Authority 
Memory does not well serve us about the Trial of Galileo
Ways to recover meaning:
- classical sources
- Arab, Hindi and Chinese learning
- experimentation
- primary documents
- subsidiary stories
- secondary documents
- dramatic interpretations, a 20th century play
It was a period in which both secular and religious authorities were challenged because of external changes in the world and internal demoralization of the Christian magisterium due to the Great Schism of east from west and the Avignon "captivity," the growing wealth of the monasteries, the trafficking in holy indulgences, and the perfidy of the Borgia and Medici Popes in Rome.
Francis Bacon and the book as source.
Luther and the Reformation
Kopernicus
Brahe's synthesis
If not one center or the other, then can there be numerous centers?
jupiter and its moons
earth's moon
Kepler, Protestant
Galileo, Catholic
• career
"Episcopacy and Presbytery reforms"
The world was seen quite differently.
Pythagoras was the great ancient mathematical source of knowledge as was Euclid who through Vitruvius the architect and writer had left an enormous impression on practitioners and theorists alike. Alas geometry could not conclusively assist Kepler in determining the proper order of the planets, the sun, the earth and the moon.
Galileo's sketches of the moon.
- geocentric
- heliocentric
- logical
- rational
- empirical
- method
- observation
- skepticism
- experimental
- repeatable
- irresolute
Kepler's breakthrough,
conic sections and Tycho Brahe's charts for evidence.
"Wedding of observation and theory presided over by necessary and sufficient data."
World is but a figment of experiences -- consisting of an amalgam of the senses versus an abiding memory we seek to recall and in recovering reveals the signals of the cosmic origins.
"The European vision of the world in 1453, when Constantinople and the treasures of Byzantium slipped into the past, forever held by the Turkish, Arab and Muslim world, causing an exodus of Greek, Latin and Near Eastern scholars to the west.
Contact
Dante Alighieri,
Essay
What Brecht said about the icon, Galileo
But "What Galileo said" and "What Brecht said about the icon, Galileo" are two different but perhaps complementary visions of the same underlying error in human judgment. A sort of hubris runs through all knowledge, but the knowledge of the heavens particularly divides the timid from the aggressive mind, the radical and tempered curiosity from the dilettantish and enthusiastic "busy" mind.
But this story, lest we pervert it's real meaning, is not about what we know or think we know as much as it is about what we are allowed to know and what we are permitted to examine, analyze, discuss and exchange in the "free marketplace of ideas" that was so dear to John Milton.
What are we allowed to know?
J. Siry
Sources
I. Bernard Cohen
I. B. Cohen, Revolutions in Science
Bronowski, Science and Human Values
tudy Guide
Date: 19 November 2007
