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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."
1611 was a different place.
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.
And Europe was a different time.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
The scientific method was in its infancy when Galileo did his research. The fact that he didn't uphold what we'd call an acceptable standard of scientific integrity does not detract from the importance of his methods. He helped get off the ground the idea that experiment, rather than preconceptions (what his contemporaries called "reason") is the way to establish scientific fact.
And yes, from what I know of his life, he does seem like an asshole. So what? Lots of assholes have done good in the world.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Yeah, Galileo thought the Earth's motion around the sun caused the tides (not the Moon). That essentially the water was "sloshing" around the Earth as it rotated, and that proved the Earth was moving. Since this is, well, wrong, (basically everyone knew the tides were connected to the Moon, if not why) it's hardly surprising most of the scientists of the day disagreed with him. Well, that and he called his opponents simpletons. Name-calling doesn't tend to win friends and influence people.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Galileo's not the only Great Man of Science to gain his fame out of sheer assholery. Louis Pasteur, for example, "proved" the nonexistence of spontaneous generation by falsifying his notes and by forcing a prominent critic, Felix Pouchet, to withdraw from experimental competition by a combination of intimidation and biased "independent" panels. Later science proved that Pasteur had the right general idea, of course, but in his specific experiments facing off against Pouchet (the famous "swan-necked flasks") he was actually mistaken. Had Pasteur not been such an asshole, Pouchet would not have withdrawn from competition and would have won.
It just goes to show that sociopaths running the world is not a new phenomenon.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Galileo was NOT incorrect about why ice floats. He was incorrect about why a wafer of ebony floats while a ball of ebony does not. From TFA:
Delle Colombe’s basic premise was that ice was the solid form of water, therefore it was more dense than water. He argued that buoyancy was “a matter of shape only,” Caruana explained. “It had nothing to do with density.”
. . .
And Galileo’s primary argument for floating ice was correctly based on Archimedes’ density theory, wherein an object in water experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of water it displaces. Because ice is less dense than liquid water, it will always float on liquid water.
. . .
On the third day of the debate, delle Colombe stole the show with a crowd-pleasing experiment, Caruana said. Delle Colombe presented a sphere of ebony to the audience. The sphere was placed on the surface of the water, and it began to sink. Then delle Colombe took a thin wafer of ebony and placed it on the surface of the water, where it floated. Because the density of both the wafer and the sphere of ebony were the same, delle Colombe announced that density had nothing to do with buoyancy and that an object’s shape was all that mattered.
. . .
Galileo argued that the thin volume of air, above the wafer but below the surface of the water, had somehow united with the ebony wafer. Thus, the density of the hybrid ebony-and-air object was the average of the density of ebony and the density of air. This average density was less than the density of liquid water, thus the ebony wafer (plus air) could float on water.
Thus, according to the article, Galileo was absolutely correct about why ice floats. He only gave an improper explanation of why his opponent's ebony show didn't disprove his explanation, and thus this article was a waste of time, and, honestly, I feel a bit misled. After actually reading TFA (which is rare for me, I will admit) I ended up more convinced that Galileo was a freaking smart dude, way ahead of his time, which was exactly the opposite of the purpose of the article. It seems like they would have been better off writing about Newton and his supposed quest for alchemy.
Galileo was friends with Urban the VIII, but it was Paul the V that the controversy began (Urban suceeded Paul). Actually, the controversy was not about the actual science but more politics. There were already theories of heliocentricity from both Copernicus and Kepler who preceded Galileo. The standard for science back then was based on an Aristotlian system. In proving his work, Galileo relied on Copernicus, and while heliocentricity was more or less accepted in the scientific community and many in the Catholic Church, there was much dispute about the great distances between starts that Copernicus theorized to deal with the abscense of parallax shifts. The problem for Copernicus was one of crude instruments, but because his theories were not universally accepted by the astronomical community of the time, Galileo, basing his proof on Copernicus failed the Aristotlian rigor needed to for proof.
Galileo disagreed and took it to the Church assuming that since the Jesuits agreed with him, the Pope would, too. But the Pope sided with general astronomers of the day and said that he was free to teach his theory but it was not a proven fact. Luther basically said the same thing to Kepler 10 years earlier, but the Lutherans don't get in trouble for it.
Even after Galileo was placed under house arrest for publishing his work as fact instead of theory (which is what the dispute was about), the Church provided housing for him, built him an observatory, fed him, provided servents for him, paid him to do research and a host of other things. It was probably the most comfortable house arrest in history.
Anyway, there were large egos involved and Galileo refused to change his position and said that he was correct and the Church was wrong. While history has shown his theory to be correct, it is for the wrong reason. Copernicus was wrong on the parallax shifts and if they had better instrumentation he would have seen the shifts. So in a way both sides were correct at the time. The heliocentric model was correct, although that was never really disputed, but the Church was correct in that it failed the rigors of scientific proof.