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Note: Science is Believing
Tag(s): Galileo, HistoryScience
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Shortly after writing The Little Balance, in the last months of 1587, Galileo sent to the leading mathematicians of northern Italy his solutions to a problem that derived from Archimedes' work.1 He had been working on this problem for a couple of years. It had apparently been presented to him by the Marchese Guidobaldo del Monte, who was to become Galileo's first patron,
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Ours is a visual culture, and Galileo is one of the people who constructed that culture.
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The fundamental realisation that our own capacity to see depends on a lens within the eye came only with Kepler's Optics of 1604, just before the invention of the telescope. And so sight, particularly when dependent on a lens, was to be trusted only when it could be confirmed by touch or sound or smell.
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epicycles on circles, effectively spirals. According to the philosophers these were merely hypotheses to ‘save the appearances’, workarounds to produce results that matched the data. In reality, they insisted, the planets were attached to crystalline orbs that performed perfect circles in the heavens. The result was mutual incomprehension, beautifully illustrated in 1616 when Cardinal Bellarmine argued that Copernicanism was a hypothesis just like epicycles – no one thought they were real, so why should anyone imagine that Copernicanism was
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There is a telling indication from Galileo's own world that his reliance on visual information was in step with the times. In 1611 he was invited to join the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynx-Eyed,
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he adopts the lynx's eye as one of his three personal symbols (the others being the parabola of the projectile and the Medicean stars).14 We should not be surprised to find an opponent complaining of the Linceans that they placed too much reliance on the acuteness of their eyesight.
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For an Aristotelian philosopher seeing was not the same as believing.
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in The Assayer Galileo tells us that sight is the supreme sense, the one we rely on for knowledge.
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