People/Galileo Galilei: Difference between revisions
add Link
(Creating People/Galileo Galilei) |
(add Link) |
||
| (3 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{#description2:True Earth/Flat Earth/Galileo Galilei}}
== Galileo Galilei ==
{{Bio
Line 6 ⟶ 7:
| died = 8 January 1642 (aged 77)<br>Arcetri, Grand Duchy of Tuscany
| education = University of Pisa
| known for = Heretic, Analytical dynamics, heliocentrism, kinematics, observational astronomy
| fields = Astronomy, physics, engineering, natural philosophy, mathematics
| spouse = Sestilia Bocchineri
Line 20 ⟶ 21:
Galileo later defended his views in "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)", which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated both the Pope and the [[Agencies/Jesuits|Jesuits]], who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. During this time, he wrote "Two New Sciences (1638)", primarily concerning kinematics and the strength of materials, summarizing work he had done around forty years earlier.
Having fathered two illegitimate daughters with his long-time mistress (whom he eventually abandoned), the unconverted Galileo was hardly the example of a devout Catholic. Although Galileo took the girls with him to Florence, he soon found caring for them annoying and decided to send them to an impoverished convent. Because of this “irrepressible egotism” that led him to abandon them, at least one of the girls held an animosity toward him the rest of his life. It was the other daughter who, having become a nun, was chosen to read to Galileo the daily Psalms imposed upon him in his exile as penance by Pope Urban VIII.
===Galileo's claims===
Galileo claimed to have invented the telescope, but Kepler and his colleagues knew it was available twenty years earlier from one of Galileo’s countrymen, Giovanni Della Porta. Records also show that spectacle-maker Johann Lippershey possessed a license to make telescopes by the mid-1580s. By April 1609 one could buy a telescope from shops in Paris, the same year that Galileo published that he was the first to see the moons of Jupiter, an event in history which is also in doubt since there is evidence that other sighters preceded Galileo, and that his brand of telescope was so small and clumsy it would have been hard to see Jupiter itself, let alone its "moons".
When Kepler pressed him to send the telescope so that his claims could be verified, Galileo gave him the typical ‘the-dog-ate-it’ excuse, claiming that he had “lent it to the Grand Duke for exhibition.” In his usual lack of gratitude, Galileo rarely mentions Kepler’s name in his books, and even those occasions are with the intent to refute him.
The book starts with a tirade against all who tried to rob Galileo “of the glory of his discoveries.”. His self-appointed monopoly on the sky is probably why Galileo also claimed to be the first to discover sunspots, but it was well known that the [[Agencies/Jesuits|Jesuits]] Johannes Farricius and Fr. Scheiner and his assistant Cysat had found the spots earlier, both of whom had published their findings.
Galileo’s deceit reached new heights in his confrontations with the Holy Office of the Catholic Church from 1616-1633. Prior to this, Galileo had made known his views of heliocentrism privately in a 1597 letter to Kepler, yet in a remarkable display of duplicity, in the intervening years between 1597 and up until 1613, he had been teaching against Copernicanism quite vigorously, complete with charts and graphs. A 1606 manuscript of his musings still survives today. Galileo was in a constant whirlwind: saying one thing and doing another, and doing one thing and saying another.
Suffice it to say, after giving him every grace and favor to treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, not fact, Galileo refused, claiming he had proof when, indeed, he had none at all. The Church hierarchy simply could not put up with his roguery any longer. His former confidant, Cardinal Barberini, later became Urban VIII, and, as pope, made it a point to condemn Galileo for lack of proof.
The most egregious fact about the pre-1641 Galileo is that at the time he was vigorously defending Copernicanism before the Holy Office in 1633, he knew even then the system didn’t work and that he had no substantial proof for it. Since he rejected Kepler’s elliptical orbits (although he used Kepler’s material whenever it was to his advantage, and claimed it as his own), and refused any compromise with the [[Agencies/Jesuits|Jesuits]] who were going over to Brahe’s geocentric model, he was stuck with Copernicus’ forty-eight epicycles, yet he advertised the model as one that bypassed the earlier mechanical problems “with one single motion of the earth.” It is obvious that either Galileo was lying or he never read Copernicus’ book.
Galileo that the Church would not even consider changing its position on the cosmos unless Galileo could provide proof of his claims. In one of his more audacious moves, Galileo tried to prove his case by a strange concoction of theory and conjecture on the nature of tidal action. Having rejected as “occultish” Kepler’s explanation that the combination of the sun’s and moon’s gravity caused the daily tides, Galileo, even knowing that his own explanation could not be physically possible, nevertheless, to save his prestige, tried to convince the Catholic prelates that tides were caused by the tilt of the earth’s axis and the earth’s monthly changes in orbital velocity. In addition, his theory addressed only a 24-hour tidal cycle, but even sailors knew, and reported to the common folk, that the tides alternated every 12 hours. Galileo then tried to explain the discrepancy by postulating that the ocean floor varied in depth.
All things considered, the unconverted Galileo was probably one of history’s better examples of a sophist and propagandist. Although his image is one of an empiricist who made no claims apart from experiment, scientifically speaking the pre-1641 Galileo was a bottom-feeder who often gloried in credit where no credit was due.
===Galileo caught in a lie===
Line 76 ⟶ 96:
What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.
</blockquote>
===Further reading===
* [https://christianobserver.net/the-private-lives-of-copernicus-kepler-galileo/ christianobserver.net The Private Lives of Copernicus, Kepler & Galileo – Occultists]
| |||