Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge Science Biographies) [Paperback]

Michael Sharratt (Author), David Knight (Preface)

Book Description

Series: Cambridge Science Biographies | Publication Date: April 26, 1996

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, the decoder of nature's mathematical language and a quite brilliant popularizer of science. Even his reluctant excursion into theology has at last been officially and handsomely recognized by the Church's "rehabilitation" of the Inquisition's most famous victim, fully discussed in the last chapter. This book makes his lasting contributions accessible to nonscientists and his mistakes are not overlooked. This is not a mythical story, but the biography of an innovator--one of the greatest ever known.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...several details in this biography make our understanding of Galileo's world easier." Seventeenth-Century News

"Most readers will read the last chapter of this outstanding biography on Galileo first. Laying out the contemporary Church's attempt to bring together the two cultures of science and religion into a harmonious relationship of mutual respect, the chapter provides the satisfying closure to the infamous Galilo affair that no other book in the previous three and a half centuries has been able to do." James R. Hansen, Science Books & Films

"Building from a thorough familiarity with the volumes of scholarship on the subject, the author offers an extremely readable reappraisal of Galileo's life and work. Sharratt's book is an excellent addition to the Cambridge Science Biographies series." James R. Hansen, Science Books & Films

"From now on, when I assign a single book on Galileo to undergraduate students, it will be this one." James R. Hansen, Science Books & Films

"In Galileo: Decisive Innovator, Michael Sharratt offers an effective and manageable remedy to the standard schoolbook portrayal of Galileo. Effective, because it outlines Galileo's contributions with an emphasis on ideas rather than anecdotes. Manageable, because it is a succinct account that restricts itself to the salient features of Galileo's arguments and the key events and relationships that shaped his life...Sharratt succeeds in restoring the man behind the myth." The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada

Book Description

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. Not overlooking his mistakes, this text makes his lasting contributions accessible to nonscientists.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 26, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521566711
• ISBN-13: 978-0521566711
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,631,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Upside Down Through a Telescope, December 3, 2000

By 

Thomas J. Burns (Apopka, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge Science Biographies) (Paperback)

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 dangerous union. Galileo used his early observations virtually exclusively to attempt to prove the validity of the Copernican system [though Keppler, with all his number crunching, did a more thorough job of this.] Galileo's discovery of four moons revolving about Jupiter established at least that the earth was not the center of motion. The crescent face of Venus made a strong case, as he saw it, for a sun-centered universe. Perhaps most damaging to traditionalists, the discovery of mountains and valleys on the moon implied that heavenly objects could, for all practical purposes, undergo the same secular critiques as earthly matter and principles.

Sharratt depicts Galileo as a gregarious man with many friends who, like most struggling artisans, knew how to ingratiate himself to influential patrons for financial support and connections. He could be jealously protective of his prerogatives and he did not suffer fools gladly. Sharratt's research leads him to believe that Galileo ran afoul of the Jesuits, or at least some of them, who were only too happy to provide Robert Bellarmine and the Roman Inquisition with disquieting interpretations of Galileo's works.

The Inquisition's public dispute with Galileo involved the latter's teaching of Copernicanism. Put simply, adherence to Copernican theory in 1616 was tantamount to a denial of Biblical inerrancy in the eyes of the Catholic Church, then deeply enmeshed in struggles with Protestant reformers over, among other things, Biblical interpretation. However, there can be no doubt that Galileo's dismemberment of the Aristotelian system was viewed as an equally inimical threat to the unity and soundness of Catholic doctrine, also under fire from Protestants. In 1616 a somewhat friendly and informal encounter with Bellarmine and Pope Urban VIII resulted in an avuncular warning that Galileo refrain from public advocacy of Copernicanism. Sharratt reports that there was some confusion over precisely what these men agreed to. Hence, when Galileo published his masterpiece The Dialogue in 1632, in which he enhanced and reinforced earlier writings, he was arrested by the Inquisition for reneging upon the instruction of 1616. Sharratt's description of the trial is terse and brief; Galileo lived his remaining years under house arrest.

Somewhat misplaced is the final chapter on Galileo's rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. This chapter has the marks of an afterthought or editorial recasting. The author himself admits that the "rehabilitation" was of the Church, not Galileo. More tellingly, Sharratt makes no mention of present struggles between Church traditionalists and modern day Galileos, and he would have needed to look no further than to reproductive science. One need only consider the present state of Catholic sexual ethics to see that the microscope has replaced the telescope as an object of terror for today's Bellarmines.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Effective and Manageable biography, April 2, 2005

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S. Park "Park" (McLean, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge Science Biographies) (Paperback)

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 story, due to his expertise and profession in this field as a philosophy professor and a Roman Catholic Priest. Just the fact that Sharratt is a Roman Catholic Priest gives his last chapter, "Rehabilitation," a stronger thrust than other authors, methodically deconstructing the legal underpinnings of the case and identifying the true issues and personality conflicts of Galileo.

Sharratt offers an effective and manageable method of dealing with the immense life of Galileo in his 262 pages. It is effective in putting an emphasis on Galileo's ideas rather than a collection of anecdotes and it is manageable because the biography, despite its details, is a succinct account of influences on Galileo and in turn his influences on the world, that shaped his life.