Quecksilber experiment galileo biography
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On the other hand, the justifications of his principles ultimately rest on a priori grounds. In sum, an adverse result would refute the view, but such an experimental failure is unintelligible.
Galileo’s ambivalence towards empirical evidence led some commentators to think his method was entirely a priori (Koyré 1966).
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On Motion
At the University of Pisa, Galileo learned the physics of the Ancient Greek scientist, Aristotle. Galileo, by contrast, held that the planetary models corresponded to physical realities. E.g., strictly speaking, a horizontal surface is spherical, so the body’s conserved motion along it would be circular.
In January 1633, a very ill Galileo made an arduous journey to Rome. However, he did have a brief relationship with Marina Gamba, a woman he met on one of his many trips to Venice. And for Pope John Paul II’s 1992 rehabilitation of Galileo, see Coyne 2005.
Bibliography
Primary Sources: Galileo’s Works
The main body of Galileo’s work is collected in:
- Favaro, Antonio (ed.), 1890–1909, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, 20 vols., Florence: Barbera; reprinted 1929–1939 and 1964–1966.
As noted above, this has made for interpretive fecundity, but it also entails that Galileo’s appraisal has mainly been in the eye of the beholder. In 1613–14, Galileo participated in discussions of Copernicanism through his student Benedetto Castelli, and wrote a Letter to Castelli defending the doctrine from theological objections.
This is no small set of accomplishments for a court musician’s son who left the University of Pisa without a degree.
Momentous figures living in momentous times are full of interpretive fecundity, and Galileo has been the subject of manifold interpretations and much controversy. His primary qualities are the properties of mathematical volumes in geometric space (as Descartes would later emphasize).
29–52.
- Lindberg, David C., and Robert S. Westman (eds.), 1990, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Machamer, Peter, 1976, “Fictionalism and Realism in 16th Century Astronomy,” in R. S. Westman (ed.), The Copernican Achievement, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.
His work on astronomy made him famous and he was appointed court mathematician in Florence. In the traditional hierarchy, physics could constrain what models were really possible, but not so the other way around. Ironically, in The Assayer Galileo rejects the best pre-telescopic evidence in favor of Copernicanism—the comets, which Tycho Brahe had shown to move through the supposedly solid celestial spheres in trajectories around the Sun.
But Galileo ridicules the notion that comets are celestial objects, instead insisting that they are sublunary phenomena produced by optical refraction in the atmosphere.
By the late 1620s, Galileo had resolved to produce a text defending Copernicanism, as far as was permitted by the Church’s 1616 condemnation of the doctrine.
He argues that the combination of the Earth’s diurnal rotation and its annual revolution around the sun can account for the flux and reflux of the seas. The reconciliation necessitates an error theory that attributes deviations from mathematical exactitude to “impediments,” like friction or air resistance, that can be set aside in the empirical evaluation of a mathematical theory.
Galileo died in Arcetri on 8 January 1642.