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Galileo: Right On the Solar System, Wrong On Ice
carmendrahl writes "Famed astronomer Galileo Galilei is best known for taking on the Catholic Church by championing the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. But he also engaged in a debate with a philosopher about why ice floats on water. While his primary arguments were correct, he went too far, belittling legitimate, contradictory evidence given by his opponent, Ludovico delle Colombe. Galileo's erroneous arguments during the water debate are a useful reminder that the path to scientific enlightenment is not often direct and that even our intellectual heroes can sometimes be wrong."
I remember reading somewhere that another opponent, possibly the same in the blurb, had the same complaints about the heliocentric system. While he believed it to be true as well, he found Galileo's reasons as to why were erroneous, and fought over these 'wrong reasons'.
Galileo Galilei was an asshole. That was the start of his problem. He partially recreated the work of Copernicus (who had no conflict with Catholicism while proving heliocentricity), but then stopped about 3/4 of the way and filled the rest with evidence-free assertions. He never did provide evidence for those assertions (which have since been found to be wrong), but he did write a 'dialogue' to defend his claims where he (accidentally?) used a nickname for the Pope of the time as the name of his ignorant questioner character.
Once the Pope thought he was being directly insulted, things went downhill fast.
Looks like the same pattern with this story about water, no surprise to anyone who actually knows a bit of history.
1611 was a different place.
If samzenpus had bothered to read the article, he would know that it explains, very clearly, that Galileo was right on the question of why ice floats. He was apparently wrong in some of the reasoning that he used to explain another effect (a disc of ebony floating on water due to surface tension).
Maybe samzenpus should go back to posting more science fiction...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
At the time, science was seen as an offshoot of philosophy (natural philosophy).
Ice floats because it's a witch.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC presented a theory of heliocentrism.
Copernicus knew about Aristarchus: the first version of his manuscript ("De revolutionibus orbium coelestium") contained the lines
Source: http://www.demokritos.org/Aristarchus%20and%20Copernicus-Petrakis.htm
Note: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philolaus Philolaus's theory also had the sun revolving around a "central fire". Aristarchus's theory was the first known heliocentric theory.
Why did science ignore Aristarchus for almost two millenia? One reason the Greeks used: "If the earth revolves around the sun, we should see parallax motion of the stars. We don't see parallax motion of the stars. Therefore, the earth doesn't revolve around the sun." But instead of improving their technology so they could see parallax motion, they spent their scientific energies devising epicycles.
...Now we're getting a summary about a debate that happened centuries ago...
First posted in 1611. Don't forget about the dupes in 1650, 1701, 1784, 1823, 1824, 1891, 1911, 1938, and 1992.
Galileo argued that comets were optical illusions (they are most definitely physical objects) and that ocean tides were the result of oceans sloshing around from Earth’s rotation (tides have more to do with the moon’s gravitational pull).
Did anyone else find it strange that a page called "Chemical & Engineering News" would need to point out that comets are real and that the moon's gravity is a factor in the cause of tides?
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But instead of improving their technology so they could see parallax motion, they spent their scientific energies devising epicycles.
To be fair, they believed the stars to be near enough that any parallax motion would be easily and obviously visible without improved technology. When weighed against having to massively expand the size of the universe, epicycles actually were the simpler concept.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
He was ignorant of modern scientific efforts. Nowadays, we take a vote among political activists, come up with a consensus, and ridicule anyone who believes in the minority. We don't need any of that mathematical proof or experimental evidence crap. It saves a lot of time. As soon as you have a majority, you can start belittling everyone else.
We are no longer hobbled by those ancient, useless beliefs, like "the scientific method". Ours is the enlightened age!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
And Europe was a different time.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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Even if man-made climate change is false, reducing the fucking atmospheric pollution is a good damn idea.
Carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant. And much of the increase in real atmospheric pollution is a result of the Greens demanding that Western nations reduce CO2 emissions, so we shipped all our factories to China, where they burn coal without a care in the world about where the pollution goes.
...science was seen as an offshoot of philosophy...
And it remains a descendent: Science research eventually relies upon arguments set forth by Mathematics, which relies upon arguments set forth by Philosophy.
Heck, even the fact that you can have a logical argument relies upon the work of Philosophers. The biggest reason why modern Philosophers are not typically proficient Scientists boils down to the fact that they likely occupy their time reading different books, and thus aren't well-versed in the necessary esoterica.
Paper-clips float on water, if you place them in flat and very carefully.
I just had to raid the office supplies cabinet and try it...
I hear that super-tankers do too, though I can't test that myself as our office supply cabinet is fresh out.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is that he was an arrogant ass and often wrong. The Catholic church did not have issue with Galileo's heliocentric view, in fact, the Catholic church has a method to accept and alter their understandings of such natural actions.
The issue is that Galileo's arguments left doubt. Ironically, there were some contemporaries whose work could have aided Galileo's proof of his view. However, he has pretty much dismissed those individuals and their works as wrong. And done so extremely rudely.
The real issue of Galileo's is that he came out postulating "FACT" while by-passing the equivalent of "peer review" for the day. The pope was actually rather fond of Galileo and his work. But refused to acknowledge Galileo's theories as fact, despite his fondness. Then Galileo chose to be a bigger arse. And wrote a book publicly insulting the Pope. It's funny, as we still have this issue in science today over peer review, and early publication statements.
Do you know what the big punishment was? I've read comments deriding the church for executing Galileo. When in truth, Galileo was given a backhanded patronage. He was put on a house arrest. But pretty much had most of his means taken care of, was free to continue his work. It was essentially a public censure.
Ironically, I was unaware of most of these facts until a few years ago. When reading the 1632 series, I started to research Galileo Galilei.
"The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could be supported as only a possibility, not an established fact."
That is not obstruction of science by the church, pope, nada. That is merely saying "Hey, before you declare something as fact, you need to be able to prove it."
Alas, the failure of science here, is to hide this blemish in the failure of history. So we go and teach how Galileo was persecuted for thinking differently. No, Galileo was in trouble for being a rude arrogant ass who couldn't back up his claims.
I have posted here as a Christian, gotten some support and some flaming from internet atheists on the site, though not much because I try to be a good slashdot citizen with most of my posts having nothing to do with religion per se. So, I am surprised by the relative balance here and think that most of the posters have been too easy on the Catholic Church and the Pope -- the opposite of what I usually see. Galileo may have been an asshole in some respects and provoked the reaction against him. I don't think it is uncommon in true Geniuses of his type to behave this way. But now a days we do not try our resident Geniuses before a kangaroo court of law or inquisition and force them to plead guilty of crimes that shouldn't be crimes and that they didn't do anyway, recant under the threat of torture, burn their work and publicly condemn them in every university, then sentence them to life imprisonment. (This sentence was commuted to permanent house arrest after the trial.)
preconceptions (what his contemporaries called "reason")
What you readily dismiss as preconception was called reason by others because it is rationalism. A priori knowledge absent of empirical evidence. To dismiss it so easily is to ignore the entire works of mathematics. We all know that two of anything added to two of anything else is four. We do not need infinite evidence to prove it with reasonable (there is that root word again) certainty. Math is a noumenon manipulating process. There is no evidence that mathematical objects exist because they do not exist outside of the mind. Yet, despite having no evidence prior to the conception of the thought, only a fool would say any two objects added to any two others are not four.
You say that reason, or as you put it 'preconception', is not scientifically valid for deriving fact. Math exists and is used for scientific quantification of those very facts that you are defending, therefore I must say that there are four lights.
Greens demanding that Western nations reduce CO2 emissions, so we shipped all our factories to China
This is nonsense. "We" shipped all of "our" factories to China because the labor costs are (or were) vastly lower and improvements in global communications and transport made the distance increasingly less problematic. And do you think CO2 is the only thing that China's factories are spilling out? Their pollution is so bad that the life expectancy in some regions is years below what it should be. Of course there are economic costs to any regulation, of pollutants or anything else, but there are countless examples of the damage that industrialization without any regard of the environmental consequences brings. (China probably isn't the worst; try googling "Magnetogorsk".) The US may not have the manufacturing capacity it once did, but our rivers don't catch on fire either.
This is true. And it's one of the reasons people breathe about three times more often than they need to. We get enough oxy in about every third breath. That's all we need to live.
However, we need to get rid of CO2 much more often than that. So we breathe more just to exhale more and wind up taking in more oxygen just because that's part of the cycle.
If you could hold your breath long enough -just by holding it, not with duct tape or ropes or something/someone helping- the CO2 would quickly build up to an unsafe level and probably cause unconsciousness at which point the will to hold one's breathing would stop along with the muscle control needed to do it, and most people would automatically start breathing again. Not something to play with though.
Sig for hire.
Your terminal velocity depends on a number of factors, one of which is air resistance. That's why a spider can fall off of a sky scraper and land safely and why a mouse can survive a larger fall than a horse. One of the reasons that cats often survive big falls is that after they orient themselves feet-first, they spread their legs, making an improvised parachute out of their body and slowing themselves down. There's an excellent example of different falling rates at the beginning of GoldenEye, where Bond falls faster than a light plane, gets into the cabin and pulls it out of the dive.
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>At the time, science was seen as an offshoot of philosophy (natural philosophy).
This is something that confuses a lot of modern readers who look at the Galileo Affair.
When they see a churchman making "philosophical" arguments against Galileo, they assume it is due to some preposterous navel-gazing argument, not knowing the primary objection to Galileo came from people we'd call scientists today.
Galileo was making claims contrary to the founder of "science", Aristotle, and couldn't answer the counter-objections that scientists raised. The debate was taken to the authorities, the Roman Catholic Church, who told Galileo that they loved his theory, but that he didn't have enough evidence yet (and rightly so) to call it settled science. Contrary to the prevailing belief (and a forged letter claiming this) Galileo was not prohibited from teaching heliocentrism, just from teaching it as accepted fact. The Pope - a friend of his, and who believed his theory but was worried about making sudden changes in society - in fact encouraged Galileo to publish a comparison of heliocentrism and geocentrism, discussing the relative merits of each. Galileo, in typical nerd fashion, wrote a book that said heliocentrism is great, and anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot, including you, Mr. Pope. *This* is what got Galileo subject to house arrest. Not heliocentrism (which was utterly uncontroversial up until Galileo flipped off the pope - Copernicus was well received).