Galileo and his Contemporaries
Biographies such as Galileo's Battle for the Heavens commonly portray Galileo relationship with his contemporaries as a lone star in an otherwise dark sky. Discounting Galileo's contemporaries distorts the discussion of both church and science. Galileo had many important contemporaries including Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Gassendi and Mersenne . After Galileo's death, when Newton took science the next giant step forward, it was Kepler's work that he used as the anchor for his greatest work (the Principia Mathematica). Newton's philosophy of science was also more influenced by the priest-scientist Gassendi than by Galileo. Galilean biographies rarely mention Kepler. In the case of Galileo's Battle for the Heavens this distortion reached extremes. It mentioned Giordano Bruno 7 times while not mentioning Kepler even once. Bruno did not contribute a single advance in fact or theory to the science of the day.
When modern biographies ignore Galileo's contemporaries it doesn't mean that scientists of the time did. The scientists of the day, including church scientists, were following Galileo's work, but also Kepler's. The priest-scientist Gassendi was a follower of Galileo's work. He conducted several of the experiments Galileo described in his books. But he was also a follower of Kepler. Kepler's model predicted that Mercury should pass between the earth and the sun (known as a Transit of Mercury) on November 7, 1631. The scientists of Europe were well-warned of this event in publications by Kepler and his assistant. Gassendi also published a pamphlet reminding interested scientists of this event. This was a watershed event; the first international experiment. The transit of Mercury was detected by Gassendi in Paris and other observers in Alsace, Austria, and Bavaria on November 7 but slightly earlier than predicted (see Gassendi's Transit of Mercury). Scientists around Europe, including Galileo, would have known of the experiment. Although the discovery by Gassendi that Mercury was much smaller than expected helped some of Galileo's arguments, this remarkable experiment gave credence to a model that competed with Galileo's own model; one that assumed elliptical orbits. It is Kepler's model that is taught in schools today. All this happened more than a year before Galileo's famous trial.
Early in Galileo's Battle for the Heavens we are warned that what we were about to see was another example of the "recurring clash between religion and science". Developing this premise was helped by ignoring Kepler and his relations with the Church. Although the Church never provided Kepler with ongoing research grants as they had Galileo , they did provide something more important; access to resources and moral support. When Galileo ignored an early request from Kepler to borrow a telescope, it was the Archbishop of Cologne who leant him one. The last of Kepler's books to be published, Somnium, contained a gushing thank you to the Jesuit mathematician, Paul Guldin, an enduring advocate and friend of Kepler. The appendix also mentioned his joy over the gift of a telescope hand-made by the master Jesuit telescope-maker, Niccolo Zucchi. Between these early and later events there were many other events, including the Jesuits chasing down a manuscript stolen from Kepler and ensuring its return, and the Jesuits acting as a surrogate postal service for Kepler.
The program's theme of clash between religion and science really precludes any mention of positive contributions of church scientists. Galileo's Battle for the Heavens makes repeated mention of the Jesuits, including the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner. The Jesuits were presented as reactionary and the only mention of Christopher Scheiner was his erroneous belief that sunspots were actually satellites. The companion website has an entire section on the early development of the telescope. But these same Jesuits were critical to the early development of the telescope ( see Jesuits and the Telescope). The site mentions the man who proposed the telescope design that would quickly replace Galileo's, Kepler, but did not mention the first man to build one, Christopher Scheiner. It also mentions the innovation of adding an erector lens to Kepler's design . The website artfully dodges identifying the innovator, Christopher Scheiner, by anonymizing his contribution; "Some astronomers added a third convex lens to right the image". When the great scientists of the late 17th century looked back to help improve the telescope they weren't looking back to Galileo, but to the optical works of Kepler and Descartes and several priest-scientists (including Galileo's Jesuit contemporaries).
A discussion of Galileo would not be complete without mention of the Tower of Pisa experiment. Most people know the legend. A young professor from the University of Pisa climbs the Tower of Pisa in front of an audience of professors and students. In a direct challenge to the stodgy Aristotelian professors of the day, he proceeds to drop balls of unequal weight to show that they hit the ground at the same time. There is a growing consensus that this experiment was a myth, and the program's website questions whether the experiment ever happened. Neither Galileo nor anyone else in his lifetime ever mentioned the story. As with many myths there is a germ of truth to the story. There is documented evidence supporting only one Tower of Pisa free fall experiment in Galileo's lifetime. The twist is that the name of the young professor from the University of Pisa was Vincenzio Renieri, an Olivetan monk. Vincenzio, a friend of Galileo's, was not trying to disprove Aristotle. He was trying to disprove the work of the Jesuit, Niccolo Cabeo. Cabeo believed that two objects of different weights dropped from a height would reach the ground at the same time with the same velocity. This was based on observing the free fall experiments of Baliani. Vincenzio's experiment contradicted that of the Jesuit ( probably through experimental error) and Vincenzio promptly reported the results of his experiments to Galileo. Given how often Galilean biographies are presented as symbols of the clash between church and science, it is ironic that the Galileo's most famous experiment was really an attempt by an Olivetan monk to challenge the work of a Jesuit priest.
It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic set of events in the entire history of science than the Galileo Affair. Perhaps that is why there is so much written about it. We shouldn't confuse high drama with importance to the history of science, however. As the name, Galileo's Battle for the Heavens, suggests, the whole episode was about the heavens. But most science is very terrestrial. Statistical analysis of modern scientific activity shows that cosmology has almost no influence on the other disciplines of science ( see Home ). If these events and Galileo's other work were as important as these dramas suggest then we would see many references to it in the succeeding decades. But if we look at who the scientists of the 1750's were citing in their work, most would be surprised. Most would guess correctly that Newton was amongst the most commonly cited. Neither Galileo nor his contemporary cosmologists made it very high in the list. Galileo's contemporary, Gassendi was heavily cited, perhaps because he experimented in many areas of physics and also made important contributions to the philosophy of science. Also amongst the most commonly cited were several of Galileo's Jesuit contemporaries, Gaspar Schott, Giovanni Riccioli, and Claude-Francois Deschales . Citations by scientists is definitely not a perfect metric for the importance of a scientist but certainly it is better than popularity with the public.
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