Conveners
Il Saggiatore e la nascita della scienza moderna / The Assayer and the Birth of Modern Science
- Chairperson: Ivana Gambaro
Il Saggiatore e la nascita della scienza moderna / The Assayer and the Birth of Modern Science
- Chairperson: Ivana Gambaro
Il Saggiatore e la nascita della scienza moderna / The Assayer and the Birth of Modern Science
- Chairperson: Simone Zaggia
Galileo's Saggiatore has the reputation of a pioneering work in the methodology of science. It no doubt contains scattered remarks that, when assembled, support an alternative to the school philosophy as taught in Jesuit colleges. Most of the book, however, is devoted not to promoting a new methodology but to obfuscating what little science it presents. It was a clever, tedious, unfair,...
In The Assayer Galileo Galilei famously proclaimed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. However, little support for this bold claim could be found in his own published works until that time. Indeed, it would take another fifteen years before the publication of the Discorsi, in which he convincingly demonstrated how a mathematical theory of motion could be...
In his work Il Saggiatore, Galileo claimed that the book of nature is written in mathematical characters. What does this statement exactly mean? It is possible to offer different answers: 1) one could think that Galileo had a strong Platonic view. This means that a mathematical world separated from the phenomenal one exists and that the physical laws are an empirical transcription of the...
In 1618 Galileo and his student Mario Guiducci argued that comets were hot and dry exhalations illuminated by the Sun and carried forward by the revolution of the heavens. They endorsed the account according to which cometary phaenomena were nothing more than mere appearances or, as he put it, "wandering glimmers" of reflected light. –How could they ever come to elaborate such a peculiar...
First with an implicit reference, in his letter to Benedetto Castelli (December 21, 1613), and later with several explicit references, in his letter to Christina of Lorraine (spring-summer 1615), Galileo made his ultimate attempts to prevent the condemnation of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, arguing for its compatibility with the Scriptures, as well as for the freedom and autonomy of...
The four different Moon's images in the Sydereus Nuncius were analysed by Guglielmo Righini with purely astronomical methods. The first image represented the waxing Moon on the fourth or fifth day after the new Moon. For dating the second and the third image G. Righini used a very original method. He claimed that lunar libration was detectable in Galileo’s images. Gingerich criticised these...
Galileo never developed a systematic theory of heat, nor of the atomic structure of matter. All we know about can be derived from his correspondence with Giovan Francesco Sagredo (1612-1615), from Il Saggiatore (1623), from Benedetto Castelli's letter to Ferdinando Cesarini (1638), and from Vincenzo Viviani's Racconto istorico (1654). The limits and unresolved issues of Galilean atomism...
From a historical point of view, the principle of virtual work and the so-called “principle of conservation” follow different paths and have different origins. Some authors attributed the principle of virtual work to pseudo-Aristotle’s Mechanical Problems. The principle of virtual work was defined by Bernoulli: “for a system of forces that maintains a point, a surface, on a body in...
The 17th century was a gold century for Dutch science in general and in particular for the theory of music, still belonging to the physical mathematical disciplines. Beeckman, Stevin and Huygens produced important writings on the subject. In the present paper, the conception of consonance for musical intervals of Simon Stevin is presented. A quite strange conception according to most...
