6. Vincenzio Viviani, Racconto Istorico della Vita del Sig. Galileo Galilei Nobil Fiorentino (1657), Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Mss. Gal.; first published in Salvino Salvini, ed., Fasti Consolari dell'Accademia Fiorentina (Firenze, 1717), 397–431, reprinted in Galileo, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei Nobile Fiorentino, vol. 1 (Firenze: Gaetano Tartini e Santi Franchi, 1718), lxvi, trans. Martínez.
7. Drake, Galileo at Work, 20–21.
8. Benedetto Varchi, Questione sull'Alchimia (manuscript, 1544); first published in Varchi, Qvestione svll' Alchimia, ed. Domenico Moreni (Firenze: Magheri, 1827), 34, trans. Martínez; I've written “evidence” for “la prova,” but “test” is accurate too. Varchi briefly referred to Reverend Francesco Beato, professor of metaphysics at Pisa, and Luca Ghini, a physician and botanist at Bologna, as people who, among others, explained that Aristotle was mistaken about the speeds of falling bodies (34). Likewise, Giovanni Bellaso asked about the “reason why, when letting fall from high to low two balls, one of iron and the other of wood, just as soon onto the ground falls the wooden one as the iron one.” G. B. Bellaso, Il Vero Modo di Scrivere in Cifra con Facilità, Prestezza e Sicurez (Brescia: Giacomo Britannico, 1564), trans. Martínez.
9. Giuseppe Moletti, On Artillery (1576), manuscript at the Pinelli collection of the Bilioteca Ambrosiana de Milano, Ms. S. 100 sup.; also transcribed in Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale de Firenzi, Ms. Gal. 329; excerpt in Raffaelo Caverni, Storia del Metodo Sperimentale in Italia, vol. 4 (Firenze, 1891–1900; Bologna: Forni, 1979), 271–74.
10. Experiment by Donald R. Miklich and Thomas B. Settle, described (with photographs) in Thomas B. Settle, “Galileo and Early Experimentation,” in Springs of Scientific Creativity: Essays on Founders of Modern Science, ed. Rutherford Aris, Howard Ted Davis, Roger H. Stuewer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 12–17. To simultaneously release balls of different sizes and weights, physicist John Taylor used a hinged platform, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Photographs show that three steel balls were indeed dropped simultaneously, from the Gamov Tower, and near the bottom, having fallen approximately 100 feet, the largest ball (5 inches diameter, 16 pounds) was 1 inch ahead of the medium ball (4 inches diameter, 8 pounds) and about 1 foot ahead of the small ball (1 inch diameter, 2 ounces). The effect of air resistance depends on the size of the object; it is smaller for the largest ball. See Allan Franklin, Can That Be Right? Essays on Experiment, Evidence, and Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 199 (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 7–8, 11.
11. Galileo Galilei, De Motu Antiquiora [1590s?], manuscript at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale de Firenze, Ms. Gal. 71; in Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, ed. Antonio Favaro, vol. 1 (Firenze: Barbèra, 1890), trans. Martínez.
12. Ibid.
13. Simon Stevin, “Res Motas Impedimentis suis non esse Proportionales,” in Liber Primus de Staticae Elementis. Statices Liber Secundus qui est de Inveniendo Gravitatis Centro. De Staticae Principiis Liber Tertius de Staticae Praxi. Liber Quartus Staticae de Hydrostatices Elementis (Leyde, 1605), 151, trans. Martínez.
14. Iacobi Mazonii, In Universam Platonis, et Aristotelis Philosophiam Præludia, sive De Comparatione Platonis, & Aristotelis (Venetiis: Ioannem Geuerilium, 1597).
15. Galileo Galilei to Paolo Sarpi, 16 October 1604, in Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, ed. Antonio Favaro, vol. 10 (Firenze: Barbèra, 1900), 115–16.
16. Giorgio Coresio, Operetta intorno al Galleggiare de Corpi Solidi (Firenze: Bartolommeo Sermartelli, 1612), translation from Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, 29.
17. Vincenzo Renieri to Galileo Galilei, 13 March 1641, translation from Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, 31. Renieri continued: “What was noted by me in such experiments was this: it struck me that, the motion of the wooden balls being accelerated down to a certain mark, they began then not to descend perpendicularly but obliquely in the same manner as we see drops of water do as they fall from roofs, the which, coming near the earth, swerve aside, and here their motion begins to be less rapid. I have thought about this a little, and shall give your Excellency my notion of it.”
18. For discussion of Viviani's writings, including claims that Viviani embellished history for the purpose of reaching an audience that was more interested in demonstrations rather than abstractions, see Michael Segre, “Viviani's Life of Galileo,” Isis 80, no. 2 (1989): 206–31.
19. Antonio Favaro argued that Viviani deliberately lied about Galileo's date of birth, in Favaro, “Sul giorno della nascita di Galileo,” Memorie del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 22 (1887), 703–11; whereas Michael Segre has argued that Viviani may have just been mistaken, in Segre, “Viviani's Life of Galileo.”
20. Antonio Favaro, ed., Galileo Galilei, 3rd ed. (1922; repr., Milano: Soc. An. Editr. Bietti, 1939), 17, trans. Martínez. See also Antonio Favaro, “Sulla Veridicita del ‘Racconto Istorico della Vita di Galileo,’ dettato da Vincenzio Viviani,” Archivo Storico Italiano, tome 73, vol. 1, disp. 2 (Firenze, 1916), 1–24.
21. Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, 21–31; Gregory, Discovery, 2; Francis Jameson Rowbotham, Story-Lives of Great Scientists (Wells, England: Gardner, Darton, and Company, 1918), 28–29; Fahie, “Scientific Works,” 216.
22. Rowbotham, Story-Lives; Harold Moore, A Textbook of Intermediate Physics (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923), 52; Harry Austryn Wolfson, Crescas' Critique of Aristotle; Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 127.
23. Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, 22.
24. Rowbotham, Story-Lives, 27–29.
25. Lederman, God Particle, 73–74.
26. Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, 17.
CHAPTER 2. GALILEO'S PYTHAGOREAN HERESY
1. Aristotle, De Caelo [ca. 350 BCE], in Aristotle: On the Heavens I–II, trans. Stuart Leggatt (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1995), bk. 2, pt. 13.
2. Many writers claim that the problem was that the ancient astronomers had not detected parallax, the apparent shifting, for example, of nearer and distant trees and mountains as one drives by a landscape; but this kind of parallax cannot be what Aristotle and others referred to because he conceived the fixed stars as being all on one sphere, so there would be no background stars. Instead, the simpler effect involves only the apparent separations between stars all on one surface.
3. Archimedes, Psammites (The Sand-Reckoner) [ca. 220 BCE], quoted in Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 40–41.
4. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis (Natural History) [ca. 77 CE], trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949–54), bk. 2, sec. 19. According to Pliny's Pythagoras, the moon was 15,750 miles away from Earth; the actual distance is more than 233,000 miles from the surface of Earth to that of the moon.
5. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 2, sec. 20; here, by the ordering of the heavenly bodies, Pliny seems to assume that Pythagoras envisioned Earth at the center.
6. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 28, sec. 7.
7. Ptolemy, Syntaxis Mathematica [ca. 150 CE], published as Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Almagest, trans. G. Toomer (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), bk. I, secs. 5–7, pp. 41–45.
8. Ptolemy, Almagest, pp. 36, 141.
9. Geminos, Eisagōgē eis ta Phainomena [ca. 1st c. BCE], in James Evans and J. Lennart Berggren, Geminos's Introduction to the Phenomena: A Translation and Study of a Hellenistic Survey of Astronomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 117–19.
10. Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 56–58.
11. An example of this myth: “Ptolemaic astronomers needed to add more and more epicycles to the system to keep it working. For a long time, they required only twenty-seven epicycles, but by Kepler's day, they needed nearly seventy—far too complicated…. Could a good and loving God, a rational God, all-wise and all-kno
wing, have created the epicyclic nightmare that the Ptolemaic system had become?” James A. Connor, Kepler's Witch (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 65–66.
12. An equinox is when the sun is observed directly above Earth's equator, it is a day when the sun spends equal time above the horizon as below it. This happens twice per year. The word equinox might seem to suggest that the night is then as long as the day, but actually, during the equinox, daylight lasts longer than night.
13. Nicolai Copernici, De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium, Libri VI (Norimbergae: Ioh. Petreium, 1543), f. iiij reverso. Copernicus listed Philolaus, Hicetas of Syracuse, Heraclides Ponticus, and Ecphantus (who actually was not a Pythagorean). Some of the works consulted by Copernicus, such as the Placita by “Plutarch” and Lysis's Letter, were not genuine. For discussion, see Bronislaw Bilinski, Il Pitagorismo di Niccolò Copernico (Wroclaw: Accademia Polaca delle Scienze, Biblioteca e Centro di Studi a Roma, Conferenze nr. 69, 1977), 111.
14. Plato, Timaeus [ca. 360 BCE], in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 453.
15. The illustrations in this section of the chapter are based partly on the geometric schemes by W. D. Stahlman in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1955), 30–31.
16. Blaise Pascal, Pensées [ca. 1650], in Pascal, Pascal's Pensées, introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: E. Dutton 1958), sec. 3: “Of the Necessity of the Wager,” item 206, p. 61.
17. Copernici, De Revolutionibus, f. ii verso. See also Edward Rosen, “Was Copernicus a Pythagorean?” Isis 53 (1962), 504–8.
18. Copernici, De Revolutionibus, f. cij verso.
19. Martin Luther, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Johann Georg Walch, vol. 22: Colloquia oder Tischveden (Halle: J. J. Gebauer, 1743), 2260.
20. Gingerich, Book Nobody Read, 136.
21. Copernici, De Revolutionibus, f. iv verso, f. iij reverso.
22. [Andreas Osiander], “Ad Lectorem de Hypothesibus huius Operis,” in Copernici, De Revolutionibus, f. ij, verso. Johannes Petreius, the printer in Nuremberg, added the words Orbium Cœlestium to the book's title, which was simply De Revolutionibus.
23. John Calvin, “Sermon on 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, verses 19 to 24” (preached in 1556, edited in 1558); in Ioannis Calvini, Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. G. Baum et al., vol. 49 (Brunsvigae: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 677, trans. Martínez.
24. Gingerich, Book Nobody Read, 23.
25. Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Everlastinge of Righte Good Effecte, corrected and augmented by Thomas Digges (London: Tomas Marsh, 1576), addition. Previously, Pliny the Elder (in Natural History) had reported that the astronomer Hipparchus had observed what seemed to be a new star (ca. 134 BCE), a claim that astronomers doubted.
26. In 1901, city officials in Prague opened Tycho Brahe's marble tomb to confirm the identity of the skeletal remains. Physicians found that Brahe's skull indeed had a defect in the upper end of the nasal cavity, rimmed by a bright green stain of copper. Dr. H. Matiegka, Bericht über die Untersuchung der Gebeine Tycho Brahe's (Prague: Bohemian Society of Science, 1901).
27. Digges, Prognostication, addition.
28. Victor E. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 250–58.
29. Diego de Zuñiga, Didaci a Stunica Salamanticensis Eremitaie Augustiniani in Job Commentaria (Toleti: Ioannes Rodericus, 1584), 205–6.
30. Francisco Vallés, De iis quae Physice in Libris Sacris Scripta Sunt (Turin: Nicolai Bevilaquae, 1587), chap. 51.
31. Edward Rosen, “The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 25.
32. Johannes Kepler, “Observationes” [1601], in Willebrordus Snellii, Coeli et siderum in eo errantium Observationes Itassiacae (Lugduni Batavorum [Leiden]: Justum Colsterum, 1618), 83–84, trans. Martínez.
33. Bent Kaempe, Claus Thykier, and N. A. Petersen, “The Cause of Death of Tycho Brahe in 1601,” Proceedings of the 31st International Meeting of The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists, TIAFT, Leipzig, August 1993, ed. R. Klaus Mueller (Leipzig: Molina Press, 1994), 309–15. A recent bestselling book argues that Brahe was murdered by Kepler, who wanted to steal Brahe's astronomical data. See Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder, Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries (New York: Doubleday, 1994). Their argument: that Kepler had the means, motivation, and opportunity. But their claims do not convince me, partly because Brahe leisurely said goodbye to his relatives before ingesting the second and deadly dose of mercury, so he expected to die. By a process of elimination, the authors claim that evidence points to Kepler; but I see no evidence pointing to anyone, and Kepler stands out as decent and kind-hearted.
34. Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements [ca. 460 CE], trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 53. The claim seems doubtful because Proclus wrote more than a thousand years after Pythagoras died and there are no early accounts.
35. Johannes Kepler to Michael Maestlin, June 1598, quoted in Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. C. Doris Hellman (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 69.
36. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life [ca. 300 CE], trans. and ed. Gillian Clark (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), secs. 64–66, pp. 27–28; Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi, Libri V (Linci, Austria: Godofredi Tompachii, 1619), translated as The Harmony of the World, trans. E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan, J. V. Field (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), bk. 2, p. 130.
37. Max Caspar, Johannes Kepler, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 1995), 109.
38. Paul Henri Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, trans. R. E. W. Madison (1962; repr., Paris: Hermann, 1973), 214–15.
39. “Just as no natural body at all is perfectly round and therefore has a simple center, so too among the sensible and physical motions that we observe in natural bodies there is notne that does not differ a lot from the truly circular and regular motion around a center.” Bruno, La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), [1584], in Giovanni Gentile, ed., Opere Italiane, vol. 1 (Firenze: Gius. Laterza, 1907), pt. 3, p. 73, trans. Martínez.
40. Plutarch, Placita Philosophorum, Lib. 2 [2nd c. CE], chap. 13; it was not written by Plutarch, so historians attribute it to “Pseudo-Plutarch,” and it is based on a work by Aetius (ca. 50 BCE).
41. For example, Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 4, 171. For examples of the recurring claim that Bruno was the first martyr for science, along with a refutation of this myth, see Jole Shackelford, “That Giordano Bruno Was the First Martyr of Modern Science,” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald N. Numbers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 58–67.
42. Noel Swerdlow, “Galileo's Discoveries with the Telescope and Their Evidence for the Copernican Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. Peter Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 245.
43. Galilei to Giuliano de Medici, January 1611, quoted in Mario D'Addio, The Galileo Case: Trial/Science/Truth, trans. Brian Williams (Rome: Nova Millennium Romae, 2004), 29.
44. “Plutarch” [Aetius], Placita, Lib. 2, chap. 30.
45. Ioh. Keppleri, Somnium, seu Opus Posthumum De Astronomia Lunari, divulgatum à Ludovico Kepplero filio [ca. 1609] (Sagani [Silesia]: Authoris, 1634). Kepler had read ancient works by Lucian and “Plutarch” that discussed the idea of exploring the moon.
46. Johannes Kepler, Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo [1610], in Kepler, Kepler's Conversation with Galileo's Sidereal Messenger, trans. E. Rosen (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1965), 27–28.
47. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 2, sec. 6. Pliny claimed that Pythagoras made this discovery at around the Forty-Second Olympiad, which is impossible because that Olympiad began in 612 B
CE and Pythagoras was not even born until some twenty years later.
48. Galilei to Johannes Kepler, 19 August 1610, in Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro, vol. 10 (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1900), 421–23, trans. Martínez.
49. Galileo Galilei, Istoria e Dimostrazioni intorno alle Macchie Solari e Loro Accidenti (Rome, 1613), in Galilei, Opere, 5:190; also in Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (1983; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 37.
50. Paolo Antonio Foscarini, A Letter to Fr. Sebastiano Fantone, General of the Order, Concerning the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus About the Mobility of the Earth and the New Stability of the Sun and the New Pythagorean System of the World [6 January 1615] (Naples: Lazaro Scoriggio, 1615); in Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 218–21.
51. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, 226, 223, 234–35.
52. For an extensive discussion of this myth, see Dennis R. Danielson, “That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos,” in Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 50–58.
53. Ernan McMullin, “The Church's Ban on Copernicanism, 1616,” in McMullin, ed., The Church and Galileo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 165–66.
54. Bellarmino to Foscarini, 12 April 1615, in Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, 265–67.
55. Paolo Sfondarti, Bishop of Albano, “Decree of the Index” [5 March 1616] (Rome: Press of the Apostolic Palace, 1616), in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148–50.
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