Galileo: Watcher of the Skies [Hardcover]

In the last ten centuries only four massive intellectuals have dominated science, da Vinci, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Einstein, four in a thousand years. This fabulous book entitled simply Galileo fooled me completely when I picked it up. First the small font which I always found annoying, and then it's published by the Yale University Press which means I've got myself an academic writer and publisher. This is normally a combination for a very boring read.

So now I have to give it my usual acid-test. I go to three completely different sections of the book and I start reading. It was like getting smacked in the face, this David Wottoon can write, no question about it. Everything he was saying was fascinating. Could it be, a book about Galileo a page turner? I went through the whole book and loved it. What's more I think I can promise you that you will love it too, provided you have an interest in the history of science? Here's why:

* Galileo has to be considered the first truly modern scientist. All who come after him must be measured against him. His imagination was extraordinary; his mind could only be classified as fertile. If he has seen further than others, it is because he was able to throw off the limitations imposed on all his fellow scientists by the church during the time in which they lived. This was by all accounts an extremely difficult thing to achieve. He did it.

* As an inventor not just a theorist, he excelled against any and all comers. The man created the pendulum clock, the telescope, and the micrometer, the first truly accurate timepiece. He is fully credited with transferring both the use of the microscope and telescope into working instruments to explore the small and the large, namely the universe.

* His intellectual flexibility is legendary, and all done while being closely watched by the Catholic Church during the period when the Inquisition was at its peak of power, and ability to punish. This is no small achievement for a prominent scientist. His life was on the line, not just his reputation.

* In this book you will finally understand how Galileo THINKS. He started a revolution in physics, and although the first half of his life was not full of noteworthy achievements, he achieved more in the second half than most could do in five lifetimes.

* Galileo created what we would today call the experimental method grounded in a sensory basis. You want to believe it, you must first see it. He could then juggle this thought process against the concept of abstract thinking. How unique is that? Although he firmly believed that seeing is believing, he still balanced this against the recognition that knowledge is in the end about abstraction.

* The author goes into detail about Galileo's willingness and ability to stand alone in the face of every other scientist and the church fighting him on the Copernican concept of the universe. Until Galileo the universe meant earth. He forced the recognition that the earth was just an ordinary planet along with the other planets, and the sun was an ordinary star. The church fought him bitterly and indeed put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. In the book, you realize the energy and determination it took for this man to go it alone. You might remember that Darwin did not have the energy to defend himself. It was Huxley that took up the battle for Darwin. It must have been much more difficult for Galileo. Darwin faced ridicule, Galileo faced torture. You decide?

CONCLUSION:

In the last ten years of his life, his friends were dead, and he was blind. He was however surrounded by young people who idolized him for the hero he was to all men of science. He died in 1642. There is no tombstone at the time or memorial because the church did not want it. His friends however made sure that a tombstone was provided.

Every now and then a book comes along that sets things right. We are enriched that this author made the scholarly effort to help us place Galileo, this magnificent scientist with impact of such enormity into the proper context that he belongs. The world was never the same after this scientist gave us his body of work. We are so much better off that Wootton has helped us understand just how much Galileo should mean to us and thank you for reading this review.

Richard C. Stoyeck

As the story is traditionally told, Galileo remained a faithful Catholic---and Galileo himself wanted people to believe that idea. He was anxious about airing his growing skepticism over the nature of the universe's origin and purpose. His scientific positions were dangerous enough. However, the popular notion that Galileo always was a faithful Catholic is called into question in this fascinating new Yale University Press biography from British scholar David Wootton, an expert in the history of science.

After years of research, Wootton's 300-page account of the scientist's life is likely to keep the debate about Galileo alive for years to come. Wootton concludes that Galileo's restless mind and spirit made him much closer to 21st-century scientists than most previous historical accounts have indicated. (As of 2010-11, recent research into the spiritual lives of scientists, today, shows far less traditional religious doctrine among top researchers than in the general population, plus a general unwillingness to talk about religion among these researchers. Wootton doesn't refer to that recent research in his new book, but his description of Galileo and his eagerness to avoid airing the depth of his religious skepticism sounds a lot like many leading scientists today.)

Despite what Galileo's religious apologists want to claim about him, the fact is that he all but abandoned orthodox Christianity, Wootton finds. At one point, Wootton describes part of Galileo's "private irreligion" this way: "Galileo sought to live with the idea that we do not know what the universe is for, even though certain aspects of it suggest that it was designed for a purpose."

In Wootton's book, Galileo is not an angry bomb thrower. He is a man with a remarkably agile mind who finds himself on the cutting edge of scientific discoveries so exciting that he can hardly keep them to himself. Wootton describes how this relatively old man, for his era, stumbled into history: "He was 45 before it became clear that he was destined to be famous, and he never shook off the fear of failure that had grown within him over the years. Indeed that fear simply became more acute as his ambitions grew even greater. In the end, as so often happens, he brought about the very catastrophe he had most feared: he was mocked for defending" his scientific discoveries.

In this review, I'm not trying to portray this book as intentionally controversial. Time seems to heal many controversies and both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI have tried to take steps to repair the past wounds related to Galileo, even welcoming a statue honoring him into the Vatican. What Wootton has achieved in this book, though, is a really compelling portrait of a man who often seems like a two-dimensional historical figure mainly useful to illustrate some later political argument. It's terrific to find history that's still compelling reading on such a "well known" subject.

Scholarship on Galileo has advanced tremendously in recent years. It became obvious that all existing biographies were out-of-date, and a new version was needed that marshaled all of the recent research. Moreover, it needed to condense this mass of information into one volume. Two people stepped up to that impossible task and wrote books that were released within one month of each other: Galileo, Watcher of the Skies by David Wootton, and Galileo by J.L. Heilbron. Wootton's book has been described as the more accessible of the two, so I went with it.

"Accessible" should by no means equate to "dumbed down." In 37 chapters and 267 pages, Wootton somehow manages to cram as much information about Galileo into the book as possible while maintaining a high level of readability and respect for the reader's intelligence. It quickly becomes apparent that the comic-strip version of the events of Galileo's life that we have inherited are highly strained and misleading at best, or simply grossly wrong at worst. But this is not merely a book setting the facts straight. Wootton has a daring new interpretation of the facts that threads throughout the book. The most controversial of these are the assertions that Galileo converted to Copernicanism much earlier than is popularly imagined; and that he was irreligious -- if not an atheist in the modern sense, then far from the "devout Catholic" that the Church has tried to paint him to be in recent decades. Neither assertion can be proven with hard evidence, but Wootton makes compelling arguments from secondary sources.

As for the famous trial in 1633, Wootton confirms the now prevailing opinion that Galileo was "the architect of his own downfall." It would be easy to portray Pope Urban VIII and the Vatican as evil villains, as popular history would have it. It would be easy -- but wrong. Heliocentrism had been condemned as heresy in 1616, but after Urban was named pontiff in 1624 he liberalized the law and allowed Galileo (whom he admired) to write on the subject, with a few caveats. Galileo betrayed that trust. As Wootton shows, Galileo was a brilliant man who was so assured of himself (even when he was wrong, which was frequent), he consistently took huge risks and often alienated friends and allies. "The clash, when it came, was not between an impersonal institution, the universal Church, on the one hand and a dedicated scientist on the other," the author observes. "Rather it was a falling out between friends, a betrayal, a just punishment. Galileo was indeed a heretic; but worse (for heresy was much more common than historians have realized), he was disloyal and ungrateful. In the world of Counter Reformation Italy, heresy often went unpunished; disloyalty and ingratitude, on the other hand, were never tolerated."