Galileo: Decisive Innovator

by Michael Sharratt

Book Overview

In this entertaining and authoritative biography, first published in 1994, Michael Sharratt examines the flair, imagination, hard-headedness, clarity, combativeness and penetrating intelligence of Galileo Galilei. To follow Galileo's career as he exploited unforeseen opportunities to unseat established ways of comprehending nature is to understand a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo was a pathbreaker for the newly-invented telescope,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521566711
• ISBN13: 9780521566711
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Effective and Manageable biography

Book: Galileo: Decisive Innovator, 262 pages Author: Michael Sharratt In Galileo: Decisive Innovator, author Michael Sharratt portrays Galileo Galilei as a complete being, beyond the typical textbook and famous discoverer Galileo. Sharratt writes the truth and writes it vividly, with no added fluff or mythological misconceptions about Galileo, such as Galileo invented the telescope. In fact, Sharratt first introduced Galileo saying that, Galileo did not invent the telescope and that rather Galileo improved the Dutch invention and was the first to point the looking glass up towards the skies. Also Sharratt makes it a point that Galileo is one of the few scientists called by his first name, a reason why he, Sharratt, wrote the book referring to Galileo using his first name only. There are a number of reasons for readers to bother reading this book. Some of the strongest points of this biography include: organization of content, personal facts, and accurate content. There are countless other books on Galileo, but this biography was organized in such a way that even someone new to Galileo or the concepts of science discussed, were to read this book, they would be able to get a full account the same way a scientist would have. Instead of consistently going in the typical, time-based chronological order of events and explanations, Sharratt divides up Galileo's life and his "ripple effects" into ten sections (with subchapters), which are located in the table of contents. The first chapter is not about Galileo's early life, but about "The Strangest Piece of News," talking about Galileo's turning point in life with the telescope and the beginnings of his support for Copernicus' theory. In the middle of different chapters, Sharratt makes references to other time periods in Galileo's life, events, people, things that were relevant to his current writing topic. Also, Sharratt is able to give many details concerning Galileo's events. No significant event is easily overlooked; the book provides many details about Galileo's feelings, environment, and other people's lives during Galileo's important events. In Sharratt's discussion about significant events in Galileo's life, such as the Dialogue and its condemnation, Sharratt is clear to identify whom Galileo was truly fighting. It was not the Church, but the stifling paradigm of natural philosophy, whose practitioners, rather than systematically observing nature, sought recourse in Artistotle. These methods help the reader get a lively feel for everything written about Galileo and not just boring fact after fact. There are also, black and white illustrations; intelligently placed, relating to the context around it (Sharratt included a list of illustrations following the table of content). Also there is a ten-page compilation of notes in the back, to refer back to, not to mention the small-print, eight-page bibliography, a good source for further readings. Sharratt was most likely compelled to recount this s

Upside Down Through a Telescope

To all of us who have had romantic rushes with astronomy, the name Galileo is deeply revered. It is a matter of faith among us that Galileo invented the telescope and consequently a spate of remarkable objects in the heavens, particularly the rings of Saturn. We know he performed wizardlike scientific demonstrations from the leaning Tower of Pisa. If we had the benefit of a good liberal arts education, we came to understand, albeit dimly, that he got in trouble for all this with the Church.Biographer Michael Sharratt did a wise thing. He describes Galileo's adventures with the new telescope in the very first chapter of his biography, because he knows this is what we want to know first. It is a compelling chapter, although there is no way to tell the story without a certain measure of demythologizing. Galileo did not invent the telescope; the instrument was in common use in the Dutch Republic, though our hero certainly improved upon it. He never had a telescope strong enough to identify the rings of Saturn [another Dutchman, Huygens, gets credit for that.] And perhaps most depressing, Galileo first conceived of a telescope as an instrument of naval intelligence and tried to market it as such.Sharratt's book is not for curious little boys, but for the thoughtful grownups they became. The bulk of this book is not about the dramatic discoveries, but the wonder and dismay they precipitated. This work has a certain jargon true to its time. Galileo by trade was a mathematician. As the times did not require the high precision math of the nuclear-computer age, mathematicians, at least the good ones, served society by promulgating what we might call the sciences of organization: logic, the structure of accurate thought, and physics, the predictability of causes and effects.By Galileo's time, the early seventeenth century, traditional logic and physics were under assault by a number of independent scientists whose hypotheses and improved observation methods were bending the old medieval synthesis to the breaking point. Under particular assault were two venerable systems: Ptolemy's concept of the universe in which the sun, planets, and stars circled the earth; the other. Aristotle's complex synthesis of observable matter and motion. Sharratt traces with considerable detail Galileo's early disenchantment with both Ptolemy and Aristotle. Although questioning whether the Tower of Pisa events were quite the spectacle they were reported to be, Sharratt examines Galileo's method of disproving Aristotelian truisms such as the tendency of heavier objects to fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo, like many of his contemporaries, romanced the theories of Copernicus, whose theory of a sun centered universe better explained the retrograde motion of planets as observed from the earth. It was Galileo's eventual marriage to the Copernican system that would cause him so much trouble with the Church.The new telescope in the hands of a Copernican newlywed was an almost dange