Product Description: Galileo's trial in 1633 before the Roman Inquisition is one of the most frequently mentioned topics in the history of science. Galileo's encounter with the Catholic Church was not only a major turning point in the history of western culture; it is the paradigm case of the clash between the institutional authority of religion and the authority of scientific reason, a clash that has helped to define the modern era...read more

Product Description: A mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, Italian-born Galileo was the first to study the skies with a refracting telescope. In 1610, he made major discoveries relating to the moon, the Milky Way, Jupiter's four large moons, sunspots, and the phases of Venus.

Product Description: The author of this book has noted remarkable connections between 16th century Venetian painting and the secret symbolism underlying Copernicus' revolutionary conceptions, and links these discoveries about the secret hermetic knowledge of the time to situations in science today.

Product Description: Known and observed by all levels of society, the sun and moon, or the «luminaries,» were a continuous thread in the tapestry of late medieval and early modern English culture. Tracing this specific thread is a novel means of understanding changes in epistemological conceptions of the natural world realized in the Scientific Revolution...read more

(view table of contents)

Since publication of Stillman Drake’s landmark volume, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, new and exciting information has come to light about this towering figure in the history of Western science. Drawing largely from Galileo’s manuscript working papers, Drake now adds a wealth of detail to the story.Among the findings he presents in this volume are the steps that led to discovery of the pendulum law and the law of fall, by which Galileo opened the road to modern physics; Galileo’s path to the new astronomy of Copernicus, closely linked to his first essays in physics; his subsequent misgivings and final reassurances provided by the telescope.Drake focuses on Galileo’s pioneering work in physics, previously unknown, and shows that time has not diminished its value. He also considers some of the factors that played a part in the development of physics, its classical Greek beginnings, the medieval interlude, the contribution of some of Galileo’s contemporaries, and the resistance of others to his new science of motion. We see in a new light the relation of that science to modern dynamics, created by Newton half a century later. Galileo is better known as an astronomer than as a modern physicist. Drake sheds new light here too as he explores Galileo’s pioneer invention of satellite astronomy, his sighting of Neptune two and one-half centuries before that planet was identified, and his proposal of a cosmogony based on speeds of freely falling bodies. With this book Drake confirms Galileo as the first recognizably modern scientist, in both his methods and results.

Product Description: In this fascinating work, Jean Dietz Moss shows how the scientific revolution begun by Copernicus brought about another revolution as well—one in which rhetoric, previously used simply to explain scientific thought, became a tool for persuading a skeptical public of the superiority of the Copernican system...read more