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Galileo's Daughter
Albert Einstein considered Galileo Galilei to be "the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science altogether."
In a sense, the obsessive, rebellious and gadget-minded Galileo (1564-1642) was one of the first Geeks, and in the context in which he lived and worked, one of the bravest.
He was brilliant, humble and funny, qualities rarely seen in contemporary geeks and nerds, or anybody much. He was profoundly grateful to be able to use science to seek out the truth. In 1609, he set up a telescope in the garden behind his house, pointed it skyward, and saw never-before-seen stars and constellations.
"I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries. "
It was gracious of Galileo to offer thanks, since he himself received precious few acknowledgements in his lifetime. He sent his out-of-wedlock daughter off to a convent when she was 12 and never saw her again, then ran afoul of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition for his heretic notion that the earth and planets revolved around the sun.
Yet, while he never set foot outside his native Italy, his discoveries rocked the world. His most remarkable invention, the telescope, enabled him to alter the conventional reality of the civilized world and to reinforce the then - stunning argument that the Earth moves around the sun. In a sense, he hacked the universe, attacking and solving the biggest problem in both science and theology. For this, he was hauled before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend the final years of his life under house arrest.
Of his three illegitimate children, the oldest, (born Virginia in 1600, but re-named Suor Maria Celeste after she took vows of poverty and retreated permanently from the world, since illegitimate daughters were considered unfit for marriage) shared Galileo's brilliance and love of science.
She became his most determined supporter and prolific-letter-writing confidante, though he never saw her again. Her letters and life (his to her at the convent were destroyed once he was targeted by the Inquisition).
Dava Sobel's "Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love," by (Walker, US $27) expands the story of Galileo, his amazing accomplishments, adding his heart-breaking relationship with his daughter. It's a stunning book, beautiful and powerful, and it brings us back to the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court during an era when humanity's very perceptions of its place in the universe was being upended by one brave man.
In our time, Galileo would probably have ended up a zillionnaire, profiled on "Dateline" and shifting his stock-option wealth from one fund to another. In his own, he was tried and found guilty of heresy, "ordered in the name of His Holiness the Pope and whole body of the Holy Office to the effect that the said opinion that the Sun is the center of universe and the Earth moves must be entirely abandoned, nor might he from then on in any way hold, teach, or defend it by world or in writing; otherwise the Holy Office would proceed against him," which would have meant torture and death.
As the foreword to the book itself explains, this isn't a mawkish contemporary family story.
"Theirs is not a tale of abuse or rejection or intentional stifling of abilities. Rather, it is a love story, a tragedy and a mystery."
People who love science, technology and exploration will be knocked out by this volume, with its wealth of illustrations and gorgeous design. So will people who simply love a great and brilliantly-rendered story.
Pick this book up at Amazon.
sigh.....
.....if you want to know the truth go out to http://www.fixedearth.com but only if your willing to let your "scientific" faiths be challenged by some good back-to-the-BIBLE facts
it is upon this lie that most of the collapse of modern society has been built. society violence, abortion, feminism, evolution, and most of the rest of society's ills are a result of the copernican/galilean lie
the people that call themselves scientists, that say that we're on a ball of rock hurtling around a sun, that there are "billions and billions" of other "galaxies" billions of years ago have such a deep hatred of the LORD that i wonder how they live with themselves..
fact: the space program performs all calculations using a nonmoving earth!
Hmmm... As I recall, Adolf Hitler called himself a National Socialist. So, I guess the various socialist parties in Europe are all anti-semitic?
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So you would say that (for example) members of the Orthodox or coptic or other monophysite traditions are protestant? Oh please. There have been splits in the church since no later than 50 AD. They will always be there. But there is no split in the Body of Christ.
We, as Christ-followers (and not all Christians follow Christ. Don't believe me? Look around you and see where non-Christ-Following christians have put us) need to rise above labels and simply love each other.
My background is conservative (but not fundamentalist) evangelical. I go to a church which is vaguely affiliated with the Southern Baptists. I know many Southern Baptists (who shall remain nameless) who I do not expect to see in heaven and many catholics who I am quite sure I
Certainly not by our correct doctrine. In fact, I could make a pretty strong argument that the fullness of correct doctrine is unknowable. That the best we can do is in humility try to find the best doctrine we can while accepting that we might be very wrong.
So, I am 90% certain that the veneration of Mary (and common usage in the RC church has made it worship whatever word-game are played) is a waste of time. But I think that Catholics good intent keeps it from being idolatrous and I think that Catholic who genuinely seek after God will surely find him, veneration of Mary or not. Jesus said "Seek and you shall find". I don't think he was kidding.
Similarly, I think that baptism by dunking is probably not a very important doctrine: but don't tell some of the people at my church I said that!
All doctrine falls flat in the face of God's incredible love for us through Jesus Christ. Nothing else is really worth talking about.
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Your point on hubris is well-taken. I'll just be a man and swallow the urge to rationalize it away.
However, I still find it interesting that the up and down moderation effect ONLY happens on posts with religious content. The more explicitly religious the content, the more it happens.
It doesn't seem to me that my posts on religious topics are any less rational than my posts on secular ones. Why don't my posts on secular topics see-saw up and down in the ratings like this?
Heaven forfend that I should speak against pseudo-scientific rationalism! I am forbidden from observing that some moderators seem to have an axe to grind, for fear that it might offend them. You, like many others, have completely missed the point of the moderator comment: namely that the slashdot population is not religious neutral (as they would like to claim) but actively anti-religious.
My opinion, and I managed to say it without trying to insult anyone. Wow, go figure!
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I find the moderation system around here hopelessly amusing. Whenever I post on a secular topic, it tends to go straight to the top with no negative moderations. When I post admitting my religious biases, it tends to be moderated up (interesting/insightful) and down (offtopic, overrated). For example, the article above has currently been moderated up once (interesting) and down one (overrated). Which is it? I betcha if it were secular with similar quality of opinion it wouldn't have gotten the downcheck.
I always try to keep my comments at least mostly topical -- certainly as topical as the average. The only explanation I can conceive is that people moderate (up and down) based on their religious opinions. I thought moderation was not supposed to be based on whether you agree with the author? Didn't I read that somewhere?
Not that it matters... People will read, or not read. I just think it says something about that percentage of dotheads who will howl grieviously about censorship when someone wants to label their porn as porn, but will ruthlessly suppress any religious message they don't agree with.
Maybe I should start posting as a Buddhist and see what happens? I used to be a Buddhist monk and could probably fake it convinicingly. It seems that, in our society, it is okay to be anything but Christian.
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Being "different" is not the sole criterium in determining geekitude. Galileo was a brilliant man, fine (by the time's standards) scientist, and made some important discoveries. But that does not necessarily make him a geek. Jon, your writing is very good, and generally relevant as hell (or at least interesting, even when it's not relevant), but please, man - get over the geek fixation!
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Do you really believe that, Katz? Do you think that genius and vision are automatically encouraged in our day and age? That's very naive. If Galileo were born today, and said that, say, the Sun travels around the Earth, do you think he'd end up with stock options?
No. He'd make a crappy website, spewing his ideas to anyone wants to hear him, and die in isolation and poverty, overlooked by everyone.
They used to antagonise the revolutionary thinkers in the old days; now said thinkers are just buried so deep in the crap no one hears them.
Of course, Galileo was arrested not because of his ideas, which weren't entirely new, but because of the way he presented them: he was inflamatory and insulting to the Church, as a way to shake up the foundations of contemporary thoughts and force people to react and acknowledge them.
So; instead of declaring he's heretic, Galileo would get a big, juicy lawsuit on his head. Don't go thinking we live in an age when genius is recognised. True revolutionary thinking always takes a few decades to cement, and a lot of these ideas die in the crap.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
There are lots of misunderstandings concerning the "Galileo affair", now
permanently engraved in popular legend. It looks like Katz has spouted a
few more of them, and perhaps invented a few of his own. Galileo was
neither heretic nor was heliocentrism a heresy, nor was he ever charged
with actual heresy: you can only be a heretic if there was a doctrine to
deny. Contrary to popular legend, it was never church dogma that the sun
revolved around the earth. Copernicus -- a Catholic priest -- published
his work on heliocentrism with Vatican approval and dedicated his work
to the Pope. No dogma, no heresy. The best they could come up with was
suspicion of heresy.
Had Galileo been rigorously scientific in the dispute, he would not have
gotten into his trouble. The main problem was that he advocated a
controversial thesis without any convincing proof. Telescope or no, you
can't easily prove that the earth revolved around the sun when all you
saw was stuff whizzing across the sky. One possible argument -- parallax
of the stars -- backfired in that his telescope was not sensitive enough
to detect the parallax. He used spurious arguments such as ocean
tides. He had no proof. The geek had no source code.
Another problem was that he had all the diplomacy of a bull in a china
shop. I do not understand how Katz could characterize someone as
undiplomatic and polemical as Galileo as "humble". He insulted the Pope,
got into a bitter dispute with the Jesuits -- he insisted comets were an
optical illusion -- and appeared to violate an order not to teach
heliocentrism. Leaving the strictly scientific field, Galileo insisted
on muscling into theology.
Mistakes were made on both sides of a rather complex affair. But Galileo
came under a fairly benign Inquisition, and his house arrest was spent
in relative luxury (a personal valet? Good grief). Any thread of torture
was a formality. He could receive guests, and finished some of his best
work then. Contrary to popular legend, Galileo's most important
contributions to science came before and after the heliocentrism
dispute.
One Catholic view of the mess can be seen at:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/GALILEO.TXT
Sigh. This is starting to sound like something I'd call "Geek Revisionism". Suddenly, everyone in history who made a significant impact was a geek.
Of course, most brilliant men were social outcasts. So that makes them geeks, of course. The definition of geek that Katz employs is so vague... I can easily say the following people were also geeks:
Adolf Hitler: he was a recluse and a misunderstood man with a vision!
Albert Einstein: he was a scientific-minded man who worked in the patent office and thus really loved gadgets!
Aristotle: a true geek, Aristotle went forth experimenting and exploring the world with a scientific mind.
Winston Churchill: An antisocial man who was alcoholic and manic-depressive, his analytical mind carried him through WW2.
Daffy Duck: Socially awkward, feverishly inventive, excitable and driven. Uber-Geek.
Wile E. Coyote: Isn't that one blatantly obvious?
Marvin the Martian: Exemplifies the social outcast in all of us true Geeks...
That first caveman who invented fire: Oh, man, Geekissimo!
I could go on. That's what you end up with when you broaden a definition that much; everyone ends up with aspects of the definition. Shesh, Geekdom is more than fun with gadgets. You're reading it like it's some sort of astrological sign.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
As those of you who have read some of my postings may have noticed, I am (or at least try to be) a devout Christian and pretty vocal about it. I am also in some sense a scientist, althought out of date and not professional. Is there a conflict? No. There is no conflict.
People seem to assume that philosophic naturalism must push out all other philosophies. Nothing could be further from the truth. I regard my own naturalism as the study of God's methods, and so, indirectly, the study of God himself. In fact, there are many places in the Bible (for example, half the book of Job) where God defines himself and his "Godhood" in terms of his creation. In Romans 2, Paul writes that God reveals himself to all men through the glory of His creation.
Where I draw the line is at the phenomenal hubris of assuming that what I can see with my physical senses is all there is. That's not to say that I don't see evidence for God -- I do. But that evidence is spiritual and (yes) emotional. Not rational. C.S. Lewis -- highly recommended -- said that "The irrefutable and the undeniable are the two weapons that he [God] cannot use". Why? Because he wants us to freely serve him out of love for Him: not out of fear, and his precense "in anything but the most attenuated form" would overwealm us. (I have probably misquoted: the book is Screwtape letters, and I don't have it with me).
Which brings us to Galileo: the quotes in this review make it obvious that Galileo was deeply religious. Yet the author seems puzzled by this in face of the persecution that Galileo suffered. What Galileo knew (and many today apparently do not) is that God and the hierarchy of the Church often have very little to do with each other! The assumption today is often that travesties like Galileo's treatment invalidate Christianity. They don't. They only invalidate organized Christianity.
Never forget that Jesus was a rebel against organized religiosity, and often sharply criticized the authorities of his day for their failings. Don't associate Him with something he never advocated. Religion without Jesus is like beer without alcohol: it may taste good, but in the end you don't get a buzz.
Anybody I haven't offended yet? No? Good.
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I really wish those who keep flogging the Galileo myth of "brave Scientist persecuted by hidebound Chruch for selfless Pursuit of Knowledge" would apply some of that scientific viewpoint to actually reviewing what happened, and perhaps even (gasp!) revising their opining (in true Scientific fashion) based upon the facts of the case, rather than the received myth.
Otherwise, it certainly looks to me as if the Rational Enlightenment Scientific Geeks are the ones who are desperately clinging to their myths, while the Christians are the ones who are willing to look at the world and history as it actually is.
If there is a modern figure who shows us what Galileo would be if he were alive today, it is not IPO-enriched Internet geeks, but rather Carl Sagan. That is, the scientist who uses his scientific expertise to make himself out to be an expert authority on things religious. The proof that Galileo got himself in trouble with the Chruch over theology and not science is simply the number of Catholics ought to be the number of Catholics (including Kepler, Copernicus himself, and a whole bunch of Jesuit astronomers) who favored heliocentism (in even more accurate models than Galileo held) with no trouble at all.
Of course, stabbing a close personal friend in the back by making him out to be a fool in public was not a particularly diplomatic move, especially when that close personal friend happens to have just been elected Pope.
The Roman Catholic Church has admitted that they screwed up in handling Galileo (though not as badly as the mythmakers would have it). I am still waiting for the mythmakers to admit that they have treated the Catholic Church unfairly, or that Galileo might have been part of the problem himself. But I'm not holding my breath -- after all, what's historical accuracy and fairness, compared to a chance to flog religion in general and Christianity/Catholicism in particular?
"He was brilliant, humble and funny, qualities rarely seen in contemporary geeks and nerds, or anybody much."
I don't know about y'all, but I think that contemporary geeks and nerds are more likely to be brilliant, humble, and funny. We're all just a bunch of tech support people around here, but I know many people I'd put in that category, and my wife puts me in the same category all the time. I consider it a well-known fact that a large number of geeks are more shy/humble, good natured, even-tempered, humorous, and, of course, brilliant. Of course, we have the exceptions that prove the rule (Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs), but we also have role models like Linus, Alan Cox, and Woz. All of the latter seem to be good natured, funny, brilliant geeks.