' have managed to defy the Inquisition at the scene of his condemnation without any consequences? If "some believe" he might not have got away with it, where is someone who thinks he might have? User:Dandrake 06:17, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC) == Galileo as astrologer == This is yet another sad indicator why wikipedia is a doomed project. Galileo wrote treatises on astrology, he made astrological charts, he taught astrology to medical students, yet there is a "debate" about whether he was actually an astrologer and whether this should be mentioned in the opening paragraph. Good luck to all of you, and to anyone ever taking this project seriously. This is just another example of the intellectual bankruptcy of "NPOV policy" and how what really gets put on the page is just the collective wisdom or prejudice of the mob majority. :You won't get very far by making personal attacks and referring to people as "morons" in your edit summaries. ::A moment of frustration. There are people who go beyond the position you advocate below...saying that Galileo had "no use" for astrology or that he had nothing to do with it. This is patently false, and anyone who thinks so is a moron, and I have no problem saying so. :Most of the references to Galileo and astrology come from astrologers themselves, perhaps wishing to appropriate a famous name for themselves. But even if true these would not be significant enough to describe Galileo as an astrologer. ::That's not the point. The point is -- a bricklayer is someone who lays bricks, a teacher is someone who has students and delivers lectures, a farmer is someone who sells crops, a painter is someone who splashes oil on a canvas, etc., etc. The point is that ''if Galileo's astrological activities are insufficient to even warrant describing him as an "astrologer", then hardly anyone from that time period qualifies!'' You may think he was a reluctant astrologer, or an astrologer who eventually developed ideas that led to the downfall of astrology as we know it, but it's just intellectually ''dishonest'' to not even acknowledge that it's accurate to say he was a working astrologer, or that astrology was one of his activities (and not just "to put food on the table"...that doesn't explain drawing horoscopes for family). He was very active in doing things that were known as defining what an astrologer was at that time -- so it's just dishonest not to acknowledge this. Look, I don't believe in astrology, and I believe Galileo had lots of expressed doubts about it, but this hardly justifies stripping any and all mention of astrology from this article. I don't think this is a case of astrologers "appropriating" a famous name for themselves, as much as scientists "disappropriating" a label that they would rather not see connected in any way to one of their founding icons. :Galileo did not make any notable contributions to astrology, that is, he was not notable ''as an astrologer''. His claim to fame comes entirely from his scientific work. He didn't publish books or articles or writings of any kind on astrology, or make "discoveries" in the field, or found any schools of thought, or influence or teach any astrological disciples, or make his mark in any way in that field. :Yes, to a certain extent the modern clear dividing line between astronomy and astrology was much less clear in those days, and Kepler was certainly known to dabble in the "music of the spheres" and similar stuff. Galileo may have been expected by his patrons to provide horoscopes for them. So what? The fact that astrology and astronomy were not always sharply distinguished in early times is already mentioned in detail at Astrology#Relationship to astronomy and science; it's hardly necessary to repeat this fact in every single article about every single astronomer of a certain era. In the Kepler article it probably warrants a mention. In Galileo, it probably doesn't. -- User:Curps 03:43, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::The problem goes beyond mentioning the word "astrology" or acknowledging that astrology/astronomy were bound up together historically. The problem is that the article gives almost no mention of astrology at all! And when it does, it's always in the POV of the 20th-century scientist, not really a historian trying to puzzle together historically people's motivations and the turn of events of things. I understand that scientists want to present their diluted version of history, but science is not history, and to get an accurate historical picture of things, you can't look at everything through 20th-century glasses, which is what this article does. If you search books on amazon.com you will find a book or two that say Gallileo's work helped discredit astrology. "Astrology: A History" by Peter Whitfield, for one. I'm not interested in astrology so I recuse myself beyond this note. User:Jok2000 13:23, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC) ---- There's no mention at all in this article of Galileo's children. In fact, aside from one line about his father, Galileo's personal life is unmentioned in this article. ?????--User:Firsfron 01:52, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) :Well, for what it's worth (all from Dava Sobel's ''Galileo's Daughter''): :Galileo had three illegitimate children, all by Marina Gamba (d. February 1619) (she did not live with Galileo): :*Virginia, b 13 August 1600 d. 2 April 1634. She became a nun at San Matteo d'Arcetri, taking vows, and the name Suor Maria Celeste, on 28 October 1616. :*Livia, b. 18 August 1601, d. 14 June 1659, who became a nun at San Matteo d'Arcetri, taking vows and the name of Suor Arcangel on 28 October 1617 :*Vincenzio, b. 21 August 1606, d. 16 May 1629, legitimized 25 June 1619, married 29 January 1629, Sestilia di Carlo Boccherini. He had three children, Galileo, Carlo, and Cosimo :Galileo's parents were Vincenzio (1520-1591) and Giulia di Cosimo Ammannati (1538-1620); his siblings included Benedetto, Virginia, Anna, Michelangelo, Livia, and, perhaps, Lena.
:- User:Nunh-huh 01:40, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC) The date you list for Vincenzio's (Galileo's son) death cannot be right. He was married at age 23, and had 3 children, yet died just four months after his wedding? No way. Also, "Suor Archangel" isn't right. The rest of this could go on the page, if a free source can be found. --User:Firsfron 03:16, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC) ---- NB: The headings here, added after the fact, are not very accurate, but they at least allow some way of jumping down through the text. User:Dandrake 02:34, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC) ==Old telescopes== I have some facts about Galileo and the telescope that people might be interested in. The first telescopes were very unclear and had very narrow fields of vision. Most people could not see anything of any significance when they first looked down the telescope - Galileo would even offer lessons to show people how to find stars with a telescope, and then interpret what they saw. Hence, it was very easy (even legitimate) for Galileo's opponents (I'm talking individuals here, not institutions) to dispute the truth of his claims - they just said that the telescope was unreliable, what people saw wasn't actually the heavens but something in the telescope itself, or even that the telescope was a magical object. As with most 'scientific' discoveries, acceptance was due to a consensus, rather than 'proof'. A good article may be van Helden, A. "Telescopes and authority from Galileo to Cassini", in Osiris 9 (Instruments), pp 9-29 for those who wish to know more. It may also give an interesting aspect to the Church/Galileo dispute raging on above - so far, all the arguments have been interesting but, on the whole, far more vitriolic (dare I say childish?) than I expect from academics! Any chance of keeping the whole thing more relevant and less personal? User:131.111.243.37 : It's true that the early telescopes were very poor. One of the reasons that Galileo was the first to observe and publish anything significant was that his telescopes were better; Kepler at the Imperial court couldn't at first get an instrument good enough to check Galileo's claims. People who had inferior instruments were reasonable enough in being skeptical for a while, but there may be limits to reasonable skepticism there. Refusing to look (as actually happened) would be an example of exceeding the limits. : Is the belief that it might be a magical object to be considered legitimate? In the context of the magical thinking of the time, perhaps so; but if one is talking about contributions to science, I don't think so. And the suspicion that the effects were illusory invites the same sort of objection: if you want to know if the instrument shows reality, you can check it against earthly reality for starters. Failure to do so is the sort of thing that Galileo is credited with struggling against. : The statement that what happened was consensus rather than 'proof' almost begins to verge on the sort of thing you'd find in a postmodernist journal along with Sokal's article on hegemonic physics. Is the current acceptance of telescopic observations, including Galileo's, based on consensus rather than proof? It ''is'' a consensus: people who make the observations get the same results, and if any claim not to, they are properly dismissed as unreliable. But having said that, what has one said that everyone didn't already know about science? At what point would you say that the agreement on Galileo's results became proof rather than consensus? Am I asking too many rhetorical questions? : Having got a little insulting there, I'll say that I've skimmed through the now-archived discussions, and I agree that much is unscholarly and unhelpful. If either side is worse than the other, I didn't read carefully enough to notice. But Galileo remains a subject of major controversy and strong feelings. How, really, does one achieve NPOV here? (One can, though, get the available facts as right as possible, using verifiable modern scholarship (which is indeed a bit of a dig at White.))
: User:Dandrake For more on these topics look at: Albert van Helden "The telescope in the seventeenth century", ''ISIS'' 65, 1974: 39-58; "The invention of the telescope", ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'', 67,4, 1977: 1-27. Yaakov Zik "Galileo and the telescope", ''Nuncius'' 2,1999: 31-67; "Science and instruments: The telescope as a scientific instrument at the beginning of the seventeenth century", ''Perspectives on Science'', 9,3, 2001: 259-284. Albert Van Helden and Yaakov Zik, “Between discovery and disclosure: Galileo and the telescope”, in, a cura di Beretta M., Gallluzzi P., Triarico C., ''Studies on Scientific Instruments and Collections in Honour of Mara Miniati'', Bibilioteca di Nuncius Vol. 49, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2003: 173-190. ==Better than Ptolemaic?== "When Galileo was defending the copernican model, it was not scientifically superior to the Ptolemaic system." That's true but Galileo was the first to observe the satellites of Jupiter (a mini-solar system). IMO this led him to the conviction that small things should turn around around big things even if the real scientific basis requires Newton theory of gravity. User:Ericd 20:37 May 14, 2003 (UTC) ---- I've changed the statement that Galileo based his argument about the Moon's imperfect sphericity on "the occultation of stars", because most of the sources I've just looked at (admitted just some random webpages) suggest that it was his observations of shadows cast by lunar mountains that led him to this conclusion. If anyone knows that this is wrong, feel free to reword. -- User:Oliver Pereira 10:32 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) : No, you're verifiably right. Galileo described his methods in some detail in The Starry Messenger, including his calculation of the height of lunar mountains. This source, which may be considered more reliable than random websites, is available in translation: Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. ed. & tr. Stillman Drake, Doubleday Anchor, 1957, still in print. (Full disclosure: The coincidence of surnames is not coincidental. But the royalties will not put my kids through school.)
: User:Dandrake 02:35 10 Jul 2003 (UTC) ---- == GNU FDL infringement! == Argh! I've just found [http://www.malaspina.com/site/person_539.asp this biography of Galileo] at the "Malaspina Great Books" website, and it's suspiciously similar to our article. In fact, they acknowledge on the page that their article is "Adapted from Wikipedia". However, they seem to be claiming copyright of the article ("This database is maintained by Malaspina Great Books ©1995-2003"), and I can find no mention of their releasing it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Clearly they are infringing the terms of the licence. What should we do about this? Hmm... Investigating further, I see from Talk:Ernest Hemingway and Talk:Woody Guthrie that this has come up before - as early as last year, in fact. The Malaspina site has "adapted" [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22adapted+from+wikipedia%22+site%3Amalaspina.com hundreds] of our articles, with acknowledgment, but without releasing their material under the GNU FDL. It seems that nothing has been done about it, though. Not that I can talk: I could win a world championship in apathy, if there was one... :) But I think something should be done... -- User:Oliver Pereira 10:32 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :In attempt to save the evidence, I am going to go through and copy the text of all of the articles containing the string "adapted from wikipedia." In case they decide to remove them. Could someone else help me maybe, by starting at the end of [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22adapted+from+wikipedia%22+site%3Amalaspina.com the search results]? The page will be found at meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement. Just create a sub-space (like meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement/article_name), and put the text there, and link to it from meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement Thanks. User:Mbecker 14:30 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) ::I've submitted a few bot-friendly links to the http://archive.org crawler suggestion box. So as long as he doesn't have a robots.txt KEEP OUT sign, they should be archived within a few days. -- User:Tim Starling 15:01 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :::Cool. I decided that was a bit much anyhow, and I just saved the search results (since they all show that those pages contain the string "adapted from wikipedia.") See meta:Malaspina Great Books: GFDL infringement if you need to see them. User:Mbecker 15:05 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :I doubt he means any harm. User:Pizza Puzzle ::Probably not. -- User:Tim Starling 15:01 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :: I don't know if it matters if he means any harm. He is profiting off of our work (his site contains links to bookstores where he gets a cut). So, I would say he owes wikipedia some money, and he definately needs to either release those articles under the GFDL, or remove them. I'm just trying to cover our bases just in case. User:Mbecker 15:05 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) :: If Malaspina had simply noted that the bios were released under the GFDL (with the appropriate text), then nobody would owe anybody any money. Thus I doubt that we can get any from the site just because those notices weren't there (but IANAL). And given the links to Wikipedia, I believe that Great Books acted in good faith. We just need to point out the correct way to use the GFDL. -- User:Toby Bartels 15:50 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) Note: This has been posted to wikiEN-L, so there may be discussion there that can't be found here. -- User:Toby Bartels 15:50 8 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Old business== En garde. Having started the process of improving (as I think!) the organization of G's scientific work in the article (still missing a couple of categories), I'm looking at the physics. I modified the reference to experimental work in "dynamics", because Galileo's approach to the science of motion was kinetic, not dynamic. That is, he studied how things move, without developing any theory of the ''forces'' acting on them. Is this non-neutral? Maybe it needs some expansion and due hedging in the article. If you can find examples of his emphasizing the causation of motion by forces (as Descartes and Newton did), please cite. Copy to René Descartes, please, since he considered ''Two New Sciences'' to be of little value precisely because it didn't speak of the "causes" of motion. Likewise, if anyone can find a sense in which G's work in physics "paved the way" for Kepler's, please explain. Even chronologically, it's hard for work published in 1638 to have paved the way for someone who had died 8 years before. (G had done experiments 30 years earlier; but they were unpublished to such an extent that their very existence was disputed during much of the 20th century.) Galileo, to be sure, is the sort of subject that can hardly be named without starting a flame war. (At least one can walk into a Galileo clinic without fear of being shot down.) A weighing of contrary views is necessary, and it is not always easy to know what is actually controversial and what is Flat-Earth stuff. It will be no secret that I consider some aspects of Galileo's life and works to be less controversial than some people do. But need we hedge and double-hedge everything? "... is often credited with being one of the first..." Perhaps the matter of being ''one of'' the first can be established on the same sort of basis as Thomas Jefferson's being one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. The moderates might say that G is "widely believed" to have been one of the first to exploit the experimental method and to insist on mathematical descriptions; while the radicals will say he is "generally" believed to be that. But until someone shows who ''doesn't'' believe that G was "one of" the first, I incline to a still more radical view: he ''was'' one of the first. In fact, I know who might dispute the point: an expert in the history of science in Islamic civilzation. I personally woud be delighted to see a serious presentation of experimental and quantitative work in physics in the great age of Islam. Then we could present this point accurately and not vaguely, with a link to real information on earlier work. Till then—till we get something better than the irrelevant screed that an anonymous one-shot contributor put in History of physics recently, and briefly— we're stuck with the European historical record we've got. (Will the Chinese now pick up the gauntlet? All the better.)
User:Dandrake 23:02 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) ---- Being a newcomer, I have only recently got around to reading the Archives in any detail. It would be uncool to revive all the slanging matches from whenever that was— yeah, I can read the archive history, but it sure is nice now that people are sometimes signing and dating their entries— but there's a pretty remarkable amount of stuff that ignores facts, goes against that which can be established on firm evidence (if you don't like the word "facts") or simply ignores the possibility of establishing anything on firm evidence. The latter is particularly unfortunate in an encyclopedia. So here, in honor of Leo Szilard, whose posthumous memoirs use the term, is "my version of the facts" relevant to stuff that at this moment is in the Archives. In Archive 1 we find "When Galileo was defending the copernican model, it was not scientifically superior to the Ptolemaic system. Copernicus still tried to use circular orbits, and as they failed, had to use epicycles and other resources of Ptolemaic kinematics. Only after Kepler's work (that was largely ignored by Galilei) was incorporated in the theory, and Newton's law of gravity gave a sound physical basis to the whole system, was the heliocentric model undoubtedly superior." When ''Galileo'' was defending the Copernican model, it was already superior, or at least sufficiently arguably superior to be worthy of serious and unfettered argument. There is no need to give an inch on this point. It was arguably not superior in Copernicus's time, and I stress "arguably". Now why would anyone assume that ''nothing'' relevant had been discovered in the interim? The popular stuff on Galileo is full of things that supposedly bore on the argument, and the anti-Galileo crew like to argue about them (speciously); so it's hard to see how anyone can claim ignorance here. Conveniently, the Galileo article now contains some brief comments on how new astronomical discoveries affected the argument. I see in a later post, "Sunspots? No one even knew about sunspots' existence, much less their motions, until 1612, and Kepler had put forth elements for an elliptical orbit of Mars in 1609, with the other planets following thereafter, so there wasn't any time for an early Copernican system to explain sunspots. User:Shimmin " What Kepler has to do with it is not obvious. What is perfectly obvious is that the status of the argument for heliocentrism in Copernicus's time is irrelevant to the merits of the case for which Galileo was put on trial. We also find, 'Also, despite what is said, the Church did not approve the Ptolemaic system as real. It simply stated that both were simply devices to predict positions. It was Galileo who tried to force an acceptance of the Copernican system as "real."' Well, "...that the earth moves around the sun and that the sun stands still in the center of the universe without motion from east to west is contrary to Sacred Scripture..." This is Cardinal (Saint) Bellarmine, letter to Galileo, 1616. What part of ''contrary to Sacred Scripture'' don't you understand? Or are we to believe that the Church held to Scripture only as a convenient device, not as describing reality? Bellarmine did believe that it should be permissible to teach Copernican ideas as a convenient device. In this, the man who burned Bruno was a moderate; the Dominicans wanted Copernican ideas banned absolutely. But at no time during the controversy did he or the Church treat the moving sun and immobile earth as a mere device. Whether Galileo went too far in asserting the truth of heliocentrism is another question, but maybe not one of any significance to the Galileo article.
Submitted by dandrake, whose login had, curse the hasty timeouts in this system, expired before the Save page button had been hit-- User:209.204.169.149 02:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Recanation and sentence== Making some effort to keep this to things that could be relevant to the improvement (or maintenance) of the quality of the article, and not wanting to turn it into a general debating society: Ed Poor asked, and this surely is relevant to what the entry ought to say,
What exactly was he "forced to recant"? The mobility of the earth? What were the terms of the "life-long house arrest" and when did it start? Was he guarded, told not to leave his estate, or what?And I don't think this has been clearly answered. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1630galileo.html has the full text of the recantation, along with the indictment and other things. (Since they don't cite a printed source. I've briefly checked that text against a scholarly printed source, and it's good.) Excerpts: "...I, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the Earth was not the centre of the same and that it moved, and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine; and after having received a notification that the said doctrine is contrary to Holy Writ, ..." and later, "...wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies,..." So, yes, he did have to recant the motion of the earth and its orbiting the sun and all that. The house arrest is, I think, well described in ''Galileo's Daughter''. It started the moment he was sentenced. At first he couldn't even go home: he was required to stay and do penance during some months at the home of the archbishop of Siena. Actually that was a good thing, as the archbishop was a very friendly host. In general, his sentence was far from imprisonment in a dungeon, and he was, most of the time, not ill-treated. But it ''was'' house arrest: a famous example is that when he wanted to go to see a doctor when suffering from a hernia, he couldn't do that without formal permission. And he didn't get permission. As to his sentence, there is one point on which the article is not hostile ''enough'' to the Inquisition. I don't want to rewrite the whole Inquisition section—too much work, when White is unreliable and his critics are all wet, in my extremely humble opinion—but if anyone did, this would have to get proper treatment and not the passing mention I put in a few days ago: Publication of any and all of Galileo's books was banned. Not just the ''Dialogue'', but everything he had written before, and anything he might write in the future, regardless of any possible relevance to the Faith. This was done essentially in secret, and Galileo didn't even find out about it till later, when he wanted to publish a book on physics. Any revision of our ideas of whether the Inquisition worked to suppress the advancement of learning will have to include this.
User:Dandrake 04:26 22 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Galileo's lack of judgment?== I make the obligatory claim that the following entry is not just my bit of a society-wide flame war, but a matter relevant to the contents of the article: the entry on Galileo treats of Galileo and the Inquisition; it should do so; who did what to whom, and on what basis, is relevant to that treatment; certain things are asserted in that matter which can be checked against evidence. In an unsigned comment that I won't take the trouble to track in the page history, /Archive 1 contains this text:
'"Lack of judgment" might be a bit strong, but if you actually read the Diologio[''sic''], you will understand exactly what whoever said that is talking about. It was more than a scientific treatise; it was also a rather vicious satire.'
NPOV time: I have read it, more than once, and I find no such thing at all. To be sure, the thing I read was a mere translation (the only full modern English translation there is); but then, the translator, having read the original Italian, also perceived no such thing [personal communication]. Going on, 'The speaker in the dialogue who represents the Aristotelean viewpoint is named Simplico (meaning buffoon or simpleton),...' This flat assertion could be made only by one entirely ignorant of the classical philosopher Simplicius. This isn't some profound obscurity dug up by Galileo's apologists to twist his meaning. Simplicius was well known and much admired around 1600, by people like Colombe and Cremonini (widely regarded as the real-life models for Simplicio). The young Galileo studied his work. By the way, ''does'' it mean simpleton in Italian? I'm not an expert and don't happen to have a good dictionary handy, but I note that Babelfish never heard of simplicio, and the word for simple is semplice with an e. Now, you may argue that Galileo was making a wicked pun here. Great, go ahead and ''argue'' it. Just don't omit relevant facts to hoodwink the non-specialists into thinking it's simple and indisputable. Picking up, 'and this character is not only portrayed as a fool, but at many points directly parodies various church officials. For example, his final lines are a direct quote from Urban VIII...'
Two problems here: "many" and "parodies". The example given is the one that's always given, and I'd like to see a few of the others. And it's not a parody: it's what Galileo was directly ordered to insert in the text in order to get the license to publish the book. Church authorities claimed he hadn't put ''enough'' in. Now, you or I might think that if we're ordered to insert the Church's official view, it would make sense to deliver it through the character who represents the conventional view throughout. And we might think it wise to give the Church the very last word. (Well, Salviati gets to express his approval of this "admirable and angelic doctrine", and even expand on it a little bit; that's pretty much like the last word, IMHO.) But when Galileo does it, it's a nasty satire? It is widely believed (I'm not sure of the documents here) that the Pope ''thought'' he was being mocked. But his opinion on Galileo's intentions is not more conclusive than another man's, assuming that he was not speaking ''ex cathedra''. There is not a shred of positive evidence of Galileo's having such an intention: nothing in G's papers, no dark hints in the words of anybody who knew him, nothing. It's one opinion, and not an opinion generally held, now or in Galileo's lifetime. By the way, if a book really and clearly insulted the Pope, do you think it likely that his nephew would take a moderate line and even vote against the Inquisition's sentence? User:Dandrake 19:52 22 Jul 2003 (UTC) ==Brecht== Brecht wrote a play in which the main character is called "Galileo". It is, I suppose, no reflection on Brecht's thought or ethics that the play has little resemblance to the life of Galileo Galilei, because his theory of drama didn't have much to do with historical realism. But to apply the word "knowledge" to anything derived from that play is a bit much, so I de-applied it. User:Dandrake 02:04 23 Jul 2003 (UTC) ---- To user 210.54.108.162:
You appear to be a serious contributor (from your New Zealand edits), and you'd be welcome to discuss the question whether the Pope's position is a copout. But since that opinion is by no means universally held, simply dropping the word into a paragraph is not really NPOV at all. User:Dandrake 06:56, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC) ==Cannonballs== ----Isn't it true that *Galileo never actually performed the canonball experiment from Pisa (ambiguous here, contradicted at Classical mechanics)? ::Well, the author of the Classical Mechanics piece seems to accept that the experiment was performed; but one can find plenty of people to assert the contrary. Hence this article's position that it is "not generally believed", which is about as weak as one can get. I really don't know on what grounds anyone positively asserts that it was not performed; grounds to believe that it ''was'' are in the article. User:Dandrake 07:43, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC) *Galileo was actually in deeper trouble for proposing the immutablity of atoms, which irritated those who believed it contradicted with transubstantiation, and the Pope allowed him to confess to a lesser offense as a plea bargin? ::There is a book about that, ''Galileo Heretic''. The theory is surely even further from being unanimously accepted than the story of the cannonballs. As far as I know, the charges filed against Galileo made no mention of atomism, but treated only of heliocentrism. The bargaining between the hierarchy and Galileo didn't start till after the charges were filed, and Galileo (after being examined under oath) had raised a very strong defense against a major part of the charges. If there's any evidence of atomism coming up in the bargaining or in the trial or in the preparation of the charges (working backwards here), someone should present that. ::Though Galileo showed a good deal of sympathy for ideas of atoms as proposed in classic times, I know of nothing at all in his work, published and unpublished, that would support an inference that the miracle of the Eucharist could not be real. There still may be something somewhere; maybe someone can help out here. But is there anything in the Vatican records to support the idea that powerful officials were concerned about Galileo's position on this? Contrast this with the treatment of Copernican ideas, which were attacked early and often after 1610, at all levels in the hierarchy; Vatican records from 1616 and 1632 make it quite clear that the Popes of those times had a strong position on the matter. User:Dandrake 07:43, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC) I don't remember any references to these two statements, unfortunately. User:Paullusmagnus 14:53, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC) ==Satellite observation== Hi! I've added a pic of a Galileo publication to the article. If you click on the pic, you get what the source says is a translation of the manuscript. Since I don't know any Italian, can anyone say if the translation ''is'' of that manuscript? Thanks.
User:Arpingstone 10:58, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC) :The English text is definitely from the Sidereus Nuncius. The manuscript page isn't clear enough to be checked against the text by a person whose knowledge of Italian is below rudimentary; but I've found a reference for the page. It's Galileo's first known notes on observing moons of Jupiter, from January 7, 1610, jotted down at the bottom of an old draft of a letter. See ''Galileo at Work'', p. 149. This was a few days before he recognized them as moons; here they're perceived as three tiny stars in an odd configuration. :So the caption is not strictly right. We should probably give a translation of the actual text of the page. That's not hard to get, but I probably can't do anything till next week. User:Dandrake 21:14, Dec 16, 2003 (UTC) ::Just a minor point but I'm not sure why you say the words are not clear on the manuscript. Perhaps you didn't notice that I provided a Larger Version link at the bottom of the caption? The manuscript is then very readable (IMHO). ::User:Arpingstone 22:07, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC) :::Just meant that for me to make out the words, with a less than rudimentary knowledge of Italian, it would have to be really crystal-clear, preferably reduced to type! Anyway, I can probably dig out a usable translation next week.User:Dandrake 03:55, Dec 18, 2003 (UTC) ::::Apologies for misunderstanding you. ::::User:Arpingstone 09:26, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC) ==Secret Societies== Did anyone know that Galileo was the head of the Illuminati, one of the most famous anti-church/pro-science organisations in those days? There is a book named Angels & Demons (German title: Illuminati) by Dan Brown which deals with a plot of the Illuminati order against the Catholic Church. No, I didn't know it, and I see no reason to believe it. Since there was no particular connection in that time between anti-church and pro-science, it would be interesting to see any evidence of an anti-church position on Galileo's part. The documentary evidence, in things like his letters and his friends' letters, points the other way. User:Dandrake 00:13, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC) *Last I checked, Dan Brown writes fiction, anyway. --User:Fastfission 02:33, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC) ==Footnotes== Footnotes are, for me, one of the most vexatious subjects in Wikipedia. We can't agree on a single standard; there's no way of auto-hyperlinking them; and of course hardly anyone uses them because it's more fun to free-associate what I think I know than to document how I know it. But for this article, since we're trying to make one that's well founded in what's known, would anyone mind if the style gets changed consistently to one that's more maintainable?? What I have in mind is to replace the [1] [2] [3] system, which would be fine if it created hyperlinks, with the bulky scientific style; e.g., (Einstein, 1905) referring to an alphabetical list of documents at the end. The [4] style has drawbacks in maintainability and in conflicting with the [] notation for non-Wikipedia hypelinks. Reactions? Better ideas? The suggestion needs a little time to settle down, especially with watchlists diabled today. User:Dandrake 19:50, Jan 10, 2004 (UTC) Just to illustrate the point
If I drive occassionally, does that mean I'm a professional driver? No.
If I put ice in a cup of water, does that mean I'm a chemist? No.
If I sing in the shower, does that mean I'm a singer? No.
If I construct a wooden doll house for my daughter, does that mean I'm a carpenter? No.
To the anonymous ones, if you think your "vote" means anything, register an account and sign your username. User:Adraeus 20:58, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC) ===Looks like we have consensus=== Alright, let's edit the article to include some of this info. Who'll step up to the plate first? User:Quadell – User:Quadell (User_talk:Quadell) (User:Quadell/Request for assistance)