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Cambridge Science Biographies
Galileo: Decisive Innovator
In this entertaining and authoritative biography, first published in 1994, Michael Sharratt examines the flair, imagination, hard-headedness, clarity, combativeness and penetrating intelligence of Galileo Galilei. To follow Galileo's career as he exploited unforeseen opportunities to unseat established ways of comprehending nature is to understand a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo was a pathbreaker for the newly-invented telescope, the decoder of nature's mathematical language and a quite brilliant popularizer of science. Even his reluctant excursion into theology has at last been officially and handsomely recognized by the Church's "rehabilitation" of the Inquisition's most famous victim, fully discussed in the last chapter. This book makes his lasting contributions accessible to nonscientists and his mistakes are not overlooked. This is not a mythical story, but the biography of an innovator--one of the greatest ever known.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 13, 2025
The best thing you take away from this work - scribed by a Roman Catholic father - is the factional battles the Roman Catholic Church were undergoing wherein Galileo - a hero by anyone's estimate - brashly sets forth with thoughts like (in effect) "I see it, therefore, it must be." The Church was already far out of its Patristic Father-mode by the time Galileo was born, and it was ripe for change.
But, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for conceiving of other worlds with other persons on it (derived from Aristarchus, and today, well conceived) not much earlier than when Galileo set out to benchmark the concentric universe, one hard, semi-correct step out of the dizzying world of cycles and epicycles at a time. But Galileo, it seems, in the face of massive bureaucratic religious opposition, had luck, and allies.
The telling thing is that the Church (not the state, per se) of Rome had many adherents of Galileo INSIDE, and that the sitting pope who "condemned" him (to his estate, wines, etc., if only he'd renounce what he said about concentric orbits) was on his side. He HAD to be. Otherwise, his fate would've been close to if not exactly that of Bruno's. The book Galileo supported was banned officially by the Church until the late 1800s - Copernicus's. His own work reflected the Pole's, and legal questioning as to his intent in his work tripped him up, such that he had to confess he adhered to what was then heretical thinking.
So the drama of Galileo-vs.-the implacable Roman Catholic Church was perhaps less dramatic than it appears. What will never go away, however, is clerical official acceptance vs. that of the open, free thinker - be that "clerisy" religious, academic, or governmental. This is even the case in the USA, howsoever powerful the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution be. Formal bodies are bureaucracies and self-protect; unofficial acceptance of what free thinkers conceive may exist within them - or, be clinically unaccepted due to things such as "fault in scholarship," "out of date" concepts (as if truth is a fashion item subject to whimsical vogue) etc.
These juicy nuggets aside, we learn of a man who bore the brunt of his family's debt by his inventiveness for military applications for items (and not just the telescope) for actual cash in an Italy that was at war most of the time. He had adaptations for projectile accuracy, for example, that were sellable - sort of like his Italian forebear, Da Vinci. His professorships at Pisa and Padua are detailed, and his leaning towards Copernicus's concentric planetary view the Pole had revived from classical Greece. There are his takes on basic force and acceleration that leant credence to Newton's revised laws of motion many years hence. His seminal work on sun studies are detailed, as well, always with the appropriate footnotes to actual letters, diaries, books and other apocrypha.
But, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for conceiving of other worlds with other persons on it (derived from Aristarchus, and today, well conceived) not much earlier than when Galileo set out to benchmark the concentric universe, one hard, semi-correct step out of the dizzying world of cycles and epicycles at a time. But Galileo, it seems, in the face of massive bureaucratic religious opposition, had luck, and allies.
The telling thing is that the Church (not the state, per se) of Rome had many adherents of Galileo INSIDE, and that the sitting pope who "condemned" him (to his estate, wines, etc., if only he'd renounce what he said about concentric orbits) was on his side. He HAD to be. Otherwise, his fate would've been close to if not exactly that of Bruno's. The book Galileo supported was banned officially by the Church until the late 1800s - Copernicus's. His own work reflected the Pole's, and legal questioning as to his intent in his work tripped him up, such that he had to confess he adhered to what was then heretical thinking.
So the drama of Galileo-vs.-the implacable Roman Catholic Church was perhaps less dramatic than it appears. What will never go away, however, is clerical official acceptance vs. that of the open, free thinker - be that "clerisy" religious, academic, or governmental. This is even the case in the USA, howsoever powerful the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution be. Formal bodies are bureaucracies and self-protect; unofficial acceptance of what free thinkers conceive may exist within them - or, be clinically unaccepted due to things such as "fault in scholarship," "out of date" concepts (as if truth is a fashion item subject to whimsical vogue) etc.
These juicy nuggets aside, we learn of a man who bore the brunt of his family's debt by his inventiveness for military applications for items (and not just the telescope) for actual cash in an Italy that was at war most of the time. He had adaptations for projectile accuracy, for example, that were sellable - sort of like his Italian forebear, Da Vinci. His professorships at Pisa and Padua are detailed, and his leaning towards Copernicus's concentric planetary view the Pole had revived from classical Greece. There are his takes on basic force and acceleration that leant credence to Newton's revised laws of motion many years hence. His seminal work on sun studies are detailed, as well, always with the appropriate footnotes to actual letters, diaries, books and other apocrypha.
June 12, 2008
Basically a defense of the catholic church's misdeeds.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews