Galileo The Scientist

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Peter E. Hodgson
Galileo the Scientist
Introduction
The life and achievements of Galileo form a subject of enduring
interest. He is certainly one of the greatest scientists of all time and
indeed has been called the founder of modern science. He showed
that natural phenomena obey mathematical laws and thus, Galileo
laid the foundations of quantitative dynamics and used it to give the
first accurate account of the motions of falling bodies and projectiles.
He improved the telescope and used it to discover the moons of
Jupiter, the mountains on the moon, the phases of Venus, and the
spots on the sun. All this combined to throw doubt on Aristotelian
cosmology and to support the heliocentric theory of Copernicus.
More than any scientist, Galileo was responsible for initiating the
transition from the Aristotelian science of the Middle Ages to the
mathematical science of the following centuries.
Galileo lived at a critical moment in the development of science.
According to the popular account, the ancient Greeks made the first
steps toward a scientific understanding of the world. The Greek
writings were inherited by the Muslim civilization and then
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transmitted to the new universities in the Middle Ages through
translations done mainly in Spain. Thereafter, an authoritarian
Church controlled the intellectual development of Western Europe
and prevented any independent thought or scientific development.
It was only during the Renaissance that the authority of the Church
was challenged by men like Galileo who insisted on the greater
value for science of experimentation and observation than reliance
on ancient texts. This is dramatized by the story that Galileo dropped
two balls of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and
showed that, contrary to Aristotle’s theory, they reached the ground
simultaneously. Thereafter, science developed as a free and inde-
pendent search for truth.
The reality is, of course, different and highly instructive. The
familiar story, still heard today, that there was no science worth
speaking about in the long period from the time of the ancient
Greeks to the flowering of genius in the Renaissance has long been
disproved by modern scholarship. Galileo himself was not only a
highly original scientist but remained a devout Catholic throughout
his life.1 He had a sound grasp of theology and saw clearly that the
new knowledge of the world gained by the scientific method was in
no way inconsistent with the teaching of the Church, since both
come from God. He also saw that some of the new knowledge raised
important problems of scriptural interpretation that could be
resolved within the context of traditional Catholic theology. It is now
recognized that Galileo’s views on the interpretation of Scripture are
basically correct, and he was particularly anxious to prevent the
tragedy that actually happened—the condemnation by the Church
of a genuine scientific breakthrough. He was, however, overconfident
concerning his scientific arguments, which were still at that time
inconclusive, at least to nonscientists. In view of the delicate theo-
logical questions raised by the heliocentric theory, it was not unrea-
sonable for Church authorities to ask Galileo to moderate his claims
until a definite proof was forthcoming. The main protagonists were
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all motivated to defend the truth, but they were strongly influenced
by their intellectual backgrounds and possessed personal character
traits that exacerbated their misunderstandings.
Before considering the achievements of Galileo, it is useful to
sketch the understanding of the physical world that existed before his
time.
The youthful Galileo was attracted to mathematics and avidly
studied the works of Archimedes. His interest in hydrostatics was
stimulated by Archimedes’ solution of the problem of King Hiero’s
crown, which led to Galileo’s first publication, The Little Balance
(1586). Nature, he realized, is written in the language of mathe-
matics. Galileo was further stimulated by his experiments on the
relation between musical tones and the length, weight, and tension
of strings. His work on the centers of gravity of solids led to his
appointment as the chair of mathematics at Pisa. His emphasis on
mathematics shows the influence of Plato, who was widely influen-
tial in the early Middle Ages due to the writings of Augustine. Plato
held that terrestrial phenomena are imperfect copies of abstract
mathematical forms existing in the transcendent realm of ideas.
Thus, mathematical relations are only approximately realized in
nature. It was Galileo’s greatest achievement to show how nature fol-
lows mathematical laws, but he went beyond Plato in requiring exact
correspondence, within the limits of experimental uncertainties.
It is important to distinguish between the professional Aris-
totelians in the universities, who infuriated Galileo by insisting on
the literal text of Aristotle and refusing to listen to Galileo’s argu-
ments, and the open-minded Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, who
so strongly influenced the young Galileo in his formative years.
These Jesuits followed Aristotle in many respects and taught “a
somewhat eclectic Thomism containing elements deriving from
Scotist, Averroist and nominalist thought”2 that may be described as
scholastic Aristotelianism. Therefore, although he bitterly attacked
the professional Aristotelians (particularly their views on mechanics
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and cosmology), Galileo retained a basic adherence to Aristotelian
natural philosophy throughout his life.
Aristotle thought of nature as a process, an organism, and held
that the main object of science is to see how it is related to man. For
him, the aim of science was to obtain certain knowledge by under-
standing the causes of natural phenomena. His cosmology was based
on direct commonsense experience, and this is why it has such a
strong appeal, even today. Aristotle emphasized the primacy of the
senses, which takes precedence over any theory. Who can doubt
that the earth is solid and immoveable, with the sun, the stars, and
planets moving around it?
Astronomers studied the motions of the stars and the planets, and
Ptolemy was able to describe them quite accurately by compound-
ing circular motions in the form of cycles and epicycles. This was a
purely mathematical description, and it was not maintained that the
cycles and epicycles corresponded to anything real. In contrast,
Aristotle sought a more physical cosmology in terms of real entities.
Johannes Kepler finally unified these two approaches in the early
1600s.3
At the center of Aristotle’s cosmology is the immovable earth.
Surrounding it are a number of concentric crystalline spheres bear-
ing the moon and the inner planets Mercury and Venus, then the
sun, and finally the outer planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Enclos-
ing all is the sphere of the fixed stars, and outside this is nothing at
all. There were differing views about the reality of the crystalline
spheres: Aristotle believed there are fifty-five in all, made of a pure,
unalterable, transparent, weightless, crystalline solid. The whole set
of spheres rotates once a day, thus accounting for the diurnal motion
of the sun and the stars. Seen against the background of the stars, the
paths of the planets sometimes show a retrograde or looped motion,
and this was accounted for by fixing the planets to secondary spheres
linked to the main ones. In this way, the Aristotelian cosmology was
able to give an account of all observable celestial motions, including
the prediction of eclipses.
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Guided by direct experience, Aristotle made a sharp distinction
between terrestrial and celestial matter: terrestrial matter is change-
able whereas celestial matter is unchangeable. There are four types
of terrestrial matter: earth, air, fire, and water, and each seeks its nat-
ural place. Celestial matter is the quintessence (or fifth essence)—
pure and unchangeable—and naturally moves on the most perfect
curve, the circle. On the earth, natural motion is linear: the falling
of earth and water and the rising of air and fire. These motions
accelerate as each body approaches its natural place. Unnatural
motion, such as the flight of an arrow, requires the continuing action
of a mover. Aristotle’s physics was based on direct observation and
accounted for many natural phenomena in a reasonable and coher-
ent way. As a result, it was widely accepted for two thousand years.
One of the weakest parts of Aristotle’s physics is his theory of
projectile motion. He had no concept of force and denied the notion
of inertia. Aristotle believed that because projectile motion is unnat-
ural it requires the continued action of a mover, and this must be the
medium. He therefore suggested that the thrower communicates
both motion to the medium and the power to move.
Buridan, a fourteenth-century philosopher, rejected this theory
because it cannot explain the continuing motion of a spinning wheel
and also because it is common experience that the medium resists
the motion of the projectile. Instead, Buridan proposed that the
thrower gives the projectile impetus that carries it along after it has
left the hand of the thrower. This is related to one of the arguments
against the motion of the earth. According to Aristotle, a projectile
thrown vertically upward from a moving earth will fall behind and
hit the ground west of its starting point, contrary to experience. The
impetus theory, however, predicts that it retains an eastward impe-
tus throughout its motion, and so returns to the same point as
observed.
Many philosophers believed that the ancient Greeks had achieved
the summit of knowledge; they knew essentially all that could be
known, and so the answer to any problem could be found by
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scrutinizing ancient texts, particularly those of Aristotle. The duty
of a scholar was simply to understand, defend, and teach Aristotle’s
ideas. Within this mindset, the Aristotelians simply could not under-
stand what Galileo was trying to do. To them, the world is a living
organism that can be understood by experience and reason. For
this, direct perception is all that was needed. They interpreted the
world in terms of a close-knit system of purposeful behavior, using
organic categories and concepts like matter and form, act and poten-
cy, essence and existence. Thus, the qualitative properties of things
suffice to reveal their essences.
In sharp contrast, Galileo said that it is an illusion to think we can
understand the essences of things; what we can and should do is
describe their behavior as accurately as we can using mathematics
and then make experiments to test the validity of our ideas. Quan-
titative relations are the real clues to the unique, orderly, immutable
reality. By establishing them we can find out how things behave, but
not what they are. This seemed useless to the Aristotelians, who had
a low view of mathematics; indeed, Aristotle “left to mechanics and
other low artisans the investigation of the ratios and other secondary
features of acceleration.”4 To the Aristotelians, number, weight, and
measure have no philosophical significance; motion is interpreted in
terms of purpose, and for this, mathematics is irrelevant. They had
no interest in accurate descriptions of the motions of projectiles or
in the mathematical description of levers and pulleys. Mathematics,
they allowed, is an interesting game, but it tells us nothing about the
real world. Galileo, on the other hand, thought that the Aristotelians’
elaborate structure of abstractions in fact led nowhere.
Because Galileo occupied a chair of mathematics, his duty was to
expound the works of Euclid and Archimedes. He could be much
freer in his criticisms of Aristotle than if he had been a member of
the philosophical establishment, whose main duty was to master
and teach the works of Aristotle.
It is important to distinguish between Aristotle’s general ideas
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concerning the scientific method, his natural philosophy, and the
way it was applied to particular problems. Aristotelian physics was
an attempt to find the real structure of the world by discovering true
first principles and using them with the evidence of sense experi-
ence. Galileo shared Aristotle’s goal of discovering the truth about
nature. Aristotle’s cosmology included many statements about the
heavenly bodies and detailed theories of familiar physical processes
that have subsequently been found to be incorrect, but this does not
necessarily falsify the principles of his natural philosophy. Although
Galileo showed that many of Aristotle’s views are incorrect, Galileo
did this within the framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy, and
he remained essentially an Aristotelian. In the end, Aristotle’s
attempt was a heroic failure, largely because he underestimated the
difficulty of obtaining these principles, and also the value of precise
measurement and detailed mathematical analysis.
Christian beliefs can be interpreted easily within the framework
of Aristotelian cosmology. Hell is in the center of the earth, and vol-
canoes provide evidence of its fires. Beyond the outermost sphere is
the abode of God and the saints. Knowing this, we can speak of the
descent into hell and the ascent into heaven. This imagery is lost in
the heliocentric system. If the earth is just one of the planets, then
is it not possible that people may be found on other planets? And if
so, how can they be redeemed by Christ? The Aristotelian universe
accommodated all that was known in a unified logical structure, and
this accounts for its great power over the human imagination. To
throw doubt on any part of the Aristotelian universe would seem to
threaten the whole and upset the well-established order of the
universe.
Central to the whole debate is the question of why we believe—
what the criteria are that we apply to judge whether a scientific
theory is true. More fundamental, how do we justify the criteria
itself? In Galileo’s time, a theory was judged by the Aristotelian cri-
terion: whether it gave an explanation in terms of causes. It was also
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required to “save the appearances,” that is, to give predictions in
numerical agreement with the experimental measurements. Last, it
had to be in accord with Scripture.
Galileo the Physicist

The Pendulum
Galileo’s earliest biographer, Viviani, claimed that in 1582, when
Galileo was still a medical student in Pisa, he observed the motion
of a swinging lamp in a cathedral. Using his pulse to measure the
time of swing, he found it was independent of the amplitude of the
swing, providing that the amplitude is small. This is a rather sur-
prising result, as it implies that it takes the same time for the pen-
dulum to reach the nadir of its swing, however far it is drawn aside
before release. According to Viviani, this suggested to Galileo that a
pendulum could be used to measure the pulse rate. There is, how-
ever, no other evidence for this story, as Galileo first mentioned the
isochronous nature of the pendulum in a letter in 1602. He also
showed that the period of swing is independent of the material of the
pendulum and that the period is proportional to the square root of
the length of the string. Galileo also compared the swing of the pen-
dulum with the motion of a ball that runs down one inclined plane
and up another one opposite to it. In another investigation, he found
that the times of descent are equal for all chords from the highest or
to the lowest points of a vertical circle.
The Dynamics of Free Fall and Projectiles

Galileo’s earliest work on mechanics was in his De Motu of 1592,
which is devoted to a discussion of the fall of bodies in media of dif-
ferent densities. In this work he was much influenced by the ideas of
the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, whose lecture notes he used
extensively.5 They held, with Aristotle, that the aim of science is the
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understanding of natural phenomena in terms of evident principles,
and Galileo continued to accept this throughout his life. However, he
strongly opposed the arid, textual Aristotelians found in universities,
and it is against them that his polemics are directed. De Motu is large-
ly a detailed analysis of the writings of Aristotle on motion, and after
about forty pages of discussion Galileo exclaims:
Heavens! At this point I am weary and ashamed of having to

use so many words to refute such childish arguments and such
inept attempts at subtleties as those which Aristotle crams
into the whole of Book 4 of De Caelo, as he argues against the
older philosophers. For his arguments have no force, no learn-
ing, no elegance or attractiveness, and anyone who has under-
stood what was said above will recognise their fallacies.6
Later he remarks, “Aristotle was ignorant not only of the profound

and more abstruse discoveries of geometry, but even of the most ele-
mentary principles of this science.”7 A few pages later, discussing
how projectiles are moved, he writes, “Aristotle, as in practically
everything that he wrote about locomotion, wrote the opposite of
the truth.”8
At that time, however, Galileo apparently thought that each of the
cases he discussed was characterized by a constant velocity rather
than a constant acceleration. He also accepted the false belief of the
time that if a light body and a heavy body are dropped together, the
light body will initially move more rapidly than the heavier, and so
he devoted several pages to ingenious arguments to explain why
this happens. If indeed there is experimental evidence for this effect,
it probably occurs because a heavy body has to be held more tightly
than a light one, and so tends to be released a little later.
Galileo developed his views on motion throughout his life, and his
mature conclusions are described in his Discoursi of 1638, which in
many respects is a precursor of Newtonian mechanics. The transition
from medieval to Newtonian mechanics is largely due to Galileo.
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Galileo’s views on motion went through several stages. At first,
as described in De Motu, he believed that natural motion has a nat-
ural uniform speed proportional to the difference between the den-
sity of the moving object and that of the medium. As the effective
density is diminished by the medium, so is the natural uniform
speed. Nonnatural motions are due to an impressed force, and this
is responsible for the initial acceleration. These views constituted a
coherent philosophy of motion, but Galileo could not find a single
example of this uniform motion and so concluded that acceleration
is a feature of all motion. He considered the possibility that veloci-
ty is directly proportional to the distance but soon rejected this pos-
sibility. Then, from the mean speed theorem, which implies that the
acquired velocity is proportional to the time taken, he deduced that
the distance covered is proportional to the square of the time taken.
We can obtain this result more easily using Newton’s notation:
.
ẍ = g, x = gt, x = ½gt2.
Galileo soon found that it was difficult, if not impossible, for him to
measure with sufficient accuracy the time taken for bodies to fall. He
therefore hit on the ingenious idea of timing them as they rolled
down planes inclined at different angles. The times measured were
much longer, and so could be measured more accurately. He could
make measurements for a series of increasing angles and then
extrapolate to find the rate for free fall. The experiment is indeed
quite practicable, as shown by Settle.9
Galileo also made further studies of motion that do not require
time measurements. He let balls roll down an inclined plane, and at
the end of the plane they were deflected horizontally and then
allowed to fall freely until they hit a horizontal plane. The time-
squared law implies that the path of free fall is a semiparabola, so that
by seeing how the length and angle of the inclined plane was relat-
ed to the point of contact on the horizontal plane Galileo could ver-
ify the correctness of the law.
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One of the most familiar stories about Galileo, also due to
Viviani, is that he dropped two different weights from the top of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa and that, to the dismay of the watching Aris-
totelians, they hit the ground at the same time, disproving Aristotle’s
law. If ever he did the experiment, however, and if he succeeded in
releasing them at exactly the same moment, which is not as easy as
it sounds, careful observation would have shown that, due to air
resistance, the heavier body would have hit the ground slightly before
the lighter body. This is still quite different from the proportionali-
ty given by Aristotle.
Physicists (and Galileo was no exception) are sometimes prone
to imagine that they have such a firm grasp of a particular phenom-
enon that they can confidently say what is going to happen without
making any experiments. Frequently their confidence is justified,
especially when they are making qualitative predictions, but some-
times they are wrong. Many instructive examples could be given
from the history of science. Quantitative speculations, like that men-
tioned above, are much more shaky.
The Velocity of Light

In his Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences Galileo describes an exper-
iment to determine the velocity of light. Two people, each with a
lantern, stand several miles apart. The first uncovers his lantern and
immediately after the light is seen by the second person, that person
uncovers his own lantern. The first person measures the time that
elapses from the moment he uncovers his lantern to when he sees
the light of the second lantern. This time, divided by twice the dis-
tance between the two people, gives the velocity of light. It was
found, however, that the time was immeasurably small and so the
experiment failed. We now know that the velocity of light is so
great that such experiments are bound to fail.
An interesting sequel is that Romer made the first reliable mea-
surement of the velocity of light by observing the eclipses of the
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satellites of Jupiter. These were found to occur rather later than
expected when Jupiter was far from the earth, compared with the
times when Jupiter was near. This is due to the time taken by the
light to travel from Jupiter to the earth, and from this the velocity
of light was determined.
Galileo also tried to develop a method of determining longitude
at sea by observing the satellites of Jupiter. Although this is possible
in principle, it was found to be impracticable because at that time it
was not possible to measure the time at sea with sufficient accuracy.
Harrison achieved this feat later. The method has, however, proved
useful in surveying on land.
Galileo’s Scientific Method

When he was a young professor in Padua, Galileo was strongly influ-
enced by the writings of the Jesuits teaching at the Collegio
Romano, particularly Menu, Vella, Rugierius, and Vitelleschi, and he
based his lectures on their work. These Jesuits accepted Aristotle’s
definition of science and treated logic and physical questions in a
realist way, following Aquinas. This formed the solid basis of
Galileo’s subsequent work.10
Galileo realized more clearly than anyone before him that the pri-
mary task of the physicist is to understand the world as it is, to pen-
etrate behind the apparent complexity of phenomena to the often
surprisingly simple reality beneath. Thus, when he considered freely
falling bodies, he wanted to establish the laws obeyed by all bodies
of whatever shape or material. He therefore considered fall in a
vacuum, but, as this cannot be realized in practice, he chose the
best approximation, namely, the fall in air of smooth, hard balls. The
physicist is almost never able to make an experiment in an ideal sit-
uation, so it is necessary to consider all the unwanted influences that
could affect the final result and to allow for them. This often requires
a subsidiary experiment to study and quantify these influences. This
evaluation of perturbing effects is a vital component of the art of
scientific investigation.
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Galileo also distinguished between primary and secondary qual-
ities. He pointed out that all bodies have a shape and a size, that are
in a particular place at a given time, that are moving or stationary and
so on. These are primary or essential qualities and cannot be sepa-
rated from the body. On the other hand, other, secondary qualities
such as color, taste, and smell, although grounded in the properties
of the body, are in themselves sensations that exist only as they are
perceived by the observer. The scientific research in which Galileo
was interested is essentially concerned with studying the primary
qualities of bodies.
In his research, Galileo combined the insights of Aristotle and
Plato and went beyond them. Like Aristotle, he insisted on the pri-
mary importance of experience, of the knowledge that comes to us
through the senses. This knowledge, however, cannot be taken at face
value and must be tested by combining it with other experiences and
uniting them all by a general principle or theory. This theory cannot
be deduced from the experiences; it is a creation of the human
mind. The theory should not only agree with the original experi-
ences but also predict a range of other experiences that enable it to
be tested. To specify these new experiences we need not only Aris-
totelian logic but also mathematics. The theory and the mathemat-
ics refer to an ideal world and are thus Platonic in nature. Theories
are tested by doing experiments, and the conditions are chosen so as
to be as close as possible to the ideal situation. If the results disagree
with the theory, then the theory must be modified so as to be con-
sistent with the new experiences and then tested again. It is not nec-
essary to make a large number of experiments; due to the uniformity
and rationality of nature a few well-chosen experiments suffice.
There are many practical difficulties in carrying out this pro-
gram. What experiences do we start with? Usually this is indicated
by an existing theory. If this has a mathematical character it is nec-
essary not only to observe but also to measure. The construction of
the theory depends on the insight of the scientist and cannot be
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specified by a set of rules; it may therefore be wrong in a funda-
mental way or, more frequently, it may be inadequate in one respect
or another. Its consequences are likely to be extensive, and it is not
easy to choose the ones that make the sharpest test and yet are rel-
atively easy to carry out. If there is a disagreement, is it due to a
defect in the experiment or does it show a real defect in the theory?
If the latter, then how should the theory be modified and so on?
Many similar questions must be addressed.
As the theories become more sophisticated and agree with a
wide range of experience, they may be said to give genuine, though
still limited, knowledge about the world. As confidence grows it
become less necessary to make experimental tests, and this is cer-
tainly true of the laws of motion. However, it always remains possi-
ble that new experiences show inadequacies in the theory that
require it to be modified. There are many examples of this in the his-
tory of science.
Galileo was neither a pure Aristotelian nor a pure Platonist.11 He
could claim with justice that he was a better Aristotelian than many
of the professed Aristotelians that criticized him. He, like Aristotle,
observed nature and did not seek the answers to questions only in
books. If Aristotle had been able to look through a telescope he
would have certainly modified his views. Likewise, Galileo was a
good Platonist by his stress on the importance of mathematics, which
Aristotle undervalued. However, Plato considered the material
world to be an imperfect copy of the ideal world, whereas Galileo
believed in the possibility of an exact mathematical description.
Galileo never formulated a fully articulated theory of the scien-
tific method; indeed, this is still the subject of controversy. He was
a pioneer with a vision of the future and had to develop his tools as
he tackled new problems. He was primarily interested in solving
problems, not in explaining the methods he used to solve them,
which he made up as he went along. Yet in so doing, he was inevitably
throwing doubt on the traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy,
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and this could have the most far-reaching and serious consequences.
Structures of thought are linked far more tightly than is generally
supposed, so that it is not possible to modify one section without
affecting the others. This was clearly seen by many of Galileo’s oppo-
nents and ensured their opposition, even if they were unable to
mount effective criticism of his actual scientific work.
Galileo the Astronomer

The Invention of the Telescope
In 1609, Galileo heard that a Dutch optician, Lippershey, had found
that if he put two lenses at either end of a tube and looked through
it, distant objects appeared much closer. Many of these telescopes
were made, but as their magnification was low and the images rather
blurred they were regarded more as interesting toys than as objects
of practical value. Galileo, however, immediately realized the impor-
tance of this invention and how he could use it to further his career
by offering it to the Venetian state. He was alarmed to learn that a
Dutchman was already in Venice, hoping to sell his telescope to the
Doge. He alerted his friend Sarpi, who succeeded in preventing the
Dutchman from obtaining an audience with the Doge and frantical-
ly set to work to make a telescope for himself. He fitted two lenses
at either end of a lead tube and indeed found that it magnified dis-
tant objects. Later he said that he succeeded in making a telescope
in a single day, but this seems improbable. It takes a long time to
grind a lens, and it is unlikely that he already had commercial lens-
es available or that they would be of sufficient quality. By a process
of trial and error he made a series of telescopes of increasing mag-
nification and technical excellence. As soon as he had made a good
telescope he arranged with the help of Sarpi to have an audience with
the powerful Doge of Venice, who were impressed by its value to the
Venetian navy. Astutely, Galileo presented his best telescope to the
Doge as a gift and, not to be outdone, the Doge’s senate soon after
voted to double Galileo’s salary, to reappoint him for life, and to give
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him a large bonus. Subsequently he made many more telescopes
and presented them to many eminent friends and powerful princes.
This story illustrates well Galileo’s ruthless opportunism and tech-
nical genius. Certainly his best telescopes were far superior to any
others, and he made sure that their merits were widely recognized
and that his career benefited.
The Discovery of the Moons of Jupiter

Galileo turned the telescopes to the heavens and was rewarded by a
series of outstanding discoveries. He looked at the planets and
noticed that there were one or two stars on either side of Jupiter,
almost in a line. On subsequent nights he found that the stars had
moved relative to Jupiter, and that there were now four stars. He
realized he was seeing four of the moons that orbit Jupiter just as the
moon orbits the earth. By observing them for several weeks he was
able to determine their periods of rotation. He called them the
“Medicean stars” in honor of Cosimo de Medici, and published an
account of his discovery in a pamphlet called “Sidereus Nuncius,” or
“Starry Messenger.” At first, his discovery was ridiculed, but most
people were soon convinced when they looked through one of his
telescopes. He presented telescopes to several powerful princes,
and they naturally asked their own astronomers to examine them
and assess their merits. By this clever move, the astronomers were
forced to examine his claims, whether they believed them or not,
and indeed they soon endorsed them.
Galileo was particularly excited by this discovery because it pro-
vided an example of several moons orbiting a planet, similar to
Copernicus’s suggestion that the planets orbit the sun. It did not, of
course, prove Copernicus’s theory, but showed that it was not nec-
essary for everything to rotate about a single center and answered
those who said that if the earth moves it will lose its moon.
This spectacular discovery made Galileo famous throughout
Europe, and he followed it by a whole series of new observations. He
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found hundreds more stars in the familiar constellations and showed
that the Milky Way is made up of thousands of individual stars. He
turned his telescope to the moon and observed the circular craters
we now know are due to the impact of meteorites. By observing the
behavior of the shadows of their edges as the moon waxed and
waned, he was able to show that they had a central depression sur-
rounded by a high rim and estimated that they were about four miles
high, a reasonably accurate value.
The discovery was important because Aristotle had said that the
heavenly bodies were perfectly spherical, with no rough surfaces.
The Aristotelians tried to explain Galileo’s observations by saying
that the moon is surrounded by a smooth, transparent shell that
covers all the craters. Galileo sarcastically replied that he would
believe this if they would allow him to cover the moon with high and
transparent mountains.
These new results supported previous observations of changes in
the skies. In 1604 there appeared a new star that excited great pub-
lic interest. Galileo gave three lectures on the phenomenon, admit-
ting that he was not at all sure that it was really a star; for all he knew
it might be due to the condensation of vapors in faraway space. Stud-
ies of its parallax showed that it was much farther from the earth
than the moon and so provided another example of imperfections in
the celestial realm.
These new discoveries were highly uncongenial to the Aris-
totelians, who redoubled their efforts to discredit Galileo’s work,
maintaining that what he saw was due to imperfections in his tele-
scopes. He defended himself vigorously, first developing the oppos-
ing views and supporting them by real arguments, and then
demolishing the whole structure with undisguised relish.
His discoveries were soon accepted by other astronomers, par-
ticularly by the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, who became sup-
portive of his work. When Galileo visited Rome in 1611 to lecture
on his discoveries, he was feted by them.
 logos
In 1611, Galileo observed the sunspots that provide another
example of imperfections in the celestial realm. He correctly sur-
mised that they are clouds of vapor on the sun’s surface, and by
observing their motion deduced that the sun rotates with a period of
about a month. Galileo did not discover the sunspots; the Chinese had
known of them for centuries, and other European scientists had also
noticed them. To maintain the incorruptibility of the heavens, the
Jesuit astronomer Scheiner suggested that sunspots are little planets
orbiting the sun. Galileo had little difficulty in demolishing Scheiner’s
theory, but did so in a courteous way. Nevertheless, Scheiner was
offended, and this was to cause Galileo much trouble later on.
To disprove Scheiner’s theory, Galileo observed that the sunspots
are approximately circular when they are near the center of the
sun’s disk and progressively become more elliptical as they approach
the edge. This is just what would be expected if they are situated on
the surface of the sun; if they were spherical planets they would keep
the same circular shape as they moved around the sun. Although this
does not amount to a strict proof, Galileo was justified in using the
motion of the sunspots as an argument in favor of the heliocentric
theory.
The Heliocentric Theory

Copernicus’s book De Revolutionibus, which put forward the helio-
centric theory, remained Aristotelian in all except its central idea and
is written so that, apart from some introductory sections, it can be
understood only by professional astronomers. Initially, Copernicus
was concerned, like Ptolemy, to find the best way to calculate the
motions of the planets and used the heliocentric hypothesis as a cal-
culating device. As the work proceeded, he found that it accounted
naturally for many observations that could be fitted by the geocen-
tric model only by making specific assumptions in each case. Even-
tually he came to believe that the Copernican theory is true. As
Galileo remarked in a letter to Monsignor Dini in 1615,
galileo the scientist 

From many years of observation and study, he was abundant-
ly in possession of all the details observed in the stars, for it is
impossible to come to know the structure of the universe
without having learned them all very diligently and having
them very readily available in mind; and so, by repeated stud-
ies and very long labours, he accomplished what later earned
him the admirations of all those who study him diligently
enough to understand his discussions. Thus, to claim that
Copernicus did not consider the earth’s motion to be true
could be accepted perhaps only by those who have not read
him, in my opinion; for all six parts of his book are full of the
doctrines of the earth’s motion, and of explanations and con-
firmations of it.12
Copernicus was highly regarded by professional astronomers,

and they realized the many advantages of the new system. Many of
them began to use his methods, even if they continued to reject his
heliocentrism.
Subsequently, Tycho Brahe proposed a new cosmology, in which
all the planets revolve around the sun, which in turn revolves around
the earth. Providing the spheres of the fixed stars are sufficiently far
away, this is mathematically equivalent to the Copernican heliocen-
tric system. It was adopted by many astronomers as a way of using
the ideas of Copernicus while avoiding the apparent absurdities of a
moving earth.
The heliocentric theory provided natural qualitative explanations
of several phenomena, such as the retrograde motions of the plan-
ets, the phases of Venus, and the angular closeness to the sun of the
inner planets Mercury and Venus. In the Ptolemaic system these
observations were included by the special choice of the parameters
of the ellipses. Although some astronomers, including Copernicus,
became convinced of the correctness of the heliocentric theory, they
had no conclusive arguments. It was easy to defuse the opposition
likely to be encountered by the heliocentric theory by maintaining
 logos
that it was just a convenient mathematical scheme with no preten-
sions to reality. The Lutheran theologian Osiander, who saw the
manuscript of Copernicus through the press, inserted an anony-
mous preface to this effect without Copernicus knowing.
Professional astronomers were well aware of the large number
of minor improvements that had been made in the Ptolemaic sys-
tem over the previous centuries without significantly improving
the ﬁt to the unsatisfactory ancient data, and that proved quite
unable to fit the greatly improved data of Tycho Brahe, and they
increasingly turned to the Copernican theory as the basis of their
calculations. Many of them still rejected the heliocentric theory as
a real account of celestial motions and used the Copernican theory
simply as a method of calculation. The astronomers gradually
improved the Copernican theory and found that it was much more
tightly constrained than the Ptolemaic theory, so that it was not pos-
sible to adjust the parameters of the planetary orbits independently
of each other. And so, impelled by their practical concerns, the belief
of the professional astronomers gradually changed. By around 1616,
the time of the Church’s first action against Galileo, the case for
Copernicanism was respectable but still weak. By the time of his
recantation in 1633, the tide had turned and geocentrism was almost
a lost cause. According to Kuhn, “By the middle of the seventeenth
century it is difficult to find an important astronomer who is not
Copernican; by the end of the century it is impossible.” It took much
longer for heliocentrism to be generally accepted; Milton, for exam-
ple, in his great work treated the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems
on equal footing.
It is important to recall that not one of the arguments for Coper-
nicanism was conclusive. Galileo’s favorite argument from the tides
is fallacious. Bellarmine said that if the heliocentric theory was
proved correct (and by proof he meant certain knowledge through
causes, following Aristotle), then it would be necessary to study
carefully how it could be reconciled with Scripture. However, the
galileo the scientist 

proofs that first convinced the astronomers were accessible only to
them; it is the cumulative effects of a large number of indications,
individually inconclusive, that established the case and provided an
example of the unity of indirect reference akin to the illative sense of
Newman. This may also be described as the interpretation of signs,
which can be done only by the prepared mind. When eventually the
definitive proof of the heliocentric theory came two hundred years
later with the measurement of stellar parallax by Bessel in 1838, the
battle was long over, and it is doubtful there was any great stir among
either scientists or theologians.
If it had been a matter purely for astronomers, the Copernican
view would probably have gradually prevailed without drama. How-
ever, the prestige of Aristotelian cosmology, and especially its inte-
gration with Christian theology, made this impossible.
Galileo’s discoveries brought the whole heliocentric debate out
of the domain of the professional astronomers and into the area of
public discourse. Using his telescopes, people could see the evi-
dence for the celestial phenomena that were contrary to the Aris-
totelian view, such as the mountains on the moon, the sunspots, the
moons of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus. None of this proved the
heliocentric theory, but by weakening the Aristotelian cosmology it
made it more worthy of consideration. Telescopes soon became
popular, and Galileo had to make many more to satisfy demand. At
the same time he announced his discoveries in well-written book-
lets in the vernacular language. In contrast to the impenetrable
tome of Copernicus, these were immediately accessible to non-
professionals. Sure of his position, Galileo poured scorn on his
opponents and thus further inflamed the opposition. Heliocentrism
became popular among those who opposed Aristotle for other rea-
sons, even if they had little understanding of the astronomical
arguments.
Galileo maintained he was more faithful to Aristotle than the
Aristotelians. Aristotle believed in the importance of observation
 logos
and reason, and Galileo believed that if Aristotle had had the
opportunity to look through a telescope, he would have been con-
vinced by what he saw and would have revised his cosmology accord-
ingly. Galileo had nothing but contempt for those who looked for the
truth about the physical world only by searching through musty old
texts instead of opening their eyes to the world around them.
The commonsense belief in an immovable earth can be support-
ed by rational arguments. If the earth is moving with the speed nec-
essary to carry it around the sun, then surely the high winds would
demolish all buildings and blow everything away. It is well known, it
was said, that an object dropped from the high mast of a ship falls
nearer to the stern because the ship moves while the object falls, and
therefore the effects due to any motion of the earth should be even
more marked. Galileo responded by showing that this statement is
false: the object lands at the foot of the mast because the object shares
the forward motion of the ship all the time. He then pointed out that
if we are in a closed cabin in a steadily moving ship, we can play ball
and jump around just as we could if the ship were stationary. We
could experience the up and down motion of the waves and any
changes in the ship’s forward speed, but these are all accelerations.
This absence of effects due to a uniform velocity is known as the prin-
ciple of Galilean relativity. The absence of such effects is no argument
against the translational motion of the earth.
It may be remarked that these arguments are strictly true only
for rectilinear motion. On the earth, however, the situation is dif-
ferent because the objects on the earth’s surface have circular tra-
jectories, although the difference is small for short distances. So, the
top of the mast is moving slightly more rapidly than its foot due to
the earth’s rotation, and this implies that an object dropped from
the top of the mast will hit the deck a small distance to the east of
the base. The effect is small but not negligible and was first detect-
ed by G. A. Guglielmini in Bologna in 1789 and confirmed by J. F.
Benzenberg in 1802 and 1804, and by F. Reich in 1831. The most
galileo the scientist 

accurate study was made by E. H. Hall at Harvard University in
1902; he found a deviation of 1.50 millimeters (plus or minus 0.05
millimeters) to the east for a drop of 23 meters, compared with a
calculated value of 1.8 millimeters. Further confirmation of the
earth’s rotation came from the detection of stellar parallax by
Calandrelli in 1806.13
Another argument against the rotation of the earth is that objects
would fly off into space if the earth were rotating, as it is well known
that objects can fly off a rotating wheel. Whether they actually do so
depends on the rotational velocity. In modern terminology, objects
will fly off a rotating body if the centrifugal force mv2/R due to the
rotation is greater than the force holding them on the rotator, the
gravitational force mg in the case of the earth. So, the answer to this
objection is that the earth does not rotate fast enough for objects to
fly off it. Because the period of rotation T equals 2πR/v, the cen-
trifugal force is 4πmR/T2, where R is the radius of the earth, T is
the period of the earth’s rotation and g the acceleration due to grav-
ity. The ratio of these is gT2/4π2R, or approximately 287. Thus, the
earth would have to rotate about seventeen times faster before bod-
ies flew off.
Galileo could have avoided all his troubles by saying that helio-
centrism was just a calculational device that bore no relation to re-
ality, and indeed he was strongly urged to do this. But scientists, and
Galileo was no exception, know they are investigating an objective-
ly existing world, and such subterfuge is unacceptable.
The proof that Galileo considered the strongest was his explana-
tion of the ocean tides. He proposed a physical explanation in terms
of the configurations of the seas, but this was not convincing. He con-
sidered the alternative explanations to be just fantasies, and he
brushed them aside.
Although Galileo was able to advance many cogent arguments for
the motion of the earth, the one he emphasized most strongly is fal-
lacious, and none of them amounted to a strict proof. He failed to
 logos
meet the overrigorous conditions he had accepted to show that helio-
centrism is not inconsistent with Scripture.
The Scientific Achievements of Galileo

The main achievement of Galileo was to inaugurate a new way of
thinking about the world. He rejected the traditional method of
seeking the answers to physical problems by studying the works of
masters such as Aristotle and replaced it with quantitative measure-
ment and analysis. Instead of philosophical discussions about the
nature of motion, he measured as accurately as possible how long it
took for bodies to fall a certain distance and then tried to find a
mathematical relation between them. He was not the first to empha-
size the importance of experiment; others, like Robert Grosseteste
in the thirteenth century, had laid the foundations of experimental
science. But Galileo was the first to stress the importance of estab-
lishing mathematical relationships between the results of measure-
ments. He was thus a pioneer in the mathematicization of nature,
which ultimately led to the science of theoretical physics.
Galileo maintained that
philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before

our eyes, I mean the universe, but we cannot understand it if
we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in
which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical
language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geo-
metrical figures, without whose help it is humanly impossible
to comprehend a single word of it, and without which one
wanders in vain though a dark labyrinth.14
This is not correct to describe Galileo’s scientific method either as

Platonist or as hypothetico-deductive.15 He believed that nature is
simple and that we can attain true knowledge of it. He did not
accept the view that a scientific theory preserves appearances,
galileo the scientist 

enabling us to calculate results that are more or less in accord with
observations and measurements but that tell us nothing about the
real nature of the world. Galileo was a realist, and he built on and
combined the methods of Archimedes and Aristotle to forge a new
method. For this reason he is often regarded as the founder of mod-
ern science.
Through his astronomical discoveries and his application of
mathematics to celestial phenomena, Galileo unified terrestrial and
celestial phenomena. He made everything subject to the same laws,
and the laws are expressible in mathematical form. This unification,
Galileo recognized, is not easily attainable. Initially, each realm of
phenomena has to be studied with its own concepts and laws, and
eventually they may be united with other phenomena, as electric
and magnetic phenomena were unified by Maxwell. The work is
still in progress: gravitation and quantum mechanics still await uni-
fication. Scholastic philosophers and other Renaissance mathemati-
cians anticipated, in one way or another, many of what are
sometimes regarded as Galileo’s greatest discoveries, and his
achievement was to unify them in a way that led to the development
of theoretical physics.
In addition to his work of unification, Galileo separated science
from theology so that theology, and in particular the Bible, should not
be used as a source of scientific knowledge. Rather, what we find out
by observation and experiment can sometimes assist the interpreta-
tion of the Bible. Galileo is sometimes credited with the elimination
of metaphysics from science, but no scientific activity can ever be free
from metaphysical assumptions. In particular, he had a strong belief
in the order and simplicity of nature and in its real existence, and
these and other beliefs presupposed by science are Christian beliefs
that played a determining role in the origin of modern science in the
High Middle Ages. Likewise, Galileo distinguished the mathematical
approach to physics from Aristotelian natural philosophy.
Although Galileo was largely responsible for the overthrow of
 logos
several conclusions of Aristotelian physics, he retained a general
commitment to the principles of Aristotle’s approach to science, par-
ticularly the need to attain a physical understanding of nature and to
use the laws of logic. Galileo was a strong believer in the simplicity
of nature and so continued to believe that the orbits of the planets
are circular. As a result, although he greatly admired the work of
Kepler, he never showed much interest in Kepler’s three laws of
planetary motion, which indeed provide strong support for the
heliocentric theory. This belief in universal circular motion led
Galileo into great difficulties when he considered the explanation of
comets. Neither did he spend time on the optical theories underly-
ing the operation of the telescope, but constructed them by a process
of trial and error.
Galileo’s second great achievement was the construction of
significantly improved telescopes and the astronomical discoveries he
made with their aid. These made him famous throughout Europe
and changed his life. He soon became convinced that the helio-
centric theory of Copernicus was correct and used his astronomical
discoveries to develop arguments in its favor. Individually, none of
these arguments was conclusive, and at least one was incorrect, but
together they were sufficient to convince the scientifically trained
mind.
If he had been content, like most scientists, to publish his results
in weighty Latin tomes, Galileo might not have become embroiled
in controversy. Instead, he vigorously publicized his work and wrote
in the vernacular in a way that could be understood by the general
reader. This was necessary partly to obtain employment, but also
because he felt he had a duty to publish his new view of the world.
When his jealous enemies, unable, so he claimed, to defeat him on
scientific grounds, invoked the aid of theology, he countered with a
treatise on the interpretation of Scripture. The theologians of the
Inquisition, angered by his incursion into their domain and con-
cerned by the threat to the Church’s authority to be the sole, authen-
galileo the scientist 

tic interpreter of Scripture, persuaded the Inquisition to force
Galileo to abandon his support for Copernican astronomy. They
were, for the most part, well motivated, and saw themselves as
defenders of a hallowed synthesis of natural and supernatural knowl-
edge. They had, however, an inadequate understanding of Galileo’s
scientific achievements, which made it absolutely essential for them
to rethink many of their cherished assumptions.
The attempt to suppress Galileo’s support of Copernican astron-
omy of course failed, and his writings became widely known
throughout Europe. His work on dynamics, in particular, culminat-
ed in the achievements of Newton, who unified Galileo’s laws of
motion and those of Kepler with his theory of gravitation. More gen-
erally, Galileo inaugurated a new style of scientific thinking that was
to bear much fruit in the following centuries and identify him as one
of the founders of modern science.
Notes
1. Olaf Pedersen, “Galileo’s Religion,” in G. V. Coyne, M. Heller, and J. Zycinski, ed.
The Galileo Affair: A Meeting of Faith and Science, Proceedings of the Cracow Confer-
ence, May 1984; Specola Vaticana, 1985, 75.
2. William A. Wallace, “Galileo’s Trial and the Proof of the Earth’s Motion,” Catholic
Dossier, 1, no. 2 (July-August 1995): 7.
3. J. L. Russell, “What Was the Crime of Galileo?” Annals of Science 52 (1995): 403.
4. William R. Shea, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1610–1632 (Sagamore
Beach, Mass.: Watson Publishing, 1977).
5. William A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984).
6. I. E. Drabkin, trans., “De Motu,” in Galileo Galilei on Motion and Mechanics, I. E.
Drabkin, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 58.
7. Ibid., 70.
8. Ibid., 76.
9. Thomas B. Settle, Science (6 January 1961): 19.
10. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources, 198.
11. Thomas P. McTighe, “Galileo’s Platonism,” in Galileo:Man of Science, Ernan McMullin,
ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 365.
12. Maurice Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), 60.
 logos
13. William A. Wallace, “Galileo’s Trial and the Proof of the Earth’s Motion,” Catholic
Dossier 1, no. 2 (July-August 1995): 7.
14. Stillman Drake, trans., Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (Chicago: Chicago Univer-
sity Press, ), –.
15. William A. Wallace, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources
of Galileo’s Thought (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Publishing, 1981), 129 et seq.

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Galileo the Scientist

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The Scientific Achievements of Galileo

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galileo the scientist 

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