Galileo Galilei was placed on the dock in 1633. Before the Court of the Holy Office in Rome, Italy, he retreated even from suggesting that the Earth is not fixed in the center of the universe.
Legend has it that Galileo, after being discarded, said in a low voice and with sad eyes: “And yet he moves.” This last saying has no historical support.
“There is no way to prove that he really said this, not even based on the trial literature,” he says in an interview with Tec ReviewAnd the Camilo Camagi Garcia, Mathematician and Philosophy of Science, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The great physicist of the Renaissance got permission from his friend, Pope Urban VIII to write Dialogue about the world’s two extreme systems, The book published one year before the trial. Galileo had promised the Supreme Pope that he would not defend in this work the heliocentric theory of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), who in addition to being an astronomer was a Catholic priest; However, she did.
Three characters appear in this dialogue: Salviati, the defender of the Copernican system, who represents Galileo’s view; Sagredo, who does not take sides and acts as a mediator; And Simplicius, who opposes the Copernican system and relies on the geocentric scheme of Claudius Ptolemy, the astronomer of AD 100
“In the book, Salviati’s explanations are always longer than Simplicio’s, in such a way that it is an overwhelming discussion for those with the voice of Galileo,” says Camagi Garcia.
Prescribing the script in the form of dialogue avoids overt bias, as none of the characters has been declared the winner. “In this work, Galileo exposes the two systems, although he clearly supports the Copernican system more,” says this specialist.
Kamhaji adds that if Galilei had only developed the Copernican system in the book, he would have had more problems with the Holy Office.
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The main problem is the emergence of new physics that was not entirely based on sensory perception. At the time, only what was clear was correct: the earth is stationary and the sun is moving from east to west. However, the mathematical reasoning advocated by Galileo was not clear.
“Even today, there are those who defend the Ptolemaic system, in which the earth does not move. They do not deny mathematics In itselfBut the physics of mathematical thinking does. They believe that physics is governed by only the five senses, ”confirms this scientist from UNAM.
After the trial in Rome, Galileo traveled to his native city of Pisa, where he spent the last years of his life. There are books Dialogue about two new flags, An action starred again by Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio, who are not now discussing whether the Earth is moving or not.
This dialogue was published in 1638, four years before the death of its author. Maria Celeste, Galileo’s daughter, helped with the final editing of the text, as her father had already found it extremely difficult to do the work as he nearly lost his eyesight as a result of his habit of observing the sun directly through a telescope.
“Maria Celeste was a Catholic nun and in the monastery in which she lived she made the last corrections to her father’s text,” says Camhagi.
In this last work, he revealed not only the geometric background of statistics and dynamics (two new sciences at the time), but also the accelerating laws of motion, which he dealt with decades after Isaac Newton, who was born in 1642, the year in which Galileo Galilei was in the possession of God. Concerning him and Nicolaus Copernicus, the discoverer of the Law of General Attraction said the following:
“If I come to see farther than the others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”
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