This courses is dedicated to a single individual scientist, his life and times, and the historical context from which he emerged. Few scientists have had the influence and the iconic status of Galileo. He is a powerful figure in the public imagination, although I argue that almost everything that you have read by the popularisers and journalists writing about Galileo and his times is somewhere in the region of completely wrong. So, get ready for a different story – and one that I think shows Galileo to be far more interesting, funny, attractive, clever, human, and much more flawed than the popular story suggests.
You can look at Galileo from almost any perspective you can imagine, and he turns out to be interesting and innovative. His science emerges from a complex web of ideas, ancient and modern. You cannot ignore the social context in which Galileo lived, the politics of his times, the religious arguments and pressures of his times, the technical state of mathematics, or physics, or engineering, the arguments of astronomers and natural philosophers. However, stories you have been told about the conflict between Galileo and the Church are almost completely wrong and – worse – miss the point of what was going on, and who was angry with whom, and why.
Galileo is a key figure in any history of the scientific revolution, but as one gets close to the details of the developments in science in the late 16th and earlier 17th century, the story gets a lot less “revolutionary” a lot of the time. Understanding how Galileo used ancient and more recent ideas and arguments to construct new ideas about the causal mechanics of the world, and fitting his work and his arguments into the right contemporary context reveals a much more interesting character than the “saint and martyr” sort of image so often portrayed. Galileo was an experimenter, but he hid his experiments in his published works. Galileo made extraordinary, revolutionary observations with his telescope (which he didn’t invent), but many contemporaries regarded this as simply bad science, as if I tried to argue against Einstein’s theory of relativity by playing around in the kitchen, or writing poetry. Galilean physics as you were taught (remember Galilean inertial frames?) is not what Galileo did, and the foundations of his physics were completely wrong, and ignored. But he is one of the most extraordinary innovators and original thinkers in a century full of innovation and originality, and he was, without doubt, one of the principal figures in bringing about the new science of the scientific revolution, and thereby all that has followed in science since.
I will explain some aspects of Galileo and his work by looking at the Renaissance traditions and foundations that he worked from: how he was limited by these, how he used these, and how these explain the construction of his ideas. Each of his three major books is an extraordinary and revolutionary document, and each had a deeply different reception. What emerges is a much more human and interesting picture, and one which provides a deeper grasp of the extraordinary revolution in thinking that we see in Galileo and his contemporaries.
I will expect you to have a vague idea of what European history was like around the time of Galileo (say 1580-1640), but no particular scientific or historical background is necessary. However, a well-developed sense of humour is needed to appreciate Galileo ... and these lectures.