Galileo

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Linus Pauling, Galileo, and Citizen Science

Galileo's Thought Experiments

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was born in Pisa, where he studied medicine and later mathematics. From 1592-1610 he was professor of mathematics at Padua, applying his mathematics to the mysteries of motion, both the celestial and the earthly kind. From 1610 he became 'first philosopher' (as opposed to various lesser philosophers, presumably) and private mathematician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a position which seems to have enabled him to set about communicating his ideas through a series of books that changed the direction of both philosophy and science.

Despite, or perhaps because of, being charged with knowledge of such matters, philosophers ever since Aristotle had advocated positions which were not only wrong, such as that heavy objects will fall proportionately faster than light ones, but were cumbersome and unproductive. In The Assayer (1623) Galileo particularly concentrates on 'deconstructing' Aristotle, separating out his notion of movement in the sense that plants, for example , 'move' towards the sun, for a more limited one in which the physical and psychological worlds are separate and the physical world becomes amenable to mathematical analysis. The Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems - Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632) sets out in addition to the arguments (well known) for the sun-centred solar system, a more interesting argument for the relativity of motion and space. This featured Galileo's' celebrated 'Ship' ["galileo-s-thought-experiments | thought experiment], in which his two interlocutors discuss whether they would be able to tell if they were in the cabin of a boat moving 'in any direction you like', but steadily, form being in a motionless boat, for example, by taking a goldfish bowl with them and watching to see if the fish were affected, or by throwing a ball across the cabin to each other. This thought experiment, like the much misunderstood one of dropping the two balls off the leaning tower of Pisa, (which proves logically, not experimentally, that all objects must be subject to the same acceleration effects from gravity.

It was the Dialogue that caused Galileo a year after publication to be condemned by the Vatican and obliged to recant, but the reason for it seems to have been less to do with the affront caused by this debate concerning the two rival astronomical systems as by either the challenge to the orthodox view of matter (undermining the Church view on the Eucharists) or even perhaps a very blunt insult included by Galileo (who was nothing if not arrogant) to the sagacity of the Pope himself.

Galileo was also a careful empirical scientist, who made systematic and effective observation par of his method, most famously, using the new 'telescope. But it was who wrote that the book of nature is written in mathematics.

The text in the 'Overview' for this page draws on the entry 'Galielo in the Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics, edited by Martin Cohen, (Hodder Arnold 2005)