Quotes About Galileo

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

It is undoubtedly true that Galileo didn't intend to challenge the very theological foundations of the Church of Rome by observing the Moon through a telescope. But scientific discoveries, however innocuous they may seem at first sight, have a way of undermining those who don't much care for facts. Reality catches up with everyone eventually. With

But as the seventeenth century wore on, precision observations greatly improved due to the invention of the telescope and an increasingly mature application of mathematics to describe the data, and led a host of astronomers and mathematicians – including Johannes Kepler, Galileo and ultimately Isaac Newton – towards an understanding of the workings of the solar system. This theory is good enough even today to send space probes to the outer planets with absolute precision.

A modern university dean might feel that this danger was a just punishment for Galileo's evasion of teaching duties. But

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

Galileo was one of the first scientists to use the scientific method. Instead of accepting old ideas, he carefully observed the world around him, and then tried to make a theory that would explain his observations.

Now up to the end of the eighteenth century, notably in the work of chemists, heat was treated as a substance, named caloric by the great French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794), who made the first attempt to introduce the methods and concepts of physics laid down by Galileo and Newton into chemistry.

For the first time in the history of mankind, an experiment is made. Experimental science begins with Galileo.

Thus, it is possible to measure time by simply counting the oscillations of a pendulum. It seems such an obvious idea, but it took Galileo to find it; it had not occurred to anyone before him. So it goes, with science.

But it does move.

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

And yet it moves.

It used to be, it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

Contemporaries only know the authority figures and the loudmouths. And the people born into power. But it takes perspective to know who's carrying the load. Nobody here has a clue who Johannes Kepler is. All they know about Galileo is that he's a teacher who got in trouble with the Inquisition. I doubt anyone's heard of Francis Bacon. Even in Britain, nobody really knows him. He's just a guy with a funny name.

In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits – maybe a true understanding of anything, as Galileo concluded, and Newton in a certain way demonstrated. That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a fortunate one; if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry.

Galileo saw the regularity because he already had a theory that predicted it. He understood what Aristotle could not: that a moving object tends to keep moving, that a change in speed or direction could only be explained by some external force, like friction.

To separate the effects of gravity on a given mass from the effects of air resistance was a brilliant intellectual achievement. It allowed Galileo to close in on the essence of inertia and momentum. Still, in the real world, pendulums eventually do exactly what Aristotle's quaint paradigm predicted. They stop.

Near the sun is the center of the universe.

Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?

Galileo, yet men turn around women!

Langdon recordó que el problema legal de Galileo había comenzado cuando afirmó que el movimiento planetario era elíptico.

Como probablemente sabrás —prosiguió Langdon—, a pesar de las concesiones que hizo Galileo, el Dialogo fue considerado herético, y el Vaticano lo condenó a arresto domiciliario.