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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Rowland's mistakes, March 7, 2005
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.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Is Galileo the center of the universe?, February 23, 2004
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.
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17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Very Misleading Arguments, September 15, 2003
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.
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