Quotes About Galileo

Elliptical orbits. Langdon recalled that much of Galileo's legal trouble had begun when he described planetary motion as elliptical. The Vatican exalted the perfection of the circle and insisted heavenly motion must be only circular. Galileo's Illuminati, however, saw perfection in the ellipse as well, revering the mathematical duality of its twin foci. The Illuminati's ellipse was prominent even today in modern Masonic tracing boards and footing inlays.

Evolution is not a theory, contrary to what is often stated, sometimes even by scientists. Evolution is a fact. It was a theory two centuries ago, when Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin first proposed it, just as heliocentrism was a theory in the days of Copernicus and Galileo. Evolution is no longer a theory, just as heliocentrism is no longer a theory; it is a fact.

Galileo's analysis of the cantilever beam illustrates an extremely important point for understanding how structural accidents can occur: he arrived at what is basically the right qualitative answer to the question he posed himself about the strength of the beam, but his answer was not absolutely correct in a quantitative way. He got the right qualitative answer for the wrong quantitative reason.

Aristotle is generally credited (probably unreasonably) with holding up the progress of physics for about 2,000 years—until Galileo had the courage and the conviction to call him out.

It wasn't until 1822 that a reigning pope officially declared that the sun could be at the center of the solar system. And it took until 1985 for the Vatican to acknowledge that Galileo was a great scientist and that he had been wronged by the Church.

When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man's visible presence, but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics-itself a purely subjective distillation-possible.

It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo 's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.

But what G. Cantor posits as the defining formal property of an infinite set is that such a set can be put in a 1-1C with at least one of its proper subsets. Which is to say that an infinite set can have the same cardinal number as its proper subset, as in Galileo's infinite set of all positive integers and that set's proper subset of all perfect squares, which latter is itself an infinite set.

The extreme mathematical weirdness of (infinity), which Galileo spends a lot of time in TNS giving examples of, is rather presciently attributed to epistemology instead of metaphysics. Paradoxes arise, according to G.G.'s mouthpiece, only when we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited.

Our generation is witness to a development of physical knowledge such as has not been seen since the days of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and mathematics has scarcely ever experienced such a stormy epoch. Mathematical thought removes the spirit from its worldly haunts to solitude and renounces the unveiling of the secrets of Nature. But as recompense, mathematics is less bound to the course of worldly events than physics.

Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself.

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

Ever since the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had first reached him in California, Brecht had connected Galileo's caving-in before the Inquisition as the great and perhaps ineradicable moral blot on the history of physics and the developments in modern physics that led to the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

I have loved the stars to fondly to ever be fearful of the night.

Galileo was challenged because he declared a theory to be a fact and argued with the Church about the genuine meaning of the Bible.

The reality is that while heliocentrism was discussed and often accepted within Catholic circles - it was effectively the only place where it could be - the more traditional view of the solar system still prevailed even among leading scientists. So it's hardly surprising that Galileo's Catholic judges had difficulty accepting his views, especially when they saw themselves as defending scientific orthodoxy and were supported in this by the scientific establishment.

The Galileo saga is typically told as a conflict between science and religion. But in reality it was a conflict among Christians over the correct philosophy of nature. Was it Aristotle's quality or Galileo's quantity? Galileo's victory was the triumph of the idea that the nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint.