Galileo thesis

Galileo affair The Galileo affair is one of the few examples commonly used by advocates of the conflict thesis. Maurice Finocchiaro writes that the Galileo affair epitomizes the common view of "the conflict between enlightened science and obscurantist religion," and that this view promotes "the myth that alleges the incompatibility between science and religion.

Galileo thesis

Galileo thesis

An essay biography of Galileo Who was Galileo Galilei? A finger is preserved like a holy relic in the museum of science in Florence, a vertebra at the University of Padua. But he continues to be admired for all the wrong reasons.

One can imagine him, wherever he has been ensconced in death, fulminating as he did in life, appalled at the stupidity of the world of conventional wisdom and its inability to see the facts before its eyes. As a man of no small ego, and a touch paranoid to boot, he would doubtless enjoy of the veneration in which he is held as astronomer and martyr to reason and science, victim of religious dogmatism and anti-intellectualism.

But he would be greatly disturbed by the simple-minded version of his travails that has come down to us through three and a half centuries of myth-making and propaganda.

He would want to insist that his argument with the Church was of far, far greater significance than a squabble over whether or not the earth moves, as most of us now suppose it was. In the matter of his notorious trial by the Holy Office inhe conceded his error and publicly — and sincerely — demonstrated his contrition.

He had, as the Church charged, no conclusive grounds for claiming that the Copernican hypothesis was fact, and it had been a matter of serious insubordination for him to disobey a direct papal order not to go about behaving as if he did. As a deeply committed Catholic and the beneficiary of ecclesiastical favours, he was, after all, obliged to play by the rules.

But to this day his admirers stubbornly refuse to accept him at his word, preferring in a bizarre twist of logic to see him as a moral weakling, cowed by threats of the rack, or, worse, a liar and perjurer who falsely confessed before God in order to save his mortal skin. He was none of these things.

Nor, as he knew, were threats of torture more than an antiquated procedural formality — no threat at all. He was a man captivated by his discovery that laws of mechanical motion could be derived from direct observation of the world, and then expressed in elegant mathematical formulae.

The scales had fallen from his eyes and he could see with ecstatic clarity that the world was in some very real way composed of number. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

This was his tragic blindness and it was for this that the Church attacked him. Galileo believed that there is a single and unique explanation to all natural phenomena, one that can be understood through observation and reason and which makes all other explanations wrong.

The Church insisted that science, though useful, was only one route to knowledge about the world. With Plato and Aristotle, Church authorities insisted that number was not inherent in the world, but was projected upon it by humans: The elaborate mathematical formulae of the Copernican hypothesis scarcely less baffling than the Ptolemaic system it replaced were not descriptions of reality, but maps or models of reality.

It was a serious error, the Church said, a prideful error, to mistake the map for the territory. Ultimate knowledge was accessible only through the spirit, or the revealed wisdom of Scripture.

Science in our time has established to its own satisfaction that its access to knowledge is limited — in principle — to some condition forever short of completeness. I think I remarked that when he [Galileo] was heard he would be able, without difficulty, to give all explanations requested.

He answered that he will be examined in due time but that there is an argument to which they have never yet given an answer, and that is that God is all-powerful, and, if He is, why should we try to necessitate Him? I said that I did not know how to speak on those matters, but that I thought I had heard Galileo saying that he was willing not to believe in the motion of the Earth, but that as God could make the world in a thousand ways, so it could not be denied that He could have made it in this way too.

He grew angry and replied that we should not impose necessity upon the Lord Almighty; and, as I saw him working himself up to a fury, I avoided saying more that might have hurt Galileo.

Certain references in the Bible seemed to indicate that the earth was immobile, and that the sun revolves around the earth. Galileo is supposed to have come to grief for the following reason: Because, as the Church saw it and as we can see today, the issue was not the simple matter of the place of the sun and earth in the solar system, but the much more profound question of how to verify knowledge.

The kernel of his argument is this: However, interpreters of the Bible are human, and thus make mistakes of interpretation.Make sure to add the keywords “University of Georgia” and “dissertation” or “thesis” to your search in the GIL-Find catalog. All print theses and dissertations are held in an off-site repository.

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Galileo Galilei


- Galileo Galilei Galileo Galilei was one of the most influential men of the Renaissance. He was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, inventor, and among other things he was a philosopher. He integrated the independent sciences of math and physics, and unified them.

Pope Urban VIII encouraged Galileo to publish the pros and cons of Heliocentrism. Galileo's response, Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems (), clearly advocated Heliocentrism, despite his declaration in the preface that. GALILEO Project description For the research paper, you’ll place your own observations within the context of other scholarship.

In short, you will enter into an academic conversation with others who are interested in your topic, thereby participating in the construction of knowledge. Download thesis statement on Biography on Galileo Galilei in our database or order an original thesis paper that will be written by one of our staff writers and delivered according to the deadline.

Dissertations and Theses