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Galileo by John L. Heilbron {Bindaredundat} (Size: 6.86 MB)
DescriptionGalileo Hardcover – December 1st 2010 by John Heilbron (Author) {Bindaredundat}  Format: pdf File Size: 6.85Mb Product Details Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Oxford University Press; First Edition (US) First Printing edition (December 1st 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 0199583528 ISBN-13: 978-0199583522 In 1610, Galileo published the Siderius nuncius, or Starry Messenger, a "hurried little masterpiece" in John Heilbron's words. Presenting to the world his remarkable observations using the recently invented telescope--the craters of the moon, the satellites of Jupiter--Galileo dramatically challenged our idea of the perfection of the heavens and the centrality of the Earth in the universe. Indeed, the appearance of the little book is regarded as one of the great moments in the history of science. Planned to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Starry Messenger, this is a major new biography of Galileo, a fresh and much more rounded view of the great scientist than found in earlier works. Unlike previous biographers, Heilbron shows us that Galileo was far more than a mathematician: he was deeply knowledgeable in the arts, an expert on the epic poet Ariosto, a fine lutenist. More important, Heilbron notes that years of reading the poets and experimenting with literary forms were not mere sidebars--they enabled Galileo to write clearly and plausibly about the most implausible things. Indeed, Galileo changed the world not simply because he revolutionized astronomy, but because he conveyed his discoveries so clearly and crisply that they could not be avoided or denied. If ever a discoverer was perfectly prepared to make and exploit his discovery, it was the dexterous humanist Galileo aiming his first telescope at the sky. In Galileo, John Heilbron captures not only the great scientist, but also the creative, artistic younger man who would ultimately become the champion of Copernicus, the bête-noire of the Jesuits, and the best-known of all martyrs to academic freedom. Helpful Customer Review Very funny, Professor By J. A. Haverstick on August 20, 2011 Format: Hardcover I'm going to weigh in with a short one. First Heilbron has a very engaging writing style, with about one dry, droll irony per page. Second, the book is about half math. The math is about at algebra or geometry level, so even if you're not a math person, you can get the point of most of it with a little work. Yes, toward the end I was skipping most of it. Still it gives one the satisfaction of feeling you've gotten a bit of a handle on Galeleo's real intellectual life. The plethora of Italian names will probably be as confusing to many as it was to me, but Heilbron supplies a who's who at the back. There's definitly not a lot of colorful description of sunny Tuscany or rich palace interiors. It's truly what we'd call an intellectual biography, not beach reading. But for an educated scientifically oriented reader or even old philosophy major like me. I'd really recommend it. (From a philosophy of science perspective, I was taken with Heilbron's stessing that it was the implied atomic theory in Galileo's thinking rather than the heliocentric theory that was the danger to orthodoxy. Rightfully so, as Berkeley emphasized a century later!)  Sharing Widget |