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Galileo's telescopic observations: the marvel and meaning of discovery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2010

George V. Coyne*
Affiliation:
Vatican Observatory, Vatican City email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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During the very last year of what he himself described “as the best [eighteen] years of his life” spent at the University of Padua, Galileo first observed the heavens with a telescope. In order to appreciate the marvel and the true significance of those observations we must appreciate both the intellectual climate in Europe and the critical intellectual period through which Galileo himself was passing at the time those observations were made. Through his studies on motion Galileo had come to have serious doubts about the Aristotelian concept of nature. What he sensed was lacking was a true physics. He was very acute, therefore, when he came to sense the significance of his observations of the moon, of the phases of Venus, of the moons of Jupiter and of the Milky Way. The preconceptions of the Aristotelians were crumbling before his eyes. He had remained silent long enough, over a three month period, in his contemplations of the heavens. It was time to organize his thoughts and tell what he had seen and what he thought it meant. It was time to publish! In so doing he would become one of the pioneers of modern science. For the first time in over 2,000 years new significant observational data had been put at the disposition of anyone who cared to think, not in abstract preconceptions but in obedience to what the universe had to say about itself.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010

References

Fantoli, A. 2003, Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church, Vatican Observatory Publications: Vatican City State, Third English Edition; distributed by the University of Notre Dame PressGoogle Scholar