Renaissance/Early Modern

Galileo Galilei

1564–1642

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”

Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

Galileo Galilei, mathematician and natural philosopher at Padua and later at the Medici court in Florence, joined the telescope to mathematical mechanics. The presses the Copernican arrangement against the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian cosmos. treats motion and the strength of materials in the Archimedean manner of demonstration. Nature is a book. He holds that it is written in the language of mathematics, and that scripture teaches the way to salvation, leaving the structure of the heavens to inquiry. Newton inherits the demand for a single physics of earth and sky.

In the Conversation

4 of the Great Ideas

Metaphysics

Change

Uniform motion is not a change requiring a cause; only acceleration is — and this single claim dismantles the Aristotelian physics of motion.

Life & Nature

Element

The paradoxes of continuous division show that matter cannot be both infinitely divisible and composed of extended parts; some form of atomism is forced on us by reason.

Natural Science

Astronomy

The telescope reveals that the heavens are not perfect and incorruptible; observational evidence confirms the Copernican system against Aristotelian cosmology.

Mechanics

Falling bodies accelerate uniformly regardless of weight; the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.