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Lesson 32 |
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Galileo reborn |
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What has modified our traditional view of Galileo in recent times? |
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In his own lifetime Galileo was the centre of violent controversy, but the scientific dust has long since settled, |
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and today we can see even his famous clash with the Inquisition in something like its proper perspective. |
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But, in contrast, it is only in modern times that Galileo has become a problem child for historians of science. |
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The old view of Galileo was delightfully uncomplicated. |
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He was, above all, a man who experimented: |
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who despised the prejudice and book learning of the Aristotelians, |
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who put his questions to nature instead of to the ancients, and who drew his conclusions fearlessly. |
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He had been the first to turn a telescope to the sky, |
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and he had seen there evidence enough to overthrow Aristotle and Ptolemy together. |
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He was the man who climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped various weights from the top, |
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who rolled balls down inclined planes, |
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and then generalized the results of his many experiments into the famous law of free fall. |
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But a closer study of the evidence, |
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supported by a deeper sense of the period, and particularly by a new consciousness of the philosophical undercurrents in the scientific revolution, |
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has profoundly modified this view of Galileo. |
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Today, although the old Galileo lives on in many popular writings, |
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among historians of science a new and more sophisticated picture has emerged. |
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At the same time our sympathy for Galileo's opponents has grown somewhat. |
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His telescopic observations are justly immortal; |
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they aroused great interest at the time, |
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they had important theoretical consequences, |
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and they provided a striking demonstration of the potentialities hidden in instruments and apparatus. |
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But can we blame those who looked and failed to see what Galileo saw, |
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if we remember that to use a telescope at the limit of its powers calls for long experience and intimate familiarity with one's instrument? |
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Was the philosopher who refused to look through Galileo's telescope more culpable than those who alleged |
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that the spiral nebulae observed with Lord Rosse's great telescope in the 1840s were scratches left by the grinder? |
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|
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as for centuries before, curved glass was the popular contrivance for producing not truth but illusion, untruth; |
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and if a single curved glass would distort nature, how much more would a pair of them? |