Galileo [Hardcover]

Let me sum it up in the beginning of this review for you. This book has 366 pages of narrative in 8 chapters. With footnotes, you are looking at 508 pages. The narrative is thorough, from the great scientist's birth in 1564 to his death in 1642. It is thoroughly researched and there is no question that John Heilbron did his homework objectively. He applied a scholar's eye to an enormous body of work that was created by Galileo.

It is my opinion that if John Heilbron's Galileo suffers from one problem, it is the author's passion for scholarship versus making the subject of his book come alive. In essence, I found I suffered from a certain amount of boredom, and even found some of the reading tedious. This does not detract from the importance of this work, or the fact that nobody else has tackled Galileo in quite a few years.

For most of us growing up, Galileo Galilei was along with Da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, one of the four most significant scientists to the general public in the last ten centuries. We know Galileo as a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and physicist. Perhaps more significantly, he was the man who invented the telescope, and thus along with Christopher Columbus is unique among Italians. Columbus discovered a new world here on earth, and Galileo discoverd new worlds in the heavens.

His importance cannot be overestimated. Look at just a few of the subjects he studied and expanded upon:

* If you want to understand the motion of uniformly accelerated objects, you must look at his work. It is even studied in school today.

* He is probably the dividing line between the old ways of looking at science and what today would be termed modern science.

* Since he is deemed to be the inventor of the telescope, he is probably the most important innovator in the field of observational astronomy. This includes the discovery of four of Jupiter's moons, the largest, plus the confirmation of the phases of Venus, and sunspot observations. Don't forget he also observed the Milky Way galaxy, another first.

* This is the man who took Copernican's view of the sun as the center of our solar system, and ran with it. He ran so hard that it brought him to his knees in front of the Inquisition and it is all covered in this book in exquisite detail. You will finally understand how strongly the Church fought to hold onto its views as the earth as the center of the universe. Not only clerics fought Galileo, but philosophers also.

He was denounced in 1615, and was cleared a year later. The Church warned him to get behind the old theory. Author Heilbron writes in detail how the master scientist went on to preach his views again in "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" published in 1632. This time the Inquisition did find him suspect of heresy. After withdrawing his previously held opinions, Galileo was placed under house arrest the rest of his life.

The man we know as Galileo certainly knew how to annoy people. He had been doing it since he was a young man, and as you also know when you do embarrass people with your superior intellect, they are not likely to forget it. These individuals who held pent-up resentments against the scientist got their revenge later on when the renowned thinker was having his difficulties with the Church and others.

In every book I seek to find the one page, paragraph or sentence that makes the book worthwhile for me to read. I found it on page 65 of this book. Cesare Cremonini was a Junior Professor of Philosophy at the University of Padua from 1591 to 1631. In the book Heilbron quotes Cremonini as saying, "Each of us is a microcosm of the universe: hence introspection can deliver knowledge of the world as well as of the self; he who knows himself is a natural philosopher." How profound a statement is this?

My favorite chapters were Chapter 4 on Galilean Science. The sub chapter on the Reluctant Astronomer is very interesting. Chapter 7 Vainglory which is about his problems with the Pope was fascinating.

SUMMARY:

Galileo was a Renaissance man as that term is used today. He was a musician, and a superb artist. He understood foreshadowing, and perspective. He was certainly a draughtsman. He certainly could have been a painter had he chosen to pursue it. He could be a great writer at times and was a world class philosopher. He loved technology, consider his invention of the telescope, and without question, he was into gadgets. He even made a living wholesaling out the telescopes he would create. He sold them to shopkeepers to be sold to others including ship captains. His powers of memory were prodigious. He could recite vast stretches of different writers. These included Dante and Petrarch.

If you want to understand the achievements of one of the great scientists of the millennium, you will not find a better scholarly understanding of Galileo's world than John Heilbron's work. Once again, you will probably have to maintain your own interest level, as opposed to having an author whisk you away on a journey through a book that you can't put down. Thank you for reading this review.

Richard C. Stoyeck

Thank you John for a truly delightful and deeply informative book about Galileo, his science, personality and struggles with the Church. John and I crossed virtual paths around 1965 when I met Thomas Kuhn at Berkeley on his way to Princeton. John must have been his graduate student then. Kuhn invited me to Princeton where from being a mathematician I practiced history and sociology of science for a while. I ended up teaching at Brandeis for 30 years beginning with trying to illuminate students about the Copernican Revolution and convey some idea of how science works. I have traveled a long way since those days. So coming across John's book was like a breath of fresh air showing how beautifully history of science can be written. First I find his ironic way of jousting with history most entertaining. Little back-handed comments about Galileo's self serving personality left me chuckling. Only someone with a mastery of history can get away with such literary elegance and John certainly is a master. An example of this art are the closing lines of the book referring to the Church's overdoing its resurrection of Galileo parallel to its undoing of him four hundred years before: "According to Galileo's mechanics, the slightest force can move the greatest weight given sufficient time.....Who can doubt that within another 400 years, the church will recognize Galileo's divine gifts, ignore his arrogance, and make him a saint?" And the imaginative dialogue, in the spirit of Galileo, which John creates because of lack of evidence, to explicate what John feels must have been Galileo's basic reasoning about motion.

It was Galileo's arrogance that got him into trouble. Had he not been so sure of his physical and theological ideas, despite the fact he was often wrong, would not admit the priority of others, and stubbornly held on in spite of countervailing evidence, he might have not gotten into trouble. He seemed more interested in shoving his viewpoints down the throats of the Church or the Jesuit and Dominican orders when he could have continued to practice his "science," without asserting it as truth. The Inquisition gave him an out when he was first censured. Not only did he refuse to take it but rubbed salt in the wounds so his eventual recanting and incarceration seemed more personal on the part of a pope who reacted as much as a spurned lover as the enforcer of the faith. And it is in this whole complex that we get a sense that Galileo's "science" was different from what we now associate as science. We cast Bacon and Newton as rationalists where science is defined as being value free hypotheses along with experimental testing which reads only the realities of nature. We forget that Newton spent more time at alchemy then he did inventing the force of gravity. Here is a place that John's book excels. He shows how Galileo and his peers wrestled with their understanding of physical reality as embedded in personal experience, assumptions about existence, "experiments" and beliefs. They selectively threw out Aristotle's reliance on how we experience the world as working---e.g. if resistance to wind slows our pace, then with a vacuum there would be infinite speed--- and replaced with it with reasoning which took them into all kinds of speculative side traps yet within which we see elements of Newton's hypotheses of empty space and laws of gravity and motion. It is easier to see science as embedded in the changing world views of Galileo times than it is today where physics and cosmology have worked their way into such positions of authority that they can command billions of dollars for very questionable endeavors or get supported for spinning out what looks almost like mathematical theology in string theory.

But back to Galileo. As telescope and then microscope maker, his contributions to changing our world are clear. His Medician planets and mountains of the moon and parallax are really world shaking. His arguments about incline planes and gunnery though mixed with faulty reasoning nonetheless made possible the Newtonian revolution. He never quite worked out longitude and his arguments about tides not only disagreed with observation but smacked of Aristotle's reasoning. In the Robert Maynard Hutchins's great books era at the University of Chicago I attended was a three year series of required natural science courses where students read Aristotle, Galileo etc. And though I examed out of those courses, my friends would describe to me how with each book, such as Galileo's "Discourses" they became convinced of its arguments only to be knocked off balance by the next, such as Newton or Descartes. John adds a needed historical context to flesh out those transitions. His portrayal of the characters of Galileo's friends and opponents such as Scarpi, Pope Urban, Galileo's mother, son and daughter are not dull history but live people some of whom were as stubborn and self serving as Galileo both in their science, if they were academicians, and in their personal lives, seeking profit, financial security or fame.

I must confess that my own mathematical training has lapsed over my years of teaching other things, working as a mechanic, electrician, etc and becoming more interested in natural and environmental history, that I had some difficulty following the explications of Galileo's reasoning. John did make it easier by translating a lot but I don't think I have the patience to work through the details any more. I would constantly refer back to my dim memories of undergraduate physics. And though I can generally follow descriptions of relativity and quantum, I find I no longer understand kinematics and dynamics so got confused with what I know to be true physics with Galileo's often erroneous reasoning or obscure arguments. I found it quite interesting that Galileo preferred reasoning from geometry rather than abstract algebra. I am the reverse.

In closing I want to say that I think this is a truly great book in the history of science. When I put the book down, I felt I had met a historian who covered all the bases and also presented the history in a way that was enlivening. I look forward to reading John's books on Planck and Rutherford though they are probably more challenging.

Charlie Fisher emeritus Prof. of Sociology, Brandeis University and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

I'm going to weigh in with a short one. First Heilbron has a very engaging writing style, with about one dry, droll irony per page. Second, the book is about half math. The math is about at algebra or geometry level, so even if you're not a math person, you can get the point of most of it with a little work. Yes, toward the end I was skipping most of it. Still it gives one the satisfaction of feeling you've gotten a bit of a handle on Galeleo's real intellectual life. The plethora of Italian names will probably be as confusing to many as it was to me, but Heilbron supplies a who's who at the back. There's definitly not a lot of colorful description of sunny Tuscany or rich palace interiors. It's truly what we'd call an intellectual biography, not beach reading. But for an educated scientifically oriented reader or even old philosophy major like me. I'd really recommend it.

(From a philosophy of science perspective, I was taken with Heilbron's stessing that it was the implied atomic theory in Galileo's thinking rather than the heliocentric theory that was the danger to orthodoxy. Rightfully so, as Berkeley emphasized a century later!)