Contemporary historians of science have a tendency to deprecate the originality of the so-called scientific revolution, and to stress, instead, its continuities with medieval astrology and alchemy. And they have a point. It wasn’t that one day people were doing astrology in Europe and then there was this revolution and everyone started doing astronomy. Newton practiced alchemy; Galileo drew up all those horoscopes. But if you can’t tell the difference in tone and temperament between Galileo’s sound and that of what went before, then you can’t tell the difference between chalk and cheese. The difference is apparent if you compare what astrologers actually did and what the new astronomers were doing.He starts off with a mildly patronising gesture in the direction of 'contemporary historians of science' who try to deny the importance of the scientific revolution. (Ah, these academics! The 'so-called' scientific revolution, oh dear, oh dear! Still, one must be tolerant ..) Then he graciously admits that yes, maybe they do have a point, maybe there wasn't such a sharp divide between astrology and astronomy. (See? I'm a reasonable kind of guy ..) Then he performs a deft U-turn and asserts that actually there was a sharp divide between astrology and astronomy: the two were as different as chalk and cheese. (Just what we thought all along!) But the style is so charming, so conversational, that it's easy to glide past the contradictions in the argument.
He became an ever more convinced Copernican, but he had his crotchets. He never accepted Kepler’s proof that the orbits of the planets in the Copernican system had to be ellipses, because he loved the perfection of circles; and he was sure that the movement of the tides was the best proof that the earth was turning, since the ocean water on the earth’s surface was so obviously sloshing around as it turned. The truth—that the moon was pulling the water at a distance—seemed to him obvious nonsense, and he never tired of mocking it.If you drill into this paragraph. It's kind of interesting, the callow perspective of Gopnick sort of brings out Galileo, the opportunist and scientific adventurer. A sort of Edison of the Renaissance, riding a telescope instead of DC current. He loves the circles but can't get behind Kepler's even wilder metaphysical insights.
The "Lynceographum" also stressed the dangers that contacts with women posed to the philosophers' intellectual life. 7 According [End Page 140] to Cesi, the Lincei were required to avoid "the attractions of Venus," "bad women and profane love," "Venereal lust," "prostitutes," "tempting lust," "low passions of the body," "carnal drives," "libidinous excitements," and "the body's inane desires." 8 Additionally, the "Lynceographum" ordered the academicians to stay clear of "scandals with boys," and legislated how violations of the Lincei's code of honor were to be reprimanded and punished. 9 Finally, not a maid but a male servant was supposed to be hired in each liceo to keep the place clean and to care for the academicians. A female servant could be hired only if she were elderly and unattractive. Cesi's prescriptions seem to reflect a Platonic privileging of male chaste love over heterosexual desire, something we find also in the earlier Florentine Platonic Academy and other humanistic academies in Renaissance Italy
CheeseDigestsAll: What bugged me about the article was how it cast Galileo as the first scientific empiricist. ("He took the competitive, empirical drive with which Florentine painters had been looking at the world and used it to look at the night sky.")And your comments are eurocentric, which probably isn't your fault, but the fault of our ridiculously ignorant, onanistically eurocentric, Western educational system:
Vesalius had started down that road in medicine 100 years before, and it was Tycho Brahe's dedicated collection of data that allowed Kepler to derive the laws of planetary motiion - and as the article notes, Galileo rejected Kepler.
mobunited: In short, he was a crackpot who happened to be right, and his modern equivalent--a guy who claims to get hard to reproduce results with a less reliable model and whines that the academic establishment is against him--would be tossed on his ass.Nonsense. He produced reproducible results using mathematical analysis and scientific observations. "Easy" is not a requirement for reproducibility.
The World Famous: It is reasonable for the scientific community to accept data and observations from the LHC as scientific and "reproducible" even though there's only one LHC, because those experiments and results are, in fact, reproducible.How is this in any way different from the fact that there was probably only one telescope in the world capable of making those measurements (which itself was actually readily reproducible)? Did Galileo forbid anyone from using his telescope, or his design? (No.)
"No, you're all confusing "popular to other scientists" with "scientific". If a man locked in a cell for life conducts experiments scientifically, draws logical conclusions, tests his hypotheses, and writes them down, he is hardly a crackpot: he is doing science. "It is a very common mistake, but science is not a set of facts that are true to the exclusion of supposed facts that are not true, it is a process - at its core not a noun but a verb. Science describes the careful deliberate creation and communication of knowledge, it is inherently a community activity. Such an unfortunate person would be at the very least indistinguishable from a crackpot in every way that matters, regardless of how right they may be. Even if they spend a lifetime building beautiful work, a monk who locks themselves in a cell to do it creates virtually nothing of value in refusing to leave and communicate their discoveries. No one will use their model and with it make better predictions of natural phenomenon, no one will climb atop their work and through its stature see farther, and no one will place their work atop it.
"OTOH, there are "scientific" papers published every single day that are horseshit, full of errors or lies, but accepted by the general scientific community because of the degrees and professional standing of the author(s); these are not "scientific"."While a scientific paper filled with lies can't really be called scientific, a scientific paper filled with horseshit absolutely can. Science is, again, a verb. In my own research, while it is pretty disquieting to know that any model I could ever conceivably propose for the systems I study will be wrong, there is a pretty awesome reassurance in that - so long as I communicate what I find and it is important - someone else will eventually come along with either better tools or better perspective from other disciplines or better something, and improve it. What Brenard of Chartes used to say really is inherent to all of it.
"His results were reproducible. "Easy" is a ridiculous requirement - how many labs could have produced and interpreted the crystallographic results of Russell's work on DNA?"Do you mean Rosalind Franklin or John Randall? Because if you mean Franklin there was probably only really one person on Earth stupid and arrogant enough to properly interpret her preliminary photo 51 alone, and it wasn't Franklin.
camdan: "whenever i get frustrated by the arguments of a new earth creationist, it heartens me that just 400 years ago we were just figuring out that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. i'm sure making an analogy between all the biblical passages which assert a fixed earth, which are now considered metaphorical, and all the passages asserting a young earth would have no effect."Galileo's own words might, well, at least I've had luck with them. While it might seem self evident to most of us that a religious text might have nothing of value to say about things like heliocentricity, the physical age of the Earth, mechanics of disease, or the ways in which living systems evolves through natural selection, its really Galileo and his eloquence that in many ways made that so.
"We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine, by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word."But Galileo then expounds on this in such a way as to say something much deeper about the relationship between science and religion than just the 'accommodationism' that Gopnik dismisses it as in the essay. In the letter Galileo declares that in his view, while the Bible is indeed absolute and inherently true, on matters of the physical world it will only ever be trivially so - such that when the facts of the natural world and ones interpretation of the bible seem to conflict its probably a better idea to trust the natural phenomena that proceed as dictated from the Holy Ghost than one's own hermeneutics. In doing so it lays out the theological foundation of Western science that it then desperately needed and still dominates in Western religious circles to this day, and lays the ground work for the division between science and religion that we take so much for granted today but was entirely non-existent then. The discipline of Natural Philosophy, which grew into what we now know of as Western science, was then considered just a subset of theological study - and at the time it made a sort of sense but its this idea first forcefully argued by Galileo that science and religion had fundamentally different kinds of things to say about the world that made the eventual division.
IAmBroom: "His results were reproducible. "Easy" is a ridiculous requirement - how many labs could have produced and interpreted the crystallographic results of Russell's work on DNA?"I meant Rosalind Franklin. Brain fart. However, I'm not clear on what relevance your next point has to my contention that "easy to reproduce" and "popular" simply aren't requirements for scientific results.
Blasdelb: Do you mean Rosalind Franklin or John Randall? Because if you mean Franklin there was probably only really one person on Earth stupid and arrogant enough to properly interpret her preliminary photo 51 alone, and it wasn't Franklin.
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Martyrdom is the test of faith, but the test of truth is truth. Once the book was published, who cared what transparent lies you had to tell to save your life? The best reason we have to believe in miracles is the miracle that people are prepared to die for them. But the best reason that we have to believe in the moons of Jupiter is that no one has to be prepared to die for them in order for them to be real.
So the scientist can shrug at the torturer and say, "Any way you want me to tell it, I will..." Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals. It’s one of the things that make it move.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:40 AM on February 7 [11 favorites]