Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Tito Lessi’s Galileo and Viviani. 1892

Galileo Galilei (1564−1642) was one of the heroes of my youth. Any­one who can run rings around author­ity gets my vote, espe­cially when that author­ity is cruel, oppres­sive, back­ward, and con­sis­tently stands in the way of progress. If I later learned that he did not bat­tle the Inqui­si­tion quite as I had imag­ined, his hero­ism still strikes me as real. He had no way of know­ing that the Church would be far more lenient with him than it was with Gior­dano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for sim­i­lar sci­en­tific views. Both men were Coper­ni­cans, believ­ing that the earth revolved around the sun, which was con­sid­ered heresy by many Church author­i­ties in that day. For them, it went against scrip­ture, and they didn’t buy into Galileo’s sug­ges­tion that not all scrip­ture should be taken literally:

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

 

Galileo wrote in the face of tremen­dous oppo­si­tion dur­ing his life­time. He prac­ticed his sci­en­tific craft in the face of that oppo­si­tion for much of his adult life. The Inqui­si­tion was after him for nearly two decades before they put him under house arrest in 1633. All for being one of the most bril­liant sci­en­tists and inven­tors of his day.

He once said:

“And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst dis­or­ders when minds cre­ated free by God are com­pelled to sub­mit slav­ishly to an out­side will? When we are told to deny our senses and sub­ject them to the whim of oth­ers? When peo­ple devoid of what­so­ever com­pe­tence are made judges over experts and are granted author­ity to treat them as they please? These are the nov­el­ties which are apt to bring about the ruin of com­mon­wealths and the sub­ver­sion of the state.”

 

The Hub­ble Space Telescope

 

The tele­scope: While it was not really his inven­tion, he quickly made it his own with sub­se­quent refine­ments and enhance­ments. The tele­scope was vital in his obser­va­tions of plan­e­tary motion and con­firmed the Coper­ni­can rev­o­lu­tion for him. He was among the very first to use that instru­ment to secure astro­nom­i­cal proofs.

Galileo said:

“My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the per­ti­nac­ity of the asp, have stead­fastly refused to cast a glance through the tele­scope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?”

 

I also find it inter­est­ing that his father was a musi­cian, com­poser and the­o­rist. The music of the spheres. Math­e­mat­ics and music. Har­mony and the ratio of strings pro­duc­ing con­so­nances. The sounds the stars make, the beau­ti­ful ten­sion in all things, their aural poetry and the con­nec­tion with the laws of the uni­verse. The sounds com­posers imag­ine, their order — math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions for the heart. Galileo must have been impacted by the music he heard as a youth, and the the­o­ries his father espoused. There is some sug­ges­tion that he may have helped his father with var­i­ous exper­i­ments regard­ing weights and mea­sures and harmony.

Falling notes. Falling objects. Do notes with dif­fer­ent weights fall at dif­fer­ent speeds? Can you drop notes from the lean­ing tower of Pisa?

A life infused by eso­ter­ica, math, physics and tech­nol­ogy. To many in his day, every­thing he wrote and said was beyond eso­teric. Ahead of his time, a father in many sci­en­tific fields, Galileo saw that the earth also rises and could not look away.