[00:01.51]Lesson 32
[00:03.56]Galileo reborn
[00:12.03]What has modified our traditional view of Galileo in recent times?
[00:19.43]In his own lifetime Galileo was the centre of violent controversy, but the scientific dust has long since settled,
[00:28.25]and today we can see even his famous clash with the Inquisition in something like its proper perspective.
[00:36.17]But, in contrast, it is only in modern times that Galileo has become a problem child for historians of science.
[00:45.97]The old view of Galileo was delightfully uncomplicated.
[00:50.82]He was, above all, a man who experimented:
[00:54.64]who despised the prejudice and book learning of the Aristotelians,
[01:00.10]who put his questions to nature instead of to the ancients, and who drew his conclusions fearlessly.
[01:07.90]He had been the first to turn a telescope to the sky,
[01:11.23]and he had seen there evidence enough to overthrow Aristotle and Ptolemy together.
[01:16.89]He was the man who climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped various weights from the top,
[01:23.35]who rolled balls down inclined planes,
[01:26.10]and then generalized the results of his many experiments into the famous law of free fall.
[01:33.47]But a closer study of the evidence,
[01:35.90]supported by a deeper sense of the period, and particularly by a new consciousness of the philosophical undercurrents in the scientific revolution,
[01:45.78]has profoundly modified this view of Galileo.
[01:49.61]Today, although the old Galileo lives on in many popular writings,
[01:54.26]among historians of science a new and more sophisticated picture has emerged.
[02:00.34]At the same time our sympathy for Galileo's opponents has grown somewhat.
[02:06.10]His telescopic observations are justly immortal;
[02:10.04]they aroused great interest at the time,
[02:12.77]they had important theoretical consequences,
[02:16.43]and they provided a striking demonstration of the potentialities hidden in instruments and apparatus.
[02:24.54]But can we blame those who looked and failed to see what Galileo saw,
[02:29.85]if we remember that to use a telescope at the limit of its powers calls for long experience and intimate familiarity with one's instrument?
[02:39.71]Was the philosopher who refused to look through Galileo's telescope more culpable than those who alleged
[02:46.36]that the spiral nebulae observed with Lord Rosse's great telescope in the 1840s were scratches left by the grinder?
[02:55.75]
[03:05.22]as for centuries before, curved glass was the popular contrivance for producing not truth but illusion, untruth;
[03:15.32]and if a single curved glass would distort nature, how much more would a pair of them?