Please join two
interesting discussions on historical astronomy
Northern
California Historical Astronomy
www.nchalada.org
Chabot Space & Science
Center, 10000 Skyline Boulevard, Oakland
http://www.chabotspace.org/visit/directions.asp
in the Board Room, Dellums Building (West end)
(Parking free in the overflow lot or $4 in the
structure)
Morning
discussion, 10 - 12:30:
Magnetism
Chair: Alan R. Fisher
Chabot
Space & Science Center
Lunch
at a local restaurant, then a brief business meeting.
Afternoon
discussion, 2 - 5 PM:
Galileo & Daughter
Chair: Nancy
K. Cox
San
Francisco Amateur Astronomers
Please bring yummy munchies.
For
further information, contact Norm Sperling
EVERYTHING
IN THE UNIVERSE
413
Poinsettia Avenue, San Mateo, California 94403
650-573-7125
www.everythingintheuniv.com
Sessions are always discussions, never lectures.
Your contributions are eagerly welcomed.
Galileo & Daughter
Discussion Outline for NCHALADA 6/22/02
by Nancy K. Cox
The book Galileo’s
Daughter by Dava Sobel (award-winning author of Longitude) is a delightful read – I couldn’t put it down. It weaves in all the history and chronology
of Galileo (1564-1642) and his scientific discoveries, teaching, writings, and
trial, and shows his very human side through the numerous letters to him from
his equally intelligent elder daughter, Suor Maria Celeste (1600-1634), a
Catholic nun. She was a major emotional
support to her father, as well as his confidante, and he in turn never refused
a favor she requested for herself or the convent. (More on her at the meeting.)
I learned more about Galileo than I had previously
known. (He is such an iconic figure,
like George Washington, he hardly seemed real.) He made his well-known, famous telescopic discoveries relatively early in his career, using his
first telescope, about 1609-10. He was
the first to observe craters on the Moon (disrupting the notion of “perfect
spheres”), phases of Venus, Jupiter’s moons, and sunspots. With his poor instrument, he could not
resolve Saturn’s rings – he could only see them as “handles” (the rings had to
wait for Huyghens). His major troubles
with the Church came later in his career.
Galileo remarked several times with humility his
amazement and gratitude that he was the first of all human beings that had ever
existed, to observe these things. In
addition to The Starry Messenger (1610),
his recording of these phenomena, including his sketches of them, Galileo wrote
several other major works. He has a
reputation in Italy for being one of the finest writers of Italian literature.
In his Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632)
(constructed as a philosophical discussion over several days by 3 characters,
Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio), Galileo was able to gingerly discuss the
pros and cons of the Copernican theory without coming out and saying he
believed it. (Ironically, despite all
his long troubles with the Church, Galileo was a devout Catholic.) He was aware of the Church’s opposition to a
moving Earth – Galileo was a professor, and aged 36 when Giordano Bruno was burned
at the stake for such a belief (1600) – this threatened to upset mankind’s
whole view of the universe and God with an Earth-centered cosmos. Craters on the Moon and sunspots also
disturbed the Aristotelian notion of “perfect unchanging spheres”. In those days, in 17th Century Italy (although
Italy was a variety of small independent countries then, not unifying until
1870), the Church was totally involved in the political and legal lives of its
citizens (much as a conservative Muslim country of today, such as Saudi Arabia,
uses Islamic religious law as its legal system). Galileo got in major trouble because of his book, even though he
followed all the “rules” for publishing it, and it was put on a list of
prohibited books. (Interestingly,
Copernicus (1473-1543) escaped flak for his Sun-centered solar system theory,
because he conveniently died shortly after it was published.)
Galileo’s 1633 trial by the Holy Office of the
Inquisition took place when he was quite an old man, almost 70, and he was
quite distressed to have to sign a “confession” against his theory. And for the rest of his life he lived under
“house arrest” and was forbidden from teaching and visits by his colleagues,
which whom he might discuss his theories.
Galileo was a well respected and very noted and famous figure in Italy
during most of his lifetime. Many of
his colleagues rallied to his support and tried to get the ruling overturned,
but it was not rescinded until in our own lifetimes, when, in 1992, Pope John
Paul II endorsed Galileo’s philosophy.
Galileo dabbled and experimented in physics all his
life. He may have inherited his
mathematical ability from his father, a musician, who conducted mathematical
experiments on music. In addition to
his famous motion studies, he made several inventions, including a marine compass
(which he mass-produced for sale), a primitive thermometer, and a design for a
pendulum clock. He wrote treatises on
sunspots, floating objects, and the tides (on this he was wrong, though; he did
not consider the Moon to be involved).
His final, greatest work, on motion, was not put together
and published until late in his life (1638, in Holland, since he was forbidden
to publish in Italy). As a young
professor at Pisa, Galileo had conducted some of his famous motion experiments
(supposedly dropping objects from the Leaning Tower), and thought about the
problems of motion for years. In those
days, motion was thought of as a revered, almost sacred thing (Can you imagine
that! When I took physics, I thought
vectors were boring!) and Galileo was the first one to put mathematical
measurements into his studies of motion (Aristotle did not) – to really study
and observe what was happening. So
Galileo, is, in effect, the Father of Modern Physics.
His work on motion, Dialogues
Concering the Two New Sciences (1638), was also framed as a dialogue
between his same 3 characters. It
covered such topics as falling bodies and their acceleration, motions down an
inclined plane, the period of a pendulum, the curved path of a projectile (such
as a bullet) – its 2 motions, horizontal and vertical.
His active mind (Galileo was a genius for sure) never
stopped thinking about new problems in physics until the end of his days. He last major discovery, of lunar libration,
was in 1637, the same year he lost his eyesight.
Although she escaped the recurrence of the bubonic plague
that swept back into Italy in 1629, his daughter Suor Maria Celeste suffered
with great worry during his trial, and died from infection in 1634, age
34. The grieving Galileo lived another
8 years under house arrest, dying at the beginning of 1642, in Arcetri, in his
house near her convent, San Matteo. We
have surviving her 120 letters to her father.
They paint Galileo as an accessible, sympathetic and brilliant
personality. It has been recently
discovered that his daughter is buried beneath him in Galileo’s tomb.
This brief outline highlights just a few aspects of
Galileo’s illustrious life. I’m sure
the participants in NCHALADA can bring their considerable expertise and
knowledge to this discussion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sobel, Dava, Galileo’s
Daughter – a Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love. New York:
Walker & Co., 1999. Many
historical illustrations, too.
Sobel, Dava, Letters
to Father – Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo, 1623-1633. Translated and Annotated by Dava Sobel. New York:
Walker & Co., 2001. Complete
texts of all Sr. Maria Celeste’s surviving letters, in English and Italian.
[Allan-Olney, Mary.]
The Private Life of Galileo,
Compiled Principally from his Correspondence and that of his Eldest Daughter,
Sister Maria Celeste, Nun in the Franciscan Convent of St. Matthew, in Arcetri. Philadelphia: John E. Potter and Co., 1879.
Galileo’s
own writings
Sidereus
Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) translated by Albert Van
Helden. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989.
The
Assayer, in The Controversy
on the Comets of 1618 (several contributors, including also Kepler). Translated by Stillman Drake & C.
O’Malley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960.
Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Translated by Stillman Drake.
Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967.
Dialogues
Concerning the Two New Sciences (re motion). Translated by Henry Crew and A. de
Salvio. New York: Macmillan 1914 and Dover 1954.
Letters
on Sunspots, translated by Stillman Drake, in Discoveries and
Opinions of Galileo. New York: Anchor, 1957.
Two New
Sciences – including centers of gravity and the force of
percussion, translated by Stillman Drake, 2d ed. Toronto: Wall and
Thompson, 1989.
Other
useful Galileo references
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of
Science and Technology. New
York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Bernal, J. D. A History of Classical Physics. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1972, 1997.
Also has some nice old illustrations.
Cohen, I. Bernard.
What Galileo Saw: The Experience of Looking Through a
Telescope, pp 434-461 in Homage to
Galileo, edited by Paolo Mazzoldi. Singapore: World Scientific, 1993.
----. The Birth of
a New Physics. New York: Norton, 1985.
Drake, Stillman. Discoveries
and Opinions of Galileo. New
York: Anchor, 1957.
----. Galileo at
Work: His Scientific Biography. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978.
----. Galileo. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984, 1996.
----. History of
Free Fall: Aristotle to Galileo. Toronto:
Wall & Thompson, 1989.
----. Telescopes,
Tides and Tactics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
----. Cause,
Experiment and Science.
Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981.
----. Galileo Studies: Personality, Tradition, and
Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.
Pannekoek, Antonie.
A History of Astronomy. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1961.
Van Helden, Albert, & Elizabeth Burr, The Galileo Project, http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/