William Bixby > Quotes

“From Galileo’s discovery of the principle of the pendulum, a totally new concept of the design of timepieces evolved. But what proved even more significant than the discovery itself was his method of arriving at it -a system that today is called the scientific method.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“With these experiments, Galileo succeeded in unlocking the secret of uniformly accelerated motion. His theory was that the speed of an object increased the farther it fell, and, in addition, that the rate of increase was the same with each equal addition of distance. This was the phenomenon as Galileo described it: “A body is said to be uniformly accelerated when, starting from rest, it acquires equal increments of velocity during equal time intervals.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“Galileo and Kepler had succeeded in explaining how these bodies moved, but Newton became eager to know why. The question had gnawed at him for weeks on end. Then one moonlit night in 1666 while he was seated beneath a tree in the orchard of his Woolsthorpe farm, his meditations were jarred by the thud of an apple falling to the ground beside him. It was a commonplace occurrence, but coming when it did, it set off a chain of thoughts that enabled Newton eventually to answer all the remaining questions about the motion of planets and stars.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“The swing of a pendulum may be long or short, but as long as it swings, it invariably measures the same amount of time.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“Galileo named the four moons after four members of the Medici family: the brothers Cosimo II, Francesco, Carlo, and Lorenzo. News of Galileo’s discovery soon swept across Europe, arousing storms of furious debate. The French court, envious of the fact that immortality was being given the Medici, urged Galileo to search the heavens assiduously for another new star. If he found one, they asked that he call it the Grand Star of France.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“Newton understood that science began and ended with experiment and with correct conclusions drawn from experiments. This was why his approach was thought to be revolutionary and why so many men argued bitterly against it.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“One definition of genius is the infinite capacity for painstaking detail.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“In Rome, however, many of the strictest clerics seemed unconcerned - and were still reading Galileo’s works with interest. A number believed, in fact, that his writings were destined to be recognized as established truths.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“his spirit and intellect did not fail, and so he was able to continue his work almost to his last days by dictating his thoughts and theories to two of his loyal disciples. Finally, a slow fever overcame him. In 1642, when he was nearly seventy-eight, he died. The Roman Church still would not relax its judgment, and Galileo was buried in an unmarked grave.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“Galileo’s boldness in challenging accepted ideas earned him renown while he was at the University of Pisa but not among his fellow professors. The men who taught traditional physics rejected his radical ideas, but the class of intellectuals produced by the Renaissance eagerly grasped Galileo’s new knowledge.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“The first overt clerical attack took place in December 1614. Standing in the pulpit of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Father Thomas Caccini delivered a sermon that denounced mathematics as inconsistent with the Bible and detrimental to the State.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“Archimedes had discovered the truth about several important natural laws, but more significant - at least from Galileo’s standpoint - was Archimedes’s discovery of a way for a scientist to solve problems: first separating what he truly wants to solve from irrelevant externals and then attacking the core of the problem with boldness and imagination. Galileo realized that this approach was suitable for his own studies”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton

“His belief in God was absolute, and the God he believed in was “eternal and infinite; He is not duration and space, but He endures and is present.” Men like Galileo and Newton recognized instinctively that science has a limited claim on men. It does not limit or control those areas of man’s nature that are concerned with esthetics, morals, ethics, or religion. Galileo, as a man of the late Renaissance, was not only a scientist but an accomplished painter and musician. Newton in his last years remained influential in scientific circles, but he also devoted most of his time to theology.”
― William Bixby, Galileo and Newton