Mike Price has a nice piece over at Smithsonian.com on how the rediscovery of Galilaeus Galilaeus His Life: In Five Books, by Thomas Salusbury, a biography of Galileo written just twenty years after his death is causing some to reinterpret the cause of Galileo's trial. In short, Salusbury proposed that Galileo was raked over the coals because Urban VIII wanted to punish the Duke of Medici.
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Mario Biagioli, a historian of science at Harvard, wrote a book a dozen or so years ago called Galileo, Courtier. It's a study of the context of patronage, courtly virtue, and shifting credibility between philosophers and mathematicians in and around the time of Galileo's trial. Great book,…
Yesterday's post on Rick Perry's Galileo gaffe has gotten a lot of attention, much supportive, but some critical. On twitter, historians of science Rebekah Higgit and Thony Christie have helped me sort out some of the threads. I don't think this alters any of the basic results, but it's worth…
Does anything strike you as odd about the following sentence:
Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge.
It comes from…
One of the nice things about being a Big Shot science blogger is that sometimes people are willing to send you free copies of their books. One such person is John Farrell, who graciously sent me a copy of his book The Day Without Yesterday: Lematire, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology,…
This idea also is suggested in Galileo's Daughter.