Dava Sobel - Galileos Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

Opera grew out of their efforts, officially flowering in Florence in 1600 with the first performance of Euridice.

Then, as now, astrology depended on precise determinations of the positions of the wandering stars against the fixed, in order to divine the course of human events. Astronomy, which was limited in Galileos youth to mathematical analysis of planetary motions, expanded during his lifetime to include the structure and origin of all heavenly bodies.

Indeed, as any amateur astronomer today knows, stars twinkle whereas planets shine with a steady light.

Although Kepler erred here, two moons did turn up in telescopic views of Mars more than two centuries later, when Asaph Hall at the U.S. Naval Observatory detected the Martian satellites he named Phobos and Deimos.

This is the actual speed of the Earths rotation at the Equator. Its speed of revolution about the sun exceeds seventy thousand miles per hour.

Modern astronomers define a nova as the sudden dramatic brightening of an otherwise unseen star. What Galileo saw in 1604 would today be termed a supernovathe fireball explosion of a dying star.

Given the longevity of the council, its membership naturally changed considerably over the years, while ultimate approval of its decisions passed from Paul III to Julius III to Pius IV.

His successor, Sir Isaac Newton, born the year Galileo died (1642), dignified the idea of action at a distance in 1687 when he published his law of universal gravitation. In fact, the Moons gravity would create tides in the Earths oceans even if the Earth itself did not rotate or revolve.

No clear, close-up view of any comet could be obtained until 1986, when several spacecraft observed Halleys comet during its recent return. Images revealed the body to be a dark clump of icy debrisa dirty snowball"that sprouts a great head and tail of glowing gas and dust whenever its highly elliptical orbit carries it near the Sun.

This was the Latinized name of thirteenth-century English astronomer John of Holywood, who authored the influential textbook Sphere of Sacrobosco.

Galileo read and admired the 1600 opus De magnete by English scientist William Gilbert (1544-1603).

In 1838, German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel finally discerned annual parallax for the star called 61 Cygni, thus demonstrating the Earths orbital motion and gauging the greatness of the distance to even the nearest stars.

Galileos efforts here increased his familiarity with clockwork and helped lead him to his invention, some ten years later in 1641, of a prototype pendulum clock. Vincenzio helped his father by drawing a blueprint and building a model, but the work was never completed by either of them. When Christiaan Huygens later patented a pendulum clock in Amsterdam in 1656, Galileos followers accused Huygens, albeit unjustly, of plagiarism.

Galileo had tried to attach himself to the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga at Mantua, in 1603, but the salary the duke offered him fell short of his professors pay at Padua, so he stayed put until he secured a better position with the Medici.

The microbe was finally identified in 1894 by French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin of the Pasteur Institute.

Torricelli (1608-47) is remembered today as the inventor, in 1643, of the barometer.

Rondinellis book, Report on the Contagion in Florence During the Years 1630 and 1633, was published in 1634, the year after the epidemic ended in a miracle.

Her cousin Vincenzio Landucci had apparently found some pretext for filing a lawsuit against Galileo.

Even today, the Madonna is kept hidden during ordinary times. Visitors to the Impruneta church, which was rebuilt following bomb hits during World War II, must content themselves with simply being near the icon, as it reposes inside a marble shrine, behind a blue gilt-embroidered curtain.

Galileos last book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences indeed ignited later physicists: Sir Isaac Newton transformed Galileos ideas into laws of motion and universal gravitation.

The English translations of these Latin phrases, respectively, are from the book of the living and No one is accepted [as] prophet in his own country.

Later, Galileo thanked him by dedicating Two New Sciences To the very illustrious nobleman, my Lord the Count de Noailles, Councilor to his Most Christian Majesty; Knight of the Holy Ghost; Field Marshal of the Armies, et cetera, et cetera.

Posterity completely agrees with Galileo in this assessment of his merits. As Albert Einstein noted, Propositions arrived at purely by logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physicsindeed of modern science altogether.

Galileo invented a rudimentary thermometer, around 1593, for approximating room temperature, but it took until 1714 for Daniel Fahrenheit to improve on the device by sealing mercury in glass and marking the tube with a degree scale calibrated by the freezing and boiling points of water.

In 1644, in his prose polemic Areopagitica defending freedom of the press, Milton wrote: I have sat among their learned men and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while they themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits, that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner of the Inquisition.

It remained thus hidden until the start of the space age, when the unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radioed the first views of the Moons far side from lunar orbit in 1959.

Pisan tour guides to this day point out Galileos lamp, though the cathedral contains at least a dozen likely candidates, and the designated attraction was installed in 1587, after Galileo reportedly experienced his epiphany in 1582. Regardless, all lamps swing in obedience to the same laws of physics Galileo discerned.

When Urban died on July 29, 1644, the people of Rome expressed their resentment of his last expensive war, begun in Castro in 1641, by demolishing a statue of him in the courtyard of the Collegio Romano. The pope died at quarter past eleven, a diarist noted, and by noon the statue was no more. The Thirty Years War, which had raged on despite Urbans interventions, finally ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.

Within one more generation, the great chain of government that had dominated Tuscanys political structure since the fourteenth century would die out with the last Medici grand duke, Gian Gastone, in 1737.

DAVA SOBEL

GALILEOS

DAUGHTER

A Historical

Memoir of Science,

faith, and love

Most of the quotes attributed to Galileo in these pages have been drawn from various excellent English translations by MaryAllan-Olney, Mario Biagioli, Richard Blackwell, Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, Giorgio de Santillana, Stillman Drake, MauriceFinocchiaro, Maria Luisa Righini Bonnelli, William Shea, Jane Sturge, and Albert Van Helden. Stillman Drake merits particularmention and gratitude for having translated every one of Galileos major works into English.