On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:29:34 UTC, Hallvard B Furuseth
wrote:
> Wayne Throop writes:
>>: Jerry Kraus
yahoo.com>
>>: But they didn't know that in the first half of the sixteenth century.
>>: They thought Galileo was a dangerous charlatan who was trying to
>>: confuse people out of egotism and greed.
>>
>> The difference being, the churchmen refused to look through the
>> telescope.>
> There were those who did, but the church didn't.
>
> Galileo's formula for getting in trouble included replacing factual
> arguments with personal attacks. Like the dialogue he wrote where the
> Aristotelian - and the Pope's - opinion was argued by the character
> "Simplicio".
Well, no, not really. There is not a shred of evidence that Galileo
intended an insult in his handling of the argument that *the Pope ordered
him* to put in the book *after the book was written*.
Well, one shred: the Inquisition said so; you may judge that source for
yourself.
There has been much speculation about why Galileo would do something so
stupid as to deliver a direct insult to the Pope. The explanation: he
didn't.
The name Simplicio? After the eminent Roman philosopher Simplicius, as
Galileo explained, in honor (not!) of a couple of the philosopher's fans
with whom G had disputed 20 years before. And all written before the Pope
stuck his nose into what Galileo should say.
The attribution to Simplicio? Well, which of the three guys was arguing
the old beliefs anyway? Galileo's guy Salviati, who argued for the new
ones, didn't present this, which is hardly surprising. All Galileo's
mouthpiece did was call it "a most admirable and angelic doctrine", worthy
of respect even apart from its distinguished source, meaning of course the
Pope. Wow, what an insult!
Have a look at the "Galileo affair" in Wikipedia,
> for example. And _Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems_.
I read those when I wrote large pieces of them, and if you had looked in
Wikipedia then, your conclusions would have been different. From this I
suggest, not that Wikipedia _necessarily_ goes downhill, but that relying
on what it says at any moment is not wise where any contreoversy is
involved.
>
> Yet another possibly-false myth mentioned in this this thread - I've
> seen a mention somewhere that the guy who "made the trains run on time"
> didn't. I don't know if that's true though.
>
Quite right here, I think. Professor Bergen Evans of the U of Illinois,
who was a splendid debunker in the 1950s, wrote that he has worked as a
courier on Italian railways in Musso's heyday, and the trains emphatically
did not run on time.
