Reading Galileo

Reading Galileo
Author: Renée Raphael
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-03-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 142142178X

How did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential Two New Sciences? In 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, Two New Sciences. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In Reading Galileo, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of Two New Sciences which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonical vision. Raphael alleges that it was written—and originally read—as the eclectic product of the types of discursive textual analysis and meandering descriptive practices Galileo professed to reject in favor of more qualitative scholarship. Focusing on annotations period readers left in the margins of extant copies and on the notes and teaching materials of seventeenth-century university professors whose lessons were influenced by Galileo’s text, Raphael explores the ways in which a range of early-modern readers, from ordinary natural philosophers to well-known savants, responded to Galileo. She highlights the contrast between the practices of Galileo’s actual readers, who followed more traditional, “bookish” scholarly methods, and their image, constructed by Galileo and later historians, as “modern” mathematical experimenters. Two New Sciences has not previously been the subject of such rigorous attention and analysis. Reading Galileo considerably changes our understanding of Galileo’s important work while offering a well-executed case study in the reception of an early-modern scientific classic. This important text will be of interest to a wide range of historians—of science, of scholarly practices and the book, and of early-modern intellectual and cultural history.

God and Galileo

God and Galileo
Author: David L. Block
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2019-05-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1433562928

"A devastating attack upon the dominance of atheism in science today." Giovanni Fazio, Senior Physicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics The debate over the ultimate source of truth in our world often pits science against faith. In fact, some high-profile scientists today would have us abandon God entirely as a source of truth about the universe. In this book, two professional astronomers push back against this notion, arguing that the science of today is not in a position to pronounce on the existence of God—rather, our notion of truth must include both the physical and spiritual domains. Incorporating excerpts from a letter written in 1615 by famed astronomer Galileo Galilei, the authors explore the relationship between science and faith, critiquing atheistic and secular understandings of science while reminding believers that science is an important source of truth about the physical world that God created.

I, Galileo

I, Galileo
Author: Bonnie Christensen
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 41
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0307974405

Acclaimed author-illustrator Bonnie Christensen adopts the voice of Galileo and lets him tell his own tale in this outstanding picture book biography. The first person narration gives this book a friendly, personal feel that makes Galileo's remarkable achievements and ideas completely accessible to young readers. And Christensen's artwork glows with the light of the stars he studied. Galileo's contributions were so numerous—the telescope! the microscope!—and his ideas so world-changing—the sun-centric solar system!—that Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern science." But in his own time he was branded a heretic and imprisoned in his home. He was a man who insisted on his right to pursue the truth, no matter what the cost—making his life as interesting and instructive as his ideas.

Along Came Galileo

Along Came Galileo
Author: Jeanne Bendick
Publisher: Beautiful Feet Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 99
Release: 1999-06-01
Genre: Astronomers
ISBN: 9781893103016

Story of a man who had the courage to ask questions.

Galileo

Galileo
Author: Clarice Swisher
Publisher: Greenhaven Press, Incorporated
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780737706703

Because of Galileo's courageous campaign to change the methods of doing science, physicist Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern physics--indeed, of modern science altogether." A devout Catholic who wanted the church to maintain its authority and wisdom, Galileo worked tirelessly to persuade the church authorities to stop insisting that the sun revolved around a stationary earth, when there was evidence to prove otherwise. Galileo's persistence led to the Inquisition trying and sentencing him for heresy in 1633.

Galileo's Middle Finger

Galileo's Middle Finger
Author: Alice Dreger
Publisher: Penguin Books
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0143108115

"Galileo's Middle Finger is historian Alice Dreger's eye-opening story of life in the trenches of scientific controversy. Dreger's chronicle begins with her own research into the treatment of people born intersex (once called hermaphrodites). Realization of the shocking surgical and ethical abuses conducted in the name of "normalizing" intersex children's gender identities moved Dreger to become an internationally recognized patient rights activist. But even as the intersex rights movement succeeded, Dreger began to realize how some fellow activists were using lies and personal attacks to silence scientisis whose data revealed uncomfortable truths about humans. In researching one case, Dreger suddenly became a target of just these kinds of attacks. Troubled, she decided to try to understand more -- to travel the country and seek a global view of the nature and costs of these damaging battles. Galileo's Middle Finger describes Dreger's long and harrowing journeys between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice activists determined to win and researchers determined to put hard truths before comfort. What emerges is a lesson about the intertwining of justice and truth-- and about the importance of responsible scholars and journalists to our fragile democracy." --

Who Was Galileo?

Who Was Galileo?
Author: Patricia Brennan Demuth
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2015-02-05
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0448479850

Like Michelangelo, Galileo is another Renaissance great known just by his first name--a name that is synonymous with scientific achievement. Born in Pisa, Italy, in the sixteenth century, Galileo contributed to the era's great rebirth of knowledge. He invented a telescope to observe the heavens. From there, not even the sky was the limit! He turned long-held notions about the universe topsy turvy with his support of a sun-centric solar system. Patricia Brennan Demuth offers a sympathetic portrait of a brilliant man who lived in a time when speaking scientific truth to those in power was still a dangerous proposition.

Galileo's Reading

Galileo's Reading
Author: Crystal Hall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-12-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107047552

This book argues the importance of Galileo's reading and engagement with a range of writers to the shaping of early modern philosophy.

Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature

Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature
Author: Joseph C. Pitt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2013-11-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401126208

Galileo is revered as one of the founders of modern science primarily because of such discoveries as the law of falling bodies and the moons of Jupiter. In addition to his scientific achievements, Professor Pitt argues that Galileo deserves increased attention for his contributions to the methodology of the new science and that his method retains its value even today. In a detailed analysis of Galileo's mature works, Pitt reconstructs crucial features of Galileo's epistemology. He shows how Galileo's methodological insights grow out of an appreciation of the limits of human knowledge and he brings fresh insight to our concept of Galileo's methodology and its implications for contemporary debates. Working from Galileo's insistence on the contrast between the number of things that can be known and the limited abilities of human knowers, Pitt shows how Galileo's common sense approach to rationality permits the development of a robust scientific method. At the same time, Pitt argues that we should correct our picture of Galileo, the culture hero. Instead of seeing him as a martyr to the cause of truth, Galileo is best understood as a man of his times who was responding to a variety of social pressures during a period of intellectual and political turmoil. This book will be of interest to philosophers and to historians and sociologists of science as well as to a general readership interested in the scientific revolution.