Quotes About Galileo

I sometimes think about the tower at Pisa as the first particle accelerator, a (nearly) vertical linear accelerator that Galileo used in his studies.

Nature's great book is written in mathematics.

Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.

Galileo - the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science.

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.

Finally, Galileo did not say "And yet it does move" as he left the courtroom. There is no contemporary record of his saying this; the claim first appears in a book about Galileo written over a century later.1

During the investigation, Galileo lived in a Vatican palace with a servant, his food and wine provided by the Tuscan ambassador. He was never in prison and was neither tortured nor in fear of torture. The tribunal of cardinals read and voted on the report of the two officials who dealt with the accused; three refused to vote, and the pope never confirmed the verdict. As Descartes remarked, the action taken against Galileo was merely the disciplinary action of a committee.

However, Galileo got into trouble when he turned his telescope toward a wider horizon. The discovery of the four moons orbiting Jupiter — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe about which all celestial bodies orbited. By challenging the geocentric model of the Solar System, Galileo found himself accused of heresy and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Galileo stated that there was no experiment you could possibly perform which could detect if you were stationary or moving at a constant velocity. This unification of "being stationary" and "moving" stands as the first of the great unifications in physics.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don't know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.

Hubble is the most important telescope in history after Galileo's first telescope.

Galileo was jailed for asserting that the earth was round.5

In 1543, Polish astronomer and priest Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) put our corner of the universe in order, suggesting that the Sun and not Earth was at the center of our planetary system. The idea contradicted the teachings of the Church, but was eventually proved by Galileo.

claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God's whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year—almost fifty years after Galileo's condemnation—the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university.

I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon... I was a man of the Renaissance that evening - of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube... You'll fall in love, I said. Oh, pray not.

The first man to understand the extraordinary magical power of applying mathematical calculation to things in nature was an Italian called Galileo Galilei.

Hilbert had written of Galileo that in his recantation 'he was not an idiot. Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom – that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.' But this was not a trial of scientific truth.

approximately 1200 and 1600 that proved conducive for the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. Without the level that medieval natural philosophy attained, with its overwhelming emphasis on reason and analysis, and without the important questions that were first raised in the Middle Ages about other worlds, space, motion, the infinite, and without the kinds of answers they gave, we might, today, still be waiting for Galileo and Newton.

E pur si muove. (And yet it moves.) ( What Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun .)

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us.

My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the stupidity of the human herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.