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I read this in print and it is an absolutely fascinating read. Take the time with your morning coffee or lunch to take your time with it. Here is another take:
What a fascinating read! It's kind of sad in some ways - the contrast between Galileo doing his work here in Padova, and modern Italy, with the guy spending a few months in jail and then being sentenced to house arrest in his villa after having put all that time and energy into deceit and theft.
Was anyone else thinking about The Ninth Gate as they began reading this piece? The globetrotting, talk of valuable books and masterful antiquarian knowledge, and slow but definite buildup of tension were the same. Anyone know of another film or book that has this same feel?
Excellent piece, worth reading to the end.
The book, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, comes to mind.
Foucault's Pendulum is best read as a satire. I wasn't told that it sort of was before I read it and found it maddening. The moment I realised Umberto Eco was mocking everybody who believed this stuff was important, it all made much more sense.
"Gingerich has examined nearly every extant first- and second-edition copy—six hundred in all—of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres."
That is a fascinating book; part history of science, part detective story and part bibliophile's wet dream: http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Nobody-Read-Revolutions/dp/B0...
> "In addition to offering insights on celestial movement, the book rebutted Aristotle, who had maintained that heavenly bodies were smooth and “perfect”; with his telescope, Galileo had also looked extensively at the Earth’s moon, and could see mountains and craters on its surface."
Surely you can see the moon's unevenness with the naked eye?
This is correct. But the belief in Aristotle's philosophy was even more powerful:
"The medieval followers of Aristotle, first in the Islamic world and then in Christian Europe, tried to make sense of the lunar spots in Aristotelian terms. Various possibilities were entertained. It had been suggested already in Antiquity that the Moon was a perfect mirror and that its markings were reflections of earthly features, but this explanation was easily dismissed because the face of the Moon never changes as it moves about the Earth. Perhaps there were vapors between the Sun and the Moon, so that the images were actually contained in the Sun's incident light and thus reflected to the Earth. The explanation that finally became standard was that there were variations of "density" in the Moon that caused this otherwise perfectly spherical body to appear the way it does. The perfection of the Moon, and therefore the heavens, was thus preserved."
That ... seems like a lot of effort to avoid facing up to the moon looking bumpy. And Aristotle? WTF dude, you saw the same thing!
I believe they were just considered to be blemishes, and as such not part of the shape. (Perhaps just a coating picked up from being too close to the earthly realm?) The telescope, however, showed that there were shadows that changed as the sun and moon changed positions, making it clear that the craters and mountains were actual structures.
Very interesting, I wanted some more info on the "Florence Sheet", but Google turned up nothing but this article (or references to it). That seems strange.
Mario Biagioli has written about it (I think the Google issue is just that historians usually call it "Galileo's Drawings of the Moon" or the like, rather than "the Florence sheet").
Here's Biagioli on it: http://books.google.fr/books?id=XfKjO9I47QUC&pg=PA145&dq=gal...