Quotes About Galileo

I don't think I'm as revolutionary as Galileo, but I don't think I'm not as revolutionary as Galileo.

If Galileo traveled in time to the present day to hear that we are having difficulty giving a physical explanation of consciousness, he would most likely respond, "Of course you are, I designed physical science to deal with quantities not qualities!

He believed that Galileo was wrong when he imagined an Earth that revolved around the sun. In his heart of hearts, Peter knew that the sun that was slowly rising over his city revolved around him.

The Egyptians saw the sun and called him Ra, the Sun God. He rode across the sky in his chariot until it was time to sleep. Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, and poor Ra lost his divinity.

The message to Galileo from the highest theological authority could not have been plainer: unless and until you are in a position to clearly and definitively demonstrate the motion of the Earth and the stability of the Sun, keep your own counsel.

In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.

We have two boys, and one of our kids is much more interested in history and stories, so if you want him to do some calculations about lenses, you would start talking to him about Galileo... Then he would be into the lenses, but if you just start talking to him about lenses, he might not stay with you.

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

Nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.

Nature . . . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, nor cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operations are understandable to men.

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'

Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

Church doctrine had it otherwise: Earth was at the center. The conflict between Galileo's telescope and Church dogma brought disaster to Galileo, but in the end the telescope prevailed, and the dramatic story of the confrontation taught Galileo's most important lesson.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make

unmystical, hard-headed, argumentative, and possessed of a powerful personality that did not take easily to being contradicted. [Galileo]

You and Galileo," I said. "Didn't he throw his balls off the leaning tower?" Quirk Said.

Look!" Galileo commanded. "You take the focal length of the objective—for this one, a hundred minims—and you divide that by the focal length of the eyepiece, in this case eleven minims—and you get a number which identifies the device's power of magnification, thus here about nine times! It's a ratio! It's geometry again—

The good that [Galileo] fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.

Their mistake was the mistake of Galileo. He was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but he didn't know that the entire solar system revolves around yet another center; he didn't know that the real orbit of the earth, as opposed to the relative orbit, is by no means some naive circle...

Cartesian dualism served science well, at first: by ceding matters of the spirit to men of the cloth, it got the Church off the back of science, which for centuries afterward was perceived as less of a threat to religion's domain than it would otherwise have been (pace, Galileo). But Cartesian dualism was a disaster for moral philosophy, setting in motion a process that ultimately reduced human beings to automatons.

Not until 1992 did the Catholic Church admit publicly that it had erred in the matter of censoring Galileo's ideas.

History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.