New biographies of Galileo
Galileo
By John L. Heilbron.
By John L. Heilbron.
Galileo
Watcher of the Skies.
By David Wootton.
Watcher of the Skies.
By David Wootton.
...Bertolt Brecht was so mesmerized by the particulars of Galileo’s life that he wrote three versions of it for the stage, the first while living in Nazi Germany, the second while in postwar America after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the third during his voluntary exile from McCarthy’s America in communist East Berlin. Brecht’s Galileo was simultaneously the victim of a tragedy perpetuated by his society, and the tragedy himself. As Brecht witnessed the evolving role of the scientist in the mid-twentieth century, he began to see similarities between Galileo and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who paid a high price for attempting to work on the Manhattan Project while resisting its core values. In this respect, it may be fairly said that Brecht got Galileo right more than any modern historian in recognizing that he belonged to the ages, and that our perspective on him would be ever changing.
The publication of two recent biographies of Galileo, by John Heilbron and David Wootton, coincided with the 400th anniversary of the publication of Starry Messenger (1610), the treatise in which Galileo reported the astronomical observations he had made with the instrument not yet called the telescope. Heilbron, a distinguished historian of physics and mathematics, has spent many years studying the relations between science and religion, including how the Roman Catholic Church stimulated and materially supported a research program of Catholic astronomy.
Wootton has previously written on the history of atheism and unbelief, and about Galileo’s controversial Venetian friend Paolo Sarpi—a theologian and tireless critic of the papacy. In Venice there is a statue of Fra Paolo in Campo Santa Fosca commemorating his survival of a botched assassination attempt in October 1607. The cutthroats were sheltered and paid by Rome, yet Sarpi continued to defend freedom of thought and belief, both in conversation and in print, and to discuss science with Galileo. In Heilbron’s account, Galileo is a versatile connoisseur and critic; in Wootton’s, he is all but a modern scientist without faith.
Before the appearance of Starry Messenger, Galileo was known as a poorly dressed, occasionally sarcastic and mechanically adroit college dropout who kept a mistress and had sired three illegitimate children. He admired and imitated the prose of Dante, Machiavelli and Ariosto; he enjoyed reading poetry and liked to draw and tell a good joke...
