Galileo: Right On the Solar System, Wrong On Ice 206
carmendrahl writes "Famed astronomer Galileo Galilei is best known for taking on the Catholic Church by championing the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. But he also engaged in a debate with a philosopher about why ice floats on water. While his primary arguments were correct, he went too far, belittling legitimate, contradictory evidence given by his opponent, Ludovico delle Colombe. Galileo's erroneous arguments during the water debate are a useful reminder that the path to scientific enlightenment is not often direct and that even our intellectual heroes can sometimes be wrong."
Wrong on ice... (Score:4, Informative)
If samzenpus had bothered to read the article, he would know that it explains, very clearly, that Galileo was right on the question of why ice floats. He was apparently wrong in some of the reasoning that he used to explain another effect (a disc of ebony floating on water due to surface tension).
Maybe samzenpus should go back to posting more science fiction...
Re:Debate with a philosopher? (Score:5, Informative)
At the time, science was seen as an offshoot of philosophy (natural philosophy).
Re:Copernicus (Score:5, Informative)
Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC presented a theory of heliocentrism.
Copernicus knew about Aristarchus: the first version of his manuscript ("De revolutionibus orbium coelestium") contained the lines
Source: http://www.demokritos.org/Aristarchus%20and%20Copernicus-Petrakis.htm [demokritos.org]
Note: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philolaus [wikipedia.org] Philolaus's theory also had the sun revolving around a "central fire". Aristarchus's theory was the first known heliocentric theory.
Why did science ignore Aristarchus for almost two millenia? One reason the Greeks used: "If the earth revolves around the sun, we should see parallax motion of the stars. We don't see parallax motion of the stars. Therefore, the earth doesn't revolve around the sun." But instead of improving their technology so they could see parallax motion, they spent their scientific energies devising epicycles.
Re: More false history (Score:3, Informative)
Before you complain about that it is very much around today present the same amount of scientific research against a popular mainstream thinking and the scientist of today will call for you to be fired and blacklisted.
Re:More false history (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Right for the wrong reasons (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. - Albert Einstein
Re:Right for the wrong reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Galileo was NOT incorrect about why ice floats. He was incorrect about why a wafer of ebony floats while a ball of ebony does not. From TFA:
Delle Colombe’s basic premise was that ice was the solid form of water, therefore it was more dense than water. He argued that buoyancy was “a matter of shape only,” Caruana explained. “It had nothing to do with density.”
. . .
And Galileo’s primary argument for floating ice was correctly based on Archimedes’ density theory, wherein an object in water experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of water it displaces. Because ice is less dense than liquid water, it will always float on liquid water.
. . .
On the third day of the debate, delle Colombe stole the show with a crowd-pleasing experiment, Caruana said. Delle Colombe presented a sphere of ebony to the audience. The sphere was placed on the surface of the water, and it began to sink. Then delle Colombe took a thin wafer of ebony and placed it on the surface of the water, where it floated. Because the density of both the wafer and the sphere of ebony were the same, delle Colombe announced that density had nothing to do with buoyancy and that an object’s shape was all that mattered.
. . .
Galileo argued that the thin volume of air, above the wafer but below the surface of the water, had somehow united with the ebony wafer. Thus, the density of the hybrid ebony-and-air object was the average of the density of ebony and the density of air. This average density was less than the density of liquid water, thus the ebony wafer (plus air) could float on water.
Thus, according to the article, Galileo was absolutely correct about why ice floats. He only gave an improper explanation of why his opponent's ebony show didn't disprove his explanation, and thus this article was a waste of time, and, honestly, I feel a bit misled. After actually reading TFA (which is rare for me, I will admit) I ended up more convinced that Galileo was a freaking smart dude, way ahead of his time, which was exactly the opposite of the purpose of the article. It seems like they would have been better off writing about Newton and his supposed quest for alchemy.
The Big Issue with Galileo (Score:3, Informative)
Is that he was an arrogant ass and often wrong. The Catholic church did not have issue with Galileo's heliocentric view, in fact, the Catholic church has a method to accept and alter their understandings of such natural actions.
The issue is that Galileo's arguments left doubt. Ironically, there were some contemporaries whose work could have aided Galileo's proof of his view. However, he has pretty much dismissed those individuals and their works as wrong. And done so extremely rudely.
The real issue of Galileo's is that he came out postulating "FACT" while by-passing the equivalent of "peer review" for the day. The pope was actually rather fond of Galileo and his work. But refused to acknowledge Galileo's theories as fact, despite his fondness. Then Galileo chose to be a bigger arse. And wrote a book publicly insulting the Pope. It's funny, as we still have this issue in science today over peer review, and early publication statements.
Do you know what the big punishment was? I've read comments deriding the church for executing Galileo. When in truth, Galileo was given a backhanded patronage. He was put on a house arrest. But pretty much had most of his means taken care of, was free to continue his work. It was essentially a public censure.
Ironically, I was unaware of most of these facts until a few years ago. When reading the 1632 series, I started to research Galileo Galilei.
"The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could be supported as only a possibility, not an established fact."
That is not obstruction of science by the church, pope, nada. That is merely saying "Hey, before you declare something as fact, you need to be able to prove it."
Alas, the failure of science here, is to hide this blemish in the failure of history. So we go and teach how Galileo was persecuted for thinking differently. No, Galileo was in trouble for being a rude arrogant ass who couldn't back up his claims.
Re:Unless the subject is climate change (Score:4, Informative)
Greens demanding that Western nations reduce CO2 emissions, so we shipped all our factories to China
This is nonsense. "We" shipped all of "our" factories to China because the labor costs are (or were) vastly lower and improvements in global communications and transport made the distance increasingly less problematic. And do you think CO2 is the only thing that China's factories are spilling out? Their pollution is so bad that the life expectancy in some regions is years below what it should be. Of course there are economic costs to any regulation, of pollutants or anything else, but there are countless examples of the damage that industrialization without any regard of the environmental consequences brings. (China probably isn't the worst; try googling "Magnetogorsk".) The US may not have the manufacturing capacity it once did, but our rivers don't catch on fire either.
Re:Right for the wrong reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Galileo was friends with Urban the VIII, but it was Paul the V that the controversy began (Urban suceeded Paul). Actually, the controversy was not about the actual science but more politics. There were already theories of heliocentricity from both Copernicus and Kepler who preceded Galileo. The standard for science back then was based on an Aristotlian system. In proving his work, Galileo relied on Copernicus, and while heliocentricity was more or less accepted in the scientific community and many in the Catholic Church, there was much dispute about the great distances between starts that Copernicus theorized to deal with the abscense of parallax shifts. The problem for Copernicus was one of crude instruments, but because his theories were not universally accepted by the astronomical community of the time, Galileo, basing his proof on Copernicus failed the Aristotlian rigor needed to for proof.
Galileo disagreed and took it to the Church assuming that since the Jesuits agreed with him, the Pope would, too. But the Pope sided with general astronomers of the day and said that he was free to teach his theory but it was not a proven fact. Luther basically said the same thing to Kepler 10 years earlier, but the Lutherans don't get in trouble for it.
Even after Galileo was placed under house arrest for publishing his work as fact instead of theory (which is what the dispute was about), the Church provided housing for him, built him an observatory, fed him, provided servents for him, paid him to do research and a host of other things. It was probably the most comfortable house arrest in history.
Anyway, there were large egos involved and Galileo refused to change his position and said that he was correct and the Church was wrong. While history has shown his theory to be correct, it is for the wrong reason. Copernicus was wrong on the parallax shifts and if they had better instrumentation he would have seen the shifts. So in a way both sides were correct at the time. The heliocentric model was correct, although that was never really disputed, but the Church was correct in that it failed the rigors of scientific proof.
Re:Debate with a philosopher? (Score:4, Informative)
>At the time, science was seen as an offshoot of philosophy (natural philosophy).
This is something that confuses a lot of modern readers who look at the Galileo Affair.
When they see a churchman making "philosophical" arguments against Galileo, they assume it is due to some preposterous navel-gazing argument, not knowing the primary objection to Galileo came from people we'd call scientists today.
Galileo was making claims contrary to the founder of "science", Aristotle, and couldn't answer the counter-objections that scientists raised. The debate was taken to the authorities, the Roman Catholic Church, who told Galileo that they loved his theory, but that he didn't have enough evidence yet (and rightly so) to call it settled science. Contrary to the prevailing belief (and a forged letter claiming this) Galileo was not prohibited from teaching heliocentrism, just from teaching it as accepted fact. The Pope - a friend of his, and who believed his theory but was worried about making sudden changes in society - in fact encouraged Galileo to publish a comparison of heliocentrism and geocentrism, discussing the relative merits of each. Galileo, in typical nerd fashion, wrote a book that said heliocentrism is great, and anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot, including you, Mr. Pope. *This* is what got Galileo subject to house arrest. Not heliocentrism (which was utterly uncontroversial up until Galileo flipped off the pope - Copernicus was well received).