Galileo at Work

"Yes, this book really examines Galileo’s day-to-day life. It looks at what kind of correspondence he maintained with scientists all over Europe. It also shows what his thinking was on various problems. It is a close-up look at how he performed his experiments and how he worked with others to shape his ideas. He devised an ingenious apparatus for rolling balls down an inclined plane and timing their descent. In this fashion he discovered how bodies accelerate during free fall. Of course he had no clock to time such small intervals, but he counted the moments by letting water drip from a vessel, and then weighed the drops of water. Yes, and sometimes he got criticism from them as well. He didn’t take criticism well. He was a very potent opponent in a debate or even in correspondence because he was so clever. You really didn’t want to get into an argument with him. Galileo lived in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th century and just about everybody was Catholic. His own daughters were nuns and his sisters, for at least part of their lives, had been in the convent world, and so this was very much his upbringing and his outlook. When he writes about his discoveries he thanks God for being so kind to make him the first person to see marvels that have been hidden in the dark for all previous centuries. Not at that point. The minute he started agreeing out loud with Copernicus and writing about it in Italian and not Latin then he became more controversial. The Sidereal Messenger is written in Latin but soon after that he switched to Italian and that is when it became an issue. His controversial views were investigated by the Roman Inquisition which concluded that his ideas could only be supported as a possibility and not an established fact, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He had a very close relationship with one of his daughters and a correspondence which was life-long for her. When I found out about her and the letters they wrote it surprised me. Given the relationship he had with the church in later life, I had always assumed he was not religious and that he was a modern scientist with no belief. But when I found that he had daughters who were nuns it made me think that many of the things I had learnt about Galileo were wrong. So that was the impetus to find her letters and translate them into English and see what they said about who he was. It was quite close and loving. In fact he outlived her. She died quite young. He didn’t really discuss his work with her. There are just a couple of references to it in his letters but she did a lot of copy work for him. And she may have helped him copy over the manuscript for his big book. The letters are not about science, they are about things that are going on in the convent and help that she needs from him. So from them you get more of a sense of what he was like as a man."