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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).
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.
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
...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.
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.)
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.
>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).