Customer Reviews

Galileo's Mistake: A New Look At the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church

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Galileo's Mistake is a disappointing book, but it's worth a read. Despite its title, it is only partially a historical look at the `Galileo affair,' much of it being a `dialogue' a la Galileo between the author, a nun, and a Simpliceo-like logical-positivist who ineptly defends science. Rowland starts ostensibly with an attack only on scientistic philosophy. But Rowland ends up using his arguments against scientistic philosophical positions to denigrate science as a whole. After noting the variety of philosophical positions held by scientists, he still paints science with the brush of a narrow swath of scientific positions. The crux of Rowland's argument is that science cannot get at the nature of truth, only model the truth of nature. He addresses arguments for the success of science by digressing to other issues: e.g., a discussion of the successful eradication of small pox is followed by a lament that international thanks were not given to God for such success. Rowland explicitly wants science to address teleology, meaning, values, and the supernatural, not responding to arguments that science has been successful insofar as it has eschewed doing so. He critiques Galileo's belief in universal natural laws vis a vis Pope Urban VIII's argument for God's omnipotence - and does not truly address the reality that Galileo's approach proved immensely more-fruitful in explaining the world. In effect, Galileo's implied error is to not have foreshadowed the scientific epistemology of the late Twentieth Century, nor chained himself to the `it's only a useful convention' sophistry of the Church hierarchy. Rowland thus convicts Galileo of a lack of recognition of the separate magisteria of science and of faith, something proclaimed by the Church (and by such scientists as Stephen J. Gould) 350 years later. Yet Rowland himself argues that science should stray from its own magisterial and address questions of meaning, value and the supernatural. Interestingly, he does not mention the arguments of Intelligent Design, which also insist that science must throw out its naturalistic methodology and admit of supernatural explanations. Perhaps Rowland finds ID vulgar compared to his own arguments. But the issue remains: were science to stray from explaining natural phenomena with reference to natural processes, it would immediately tread into the magisteria of faith, incurring the wrath of many; and it would lose its own universality that allows scientists of different religions and philosophies to practice a unitary science that eschews questions that it cannot answer through its naturalistic methods.

Wade Rowland, author of Galileo's Mistake, certainly doesn't have much faith in conventional wisdom.

Most people were taught that the conflict between Galileo Galilei and the Vatican was the last gasp of the Age of Faith before it gave way to the Age of Reason -- a view seemingly supported by the church itself, which in 1992 officially admitted it had wronged Galileo. But it is Mr. Rowland's contention that the venerable mathematician and astronomer was not a casualty of a revengeful and backward church but instead a victim of historical circumstances and his own lack of tact.

Mr. Rowland notes, for example, that the church never bothered Nicolaus Copernicus, who proved mathematically that the earth rotated around the sun more than 20 years before Galileo was even born and nearly a century before Galileo's famous summons to Rome.

The difference, of course, is that between what Copernicus said in 1543 and what Galileo was told in 1632, Rome experienced the full brunt of the protestant reformation and responded with its own counter-reformation: the Holy See could no longer afford dissent that that kind. Those are the historical circumstances.

Galileo's lack of tact, his "mistake" as Mr. Rowland puts it, is more complicated. While Copernicus presented his views in the Latin "De Revolutionibus," Galileo made his mark with "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany" which was written in Italian, a vulgar street language at the time. More importantly, where Copernicus released his proofs on his deathbed and to a largely academic community, a Galileo just past middle age touted to a wider audience that his proof showed that the scientific method was clearly superior to the Bible as a way to understand the universe. And lastly, while the church warned Galileo to stop his promotion of the scientific method in 1616, Galileo came back to it just 16 years later when he published "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems," where he ostensibly explained both sides of the heliocentric-geocentric debate but made no mistake about which side made most sense in his mind. The Vatican, Mr. Rowland states, had no option but to call Galileo to Rome.

It is when it describes the circumstances Galileo's trial rather than the circumstances of the theological debate that this book is most interesting. Like the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial or the case against Rosa Parks in 1955, Galileo's trial was about rules being broken and not about whether the rules were right or wrong. In that light, Mr. Rowland writes that a narcissistic Galileo was clearly guilty of breaking the rules set out by an embattled and desperate church -- a church that showed its leniency by placing Galileo under house arrest rather than burning him at the stake as was common at the time.

To make his points, Mr. Rowland uses fictionalized dialogue and he creates situations where he takes certain liberties to fill in the gaps between what is known as fact, and for its part, the writing flows easily (revealing Mr. Rowland's journalistic background). But for all that, Galileo's Mistake remains a thought provoking and interesting but ultimately unpersuasive book. The traditional view of Galileo's trial is surely not without fault, but the evidence that it is almost completely wrong seems too flimsy to believe, even after 300 pages of explanations ... no matter how interesting they might be.

The arguments in this book may sound plausible to someone who has not read widely about the science of Galileo's era, but there are serious flaws throughout the book. Rowland's presentation of the issues is ill-founded.

To start with, the book is unreliable on a basic technical level. The description of the Ptolemaic system is among the least coherent I have read. In particular, the equant is not the center of any orbit, as Rowland states, but an off-center point from which the angular motion of the center of the epicycle appears constant. This was a key problem for Copernicus, not a trivial technical point to be glossed over. On the other hand, Rowland's presentation of Kepler's laws is equally garbled, so at least he is consistent in his lack of concern for detail. The honest Reader deserves more careful writing.

Rowland's main goal is to question the authority of science as the sole source of natural knowledge. His principal argument is good old-fashioned philosophical skepticism: essentially the idea that observation can only tell us about the appearance of things, not their underlying nature. He fails to tell the reader that these ideas were very much alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the essays of Montaigne and the works of Descartes, Mersenne, and Gassendi. Skepticism applies not only to science, but to all knowledge, including the theories of historians and social scientists, and even the everyday experiences that we use all the time in our practical decisions about life. You can't use skepticism to undermine science without undermining everything else. The solution of Mersenne and Gassendi is to realize the knowledge about appearances is enough; theories about reality can safely remain tentative while science advances. All this was known in the seventeenth century, though Rowland would have the reader think otherwise.

The book also trots out the usual arguments about science being a mere social construction with no inherent objectivity, arguments which seem to be very popular these days. These arguments fall to the same flaw: to whatever extent they are true about science, how much more true are they about the theories of social scientists, including the social contructionists? A skeptic might just as well conclude that Galileo himself is a mere social construction!

The author has a particularly silly attempt to explain away the obvious progress of science. The goal of science is knowlege, he says, and since it does not actually generate knowledge (see skeptical argument above) then it has not really made progress. I hope the reader sees the circularity of this reasoning.

The usual understanding of the trial of Galileo is that it was a conflict between academic freedom and the doctrinal authority of the church. For all that Rowland tries to show otherwise, he has no reasons that stand up to thoughtful scrutiny.

This is a misleading book, slick in presentation but selective in what it chooses to tell the reader. Approach with caution.

Wade Rowland has written a journalist's account of the Trial of Galileo Galilei (not the examination by Bellarmine, the actual trial) and concluded that the great Tuscan got off lightly, which fact must be acknowledged if the "hegemony of science" is to be laid low.

This book can lead a reviewer off into examinations of Idealism,Skepticism, Positivism, and the like. I will leave that to others. But I feel obliged to note that Galileo's error, according to Rowland, was to presume that the structure of the physical world might be discovered through observation and experiment, rather than relying exclusively on authority, revelation, and established interpretations of the Ancients. I assume that Rowland would also prefer Lysenko to T.H. Morgan.....he certainly knew more science than the Barberinis.

The problem with the book is not Mr.Rowland's philosophy, nor is this book simply an apologetic. We can use better apologetics. It is that he has entered a well-trodden field, without having the requisite knowledge. May I recommend a book, now a half century old, entitled "The Crime of Galileo"? Written by Giorgio di Santillana, historian, Roman, Catholic, it surveys the problem so much better than this book that it makes me despair for the cumulative progess of scholarship. In addition, the contributions of Biagioli, Sharrat, Koyre and many others seem to have been in vain, insofar as Mr. Rowland is concerned. By all means, attack the method of the natural sciences. By all means, celebrate faith and revelations. But when you come to write on the trial of Galileo, please avail yourself of information that is in your local library.Galileo's trial was the result of so many factors : It does a disservice to Galileo and to Pope Urban present the matter as Mr. Rowland does. Read this book, but please use it as a jumping-off point for better works.

In Galileo's Mistake Wade Rowland challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the notorious 1633 trial of Galileo by the Inquisition: that Ignorance and Superstition persecuted Science and Reason and that Galileo was a lonely, courageous freethinker oppressed by a reactionary and anti-intellectual institution fearful of losing its power and influence. Rowland asks if that is an accurate picture of what actually happened.

As the dust jacket states, "The disagreement between Galileo and the Church seemed to center on Galileo's belief in the Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun - something we know to be true today. But was the debate really about the Copernican theory per se? If so, why was Copernicus never condemned?"

In 1533, a hundred years before Galileo's trial, Pope Clement VII listened to a presentation of the Copernicus' theory and ten years later, Copernicus' De Revolutionibus was published - with Church sanction.

Why did the Church not bring to trial the other leading astronomers of the day who shared Galileo's Copernican views, some of whom were Jesuits in the Vatican? If the debate was not about this revolutionary theory of planetary motion, then what was it about?

Professor Rowland argues that the debate was not about Galileo's science, but his philosophy. He further argues that modern advances in science (Quantum Physics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) indicate the inadequacies of the "naïve realism" behind Galileo's mechanistic philosophy. Neither a Catholic nor an apologist for the Church, Rowland has written a fascinating and balanced book on an historical event which continues to have vast implications for us today.

An interesting side note: In 1629 Galileo published a book titled Dialogue of the Ebb and Flow of the Sea as his decisive proof of the earth's motion. Just as the motion of water inside a vessel is affected by the motion of the vessel itself, so, according to Galileo, the motion of the Earth affects the motion of the oceans. He thought that during its compound motion (rotation plus revolution), the Earth is subject to decelerations and accelerations of its rotation motion, whose period is 12 hours. Due to its own inertia, the seas would rise when "left behind" by the underlying Earth, and vice versa. Although Galileo was a very great scientist, this theory is not correct. Nor, argues Rowland, was his mechanistic philosophy.

As one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of the scientific method, there can be no doubt of Galileo's influence on our modern world. If nothing else, the sheer number of books about him and the scientific revolution that have been published recently attest to this. (My favorite among these being Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel.) Mr. Roland has made a solid addition to this collection.

Mr. Roland's main theme is the correction of what he considers a misunderstanding of the real conflict between the Church and Galileo. Whereas most people seem to believe that it was Galileo's support of the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system that got him into trouble, Roland points out that this was secondary. His true conflict came because of his insistence that the scientific method was the only way to truth. Clearly this is something that the Church could not and cannot tolerate.

Along the way we are treated to a nice history of the early years of scientific method as well as an outline of Galileo's career and achievements. Unfortunately, we are also made to endure Rowland's emulation of Galileo's method of prose. In between chapters of excellent history and commentary we have a basically irritating dialogue between the author as narrator and what I assume are the fictional characters of Sr. Maria Celeste and Berkowitz, who hold the positions of the Church and science, respectively. Of course, in a reversal of Galileo, the nun gets the best of the argument every time.

And it's not that I don't like what Rowland has to say. I agree with his thesis. I may not feel it's been overlooked as much as he does but I certainly think his reminder of Galileo's weaknesses as both scientist and writer is timely and worthwhile, though I don't dismiss Galileo's achievements as Rowland is often wont to. It's just that I don't feel much is achieved by effectively silencing the other party instead of presenting a truly reasoned discussion. Certainly Galileo could be hamfisted in his prose and we are used to the kind of virtual ad hominem approach to argument that passes as debate in everything today, but I still don't like it. A very good book would have been much better without it.

Still, I'm not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. With the impact--and often, admittedly, negative impact--that science has had on our world it is perhaps no surprise that we look back to the founders and foundation of modern science for answers. Though he doesn't provide perfect insight or perfectly readable prose, Rowland has certainly made a fair addition to our look backward at this most important of periods. It is worth reading.

The book is entertainingly written, but what is chilling is that the author clearly advocates the position that theologians should be allowed to enforce their views of the world on everyone else. Rowland supports this position by making scientific statements that are, at best, misconceptions. What disturbs me is that he is not naive but disingenuous.

For example, Rowland makes much of the fact that Galileo was never under any serious threat of torture by the Inquisition - he argues that the threat was purely formal. He then constructs elaborate arguments based on Galileo's recantation of the Copernican hypothesis. However, he fails to emphasize that if Galileo had persisted in his position and refused to recant, he would have been convicted of heresy, and if he failed to abjure his "crimes", he would have been "handed over to the civil authorities to be burned, and in burning, purified." (p. 244) Are we supposed to believe that this eventual outcome of adherence to the Copernican hypothesis did not impact Galileo's conduct during the inquisitorial process? Apparently, being burned alive does not constitute torture if one is thus purified.

I list only a few examples of the author's poor science. He cites Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field as "a cornerstone of modern quantum physics". In fact, Maxwell's equations were a triumph of nineteenth century classical physics, and one of the most revolutionary aspects of Planck's quantum hypothesis was that it challenged a theory that was brilliantly successful in so many ways. Rowland's explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is terribly distorted - no one with a reasonable grasp of science would speak of quanta as "thickenings or concentrations in a universal electromagnetic force field". It would have been far more true, and probably equally interesting, to note that almost no physicist would claim to understand quantum mechanics in the common everyday sense of the word understand. Finally his description of the Uncertainty Principle regurgitates the standard vulgar misconceptions. The Uncertainty Principle places very precise limitations on the accuracy with which complemantary physical quantities can be known. The uncertainty magnitudes are so small that they are only detectable when one is making measurements at atomic dimensions. The uncertainty in the position of a strand of DNA, for example, is negligible even when compared to the tiny size of DNA. It is a real stretch to go from a tiny fundamental "fuzziness" in the precision of our knowlege to the statement that science cannot know reality.

The book attacks the position that science has a monopoly on truth. I have no problem with this. However, it appears that the author supports the position that theologians can claim such a monopoly, and have the right to use force to back up this claim. Even if theologians of all faiths could be made to agree on a single set of truths, the history of the world is replete with examples of the tragedies that ensue when this position is taken to its logical conclusion. Readers interested in a more honest exposition of the limits of scientific understanding could skim Max Born's classic "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance" - one can skip the mathematics and focus on the philosophy.

So I recommended this book to the friends based on a review I had read of it. Now that I've actually read the book, I have to say that it was not very thought-provoking, only annoying.

As a historical account of Galileo's trial before the Inquisition, as well as of his life and work, it was interesting. But Rowland puts entirely too much of his own spin on the events, and he attacks science by setting up a straw man in the character Berkowitz, thereby devaluing whatever legitimate points he might have had.

Wade Rowland does a pretty good job at putting your mind into the times of Galileo. You're bombarded by prominent philosophical, religious, and scientific notions of the time in order to make you more easily understand how and why things turned out the way they did. Chapter by chapter, he switches between explaining the past and discussing it with two friends of his: an otherwise intelligent but incapable-of-making-a-decent-argument Berkowitz and a Sister Celeste. (I don't know if these characters and the subsequent journey around Europe were fiction, at times I just thought it odd he might have recorded every conversation and moreover carried on like everybody came out of Dawson's Creek or Frasier.)

Berkowitz was hardly a defender of science in this novel, as at times it would seem that this book is just an attack on science because it hasn't made society happier as a whole. "More comfortable," perhaps, but not any more or less happier since the times of Galileo. I can't say that was ever the claim of science. I can't agree that science has disproved the existence of God or that science meant to ween religion out of the picture, as Rowland suggests. Merely, as he and the Sister try to prove to support religion as a means of uncovering and understanding truth, I would say that science is just another method of doing just that.

The entire book is written in a manner that I'm sure would bore most people. His sentence structure, choice of words, so on and so forth caused me to put this down after two or three chapters. I kept picking it back up because it is admittedly very convincing if you don't pay attention to the underlying errors, or rather, bias convictions in Rowland's point of view. The dragging on of the story always made me feel like there was something I'd miss if I didn't read the next chapter, but at the end, I felt like the book had an extra 100 or so pages it didn't need, and I felt thoroughly disappointed.

The first half of the book seems sort of innocent in nature. The second half, not so much. Particularly the ending where he suggests the time for the rule of science is at an end of sorts, long due for being overthrown.

I don't know. The general story that you expect to read is there: details about Galileo that you don't learn in third grade, his "mistake" in saying "science is the only way to figure things out" really only being a mistake in terms of disagreeing with (a wrong-minded) society, some philosophy and background information. Certain details were also good to know.

Everything else, though, just made the book seem like an argument in favor of religion to be re-considered the main source of obtaining information sort of disguised by this back-story of Galileo.

Mix that in with the good vocabulary and the promise of research, someone who didn't read the reviews here on Amazon might go on thinking, "You know what, Rowland is right, I believe in God, science serves no purpose outside of material things, yada yada yada." You might be left thinking, "I see no flaws in his argument." The truth is: the argument is one-sided, and much like a prosecution making a case against an absent defense, unless you add your own insight, you're left favoring the prosecution.

Science is not cold and bitter. What if science merely proved that the world was cold and bitter? Like Rowland says, science is merely a map to consciousness, not consciousness itself. Whatever claims come of science cannot be blamed upon it, for the very foundation of it is to make those claims. In this, I think Rowland attributes spiritual awakening with a much happier life filled with the ability to smell the roses and take in colors of the rainbow while science disregards these things because they don't come packaged in formulas.

Yada yada yada, I wouldn't suggest this book to most people because I don't think it would appeal to them on any real level of importance. I think it's bias from the get-go, and while it does hold some pretty good ideas, that bias-ness really just ruins it. I would only open this book again to get a quote from it, from which there are many fine ones. To read it again for pure pleasure? No.

Nevertheless, the book includes what you would expect. It's got the authors point of view, which again, you could expect. The main weakness is that it's dragged on and gets pretty boring. For this reason, I'd give this book 3 stars.

I just finished reading Galileo's Mistake this week - and thoroughly enjoyed it - and thought I'd post a review. Before doing so, I read the other amazon reviews, and I must say I really disagree with a recently posted review by David Wilkins.

If Rowland did not place Ptolemy's equant correctly (I have no idea; it certainly is not important to his argument), David Wilkins is completely off base as to the author's overall philosophical position. It is not "good old fashioned skepticism", but something a lot more sophisticated. It goes by a number of names, antirealism and idealism being the most common. It does not deny the existence of real entities in the universe, but it does insist that 'ultimate' reality is beyond the grasp of human reason. Rowland, it seems to
be, presents this position about as clearly and cogently as is possible in a work aimed at lay readers.

I would agree with Rowland that the anti-realist position represents the majority opinion among thoughtful mathematicians and physicists these days (not to mention philosophers of science like Rowland), thanks to Heisenberg and Gödel among the scientists, and Hume and Kant on the philosophical side.

I am no historian - my area is technology and IT - but as far as I can see Rowland also argues very cogently that this was essentially the Church's epistemilogical stance in its conflict with Galielo. Galileo, for his part, was clearly advocating the position of naive realism or empiricism, which was thoroughly discredited both philosophically and scientifically by the early twentieth century.

It seems to me that in the end Rowland is making a rather obvious point that current scientific ideology is determined to overlook -- that is that there are limits to scientific knowledge, and that metaphysical (or religious) knowledge can be helpful (crucial, in fact) in filling out a more complete
picture of the world we live in.

How we think about the world determines how we live in it, and to the extent that Rowland's powerful book helps shatter the myth of scientific infallibility and omniscience, it does a great service. I highly recommend it to anyone with an open mind.