Hal galileo biography books

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Is that accurate then, that Galileo was always short of money?

He frets a lot over his son, who like so many sons of famous figures is not all his father would want him to be. In fact, when I was reviewing the book, I commented that by the late 17th century, people were using telescopes in the exploration of Baja California. It’s not a scientific work in any normal sense, by our standard, or even by the standards of his own time.

You can watch the version with Topol online. That’s not something a writer for a general audience often thinks of doing, and I want to fully credit her for having recognized not only that it would be great to write the story of Galileo from the perspective of his relationship with his oldest daughter, but that we should hear her in her own words.

This raises a philosophical question—and this is another way some inquisitors read the book and it is something that also interests Finocchiaro, by the way—of whether Galileo was a good philosopher. It’s the story of the simultaneous discovery of new ways of thinking about how we see the heavens. Most of us have never used a replica of a Galilean telescope—we’ve used the kind of telescope that Kepler modifies, that changes how you view the image through a different combination of lenses.

He was a mathematics professor in his 40s who had published virtually nothing. Galileo wants to write for the world. But Bruno sees Copernicanism as a kind of sign, he reads it allegorically. Here Galileo is thinking about epistemology. Clearly the children matter a lot to him because he brings them all with him to Florence—and not her.

Is Catholic regret there right from the start? Then he returns to Italy, after having flirted with Protestantism in many different places. His scholarship wasn't confined to dry theory, either; he also wove compelling narratives that brought complex concepts to life.

What the book gets you to do is to think about this as an object that has to travel through very concrete networks.

We have no idea why they didn’t marry, the assumption is that she’s not of the appropriate social class, since he facilitates her marrying someone else in Padua after he leaves for Florence. It costs a lot less to give somebody a convent dowry than a dowry for marriage.

All of the works that he publishes directly are in Italian except for The Sidereal Messenger, which is in Latin.