Galileo Galilei quotes - page 4
The passage of time has revealed to everyone the truths that I previously set forth; and, together with the truth of the facts, there has come to light the great difference in attitude between those who simply and dispassionately refused to admit the discoveries to be true, and those who combined with their incredulity some reckless passion of their own.
Galileo Galilei
I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence of those men's wits, that have received and held it to be true, and with the sprightliness of their judgments offered such violence to their own senses, as that they have been able to prefer that which their reason dictated to them, to that which sensible experiments represented most manifestly to the contrary. ...I cannot find any bounds for my admiration, how that reason was able in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make herself mistress of their credulity.
Galileo Galilei
It has been observed that missiles and projectiles describe a curved path of some sort; however no one has pointed out the fact that this path is a parabola. But this and other facts, not few in number or less worth knowing, I have succeeded in proving; and what I consider more important, there have been opened up to this vast and most excellent science, of which my work is merely the beginning, ways and means by which other minds more acute than mine will explore its remote corners.
Galileo Galilei
The speed of the ball-thanks to opposition from the air-will not go on increasing forever. Rather, what will happen is seen in bodies of very little weight falling through no great distance; I mean, a reduction to equable motion, which will occur also in a lead or iron ball after the descent of some thousands of braccia. This bounded terminal speed will be called the maximum that such a heavy body can naturally attain through the air...
Galileo Galilei
[I]t was upon... inequality of motions in point of velocity that Galileo built his theory of flux and reflux of the sea; supposing that the earth revolved faster than the water could follow; and that the water was therefore first gathered in a heap and then fell down, as we see in a basin of water moved quickly. But this he devised upon an assumption which cannot be allowed, viz. that the earth moves; and also without being well informed as to the sexhorary motion of the tide.
Galileo Galilei
His brilliant discoveries the man of science regards as his peculiar property; the means by which they were made, and the development of his intellectual character, belong to the logician and to the philosopher; but the triumphs and the reverses of his eventful life must be claimed for our common nature, as a source of more than ordinary instruction.
Galileo Galilei
Copernicus had taken one course in treating the earth as virtually a celestial body in the Aristotelian sense-a perfect sphere governed by the laws which operated in the higher reaches of the skies. Galileo complemented this by taking now the opposite course-rather treating the heavenly bodies as terrestrial ones, regarding the planets as subject to the very laws which applied to balls sliding down inclined planes. There was something in all this which tended to the reduction of the whole universe to uniform physical laws, and it is clear that the world was coming to be more ready to admit such a view.
Galileo Galilei
His conflict with the Catholic Church arose because deep in his heart Galileo was a believer. There was for him no path of compromise, no way to have separate secular and theological cosmologies. If the Copernican system was true as he believed, what else could Galileo do but fight with every weapon he had in his arsenal... to make his Church accept a new system of the universe. ...In the contrast between Galileo's heroic stand when he tried to reform the cosmological basis of orthodox theology and his humbled, kneeling surrender when he disavowed his Copernicanism, we may sense the tremendous forces attendant on the birth of modern science.
Galileo Galilei
Koyré's exaltation of the "Platonic and Pythagorean" elements of the Scientific Revolution... was based on a demonstrably false understanding of how Galileo reached his conclusions. Koyré asserted that Galileo merely used experiments as a check on the theories he devised by mathematical reasoning. But later research has definitively established that Galileo's experiments preceded his attempts to give a mathematical account of their results.
Galileo Galilei
It is to the Italian astronomer, forced in old age by the Inquisition to turn aside from the more dangerous study of the machinery of the heavens, that we owe the first exposition of many of the problems of mechanics and statics, published... in 1638. Not only did Galileo put together whatever the sixteenth century had learned in the sciences affecting building construction, but from his study of the bending strength of a beam there dates a new branch of science-the theory of the strength of materials.
Galileo Galilei
Galileo's program offers us a dead world: Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and along with them have since gone esthetic and ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse. Hardly anything has changed our world more during the past four hundred years than Galileo's audacious program. We had to destroy the world in theory before we could destroy it in practice.
Galileo Galilei
He endeavoured to determine the resistance of a beam, one end of which is built into a wall, when the tendency to break it arises from its own or an applied weight; and he concluded that the beam tends to turn about an axis perpendicular to its length, and in the plane of the wall. This problem, and, in particular, the determination of this axis is known as Galileo's problem.
Galileo Galilei
How do heavy bodies fall? ...Galileo's investigation of dynamics was physical; Aristotle's was metaphysical. But unlike Galileo, we have the additional convenience of algebraic notation. Had it been invented in his day he would certainly have known it; almost certainly he would have been able to push his development of dynamics much farther.
Galileo Galilei
The allusion to the "puzzling" problem of [the orbit of] Mars shows that Galileo ought not to have been unaware of the great work of Kepler published in 1609: Astronomia nova... in which the first two of Kepler's laws were formulated. Yet he does not mention here at all Kepler's success in solving the problem, nor his laws, nor his name even, which is brought up... only to criticize his belief in the Moon's attraction [effect upon tides], which is quite reasonably presented in the Astronomia nova and founded on astronomical reasons and not on mystical speculations.
Galileo Galilei
[T]he mathematical habit of mind and the mathematical procedure... had to be generated; otherwise Newton could never have thought of a formula representing the force between any two masses at any distance. ...Throughout the middle ages, under the influence of Aristotle, the science was entirely misconceived. Newton had the advantage of coming after a series of great men, notably Galileo... who in the previous two centuries had reconstructed the science and had invented the right way of thinking about it. He completed their work.
Galileo Galilei
