Thony Christie Interview - The Galileo Affair Part 1
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- Опубліковано 11 жов 2024
- My guest today is the historian of science, Thony Christie. Thony is an independent scholar based in Germany who also the author of the superb Renaissance Mathematicus (thonyc.wordpre...) blog. His knowledge of the history of Early Modern science is vast and so he is the perfect person to give us a detailed overview of what happened and, more importantly, what did not happen in the dispute between Galileo and the Catholic Church. Thony and I spoke for almost two and a half hours on this subject, so I’ve edited our conversation into three parts of about 50 minutes each.
In this, the first part, we discuss the common myths that seem to be accepted by many people, and certainly by many atheists, about what happened in the Galileo Affair. Thony gives a detailed background to Galileo’s early career and the social and scientific context in which he worked.
Thony's detailed, 52 part series of articles on the beginnings of modern astronomy is also a great resource: “The Emergence of Modern Astronomy - A Complex Mosaic” thonyc.wordpre....
And Thony has provided an extensive recommended reading list, which can be found here:
historyforathe...
Finally, here is the translation of Cardinal Bellarmino's "Letter to Foscarini" which we discuss in our conversation and which is crucial for an understanding of the critical issues of the Church's approach to science and to the interpretation of the Bible:
www.historyguid...
So, basically, if Galileo were alive today and this debate was still ongoing, Galileo would've written blog posts calling his opponents and critics "ass cranks," "hacks," and "incompetent."
That still doesnt make it okay to put him under house arrest until his departure. And the Catholic church basically ran around and called people sub human (pagan) or heathen.
@@thebelmont1995No one disputes that aspect….
@@j.mtherandomguy8701 Well the church certainly did.
Excellent, love the mention that the Ptolemeic system was essentially Fourier analysis.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they had relevant math back in the day...
@@nebufabu I am not sure what you mean? In this case they had the maths, but not yet the good application.
@@GeladaMaths I mean the actual transform and proof, to just show that both are different representations of the same trajectories.
@@nebufabu Yes I see! The interesting thing that was really missing was the notion of function, or even algebraic geometry to think about equations. So these trajectories were considered as more purely geometric objects, in this case according to Thony as physical ones as it was considered to be reality not a model.
Remember this bloke from my childhood singing the theme song of the TV program The Protectors starring Robert Vaughn
looking forward to this series
What books would you recommend on this subject?
I've put a link to a list for further reading in the video's description.
@@historyforatheists9363 Hey, can you do a video different cosmology on medieval times ? Can you suggest sources or books where I can read about those suggest? I am little about those terms.
30:10 which are the books (at least one) on the mathematical philosophy of Tolomeus?
There are two. Shorter and easier to read but none the less excellent is Liba Chaia Taub, Ptolemy's Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy's Astronomy, Open Court; Chicago, 1993. Longer and more academic in style Jacqueline Feke, Ptolemy's Philosophy: Mathematics as a Way of Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2018
Thank you very much, I'll take a look to both
First lol but omg this looks very interesting. I'm looking forward to watching it.
Yeah I'm interested to watch it too. The popular myth that won't go away
@@billyoga807 Thony calls Galileo "the bringer of pain".
um . . .uh . . .um . . . ahh . . . uh . . .um . . . stopped at 9:30
Dear, atheist historian,
Why did you delete my comment?
Are you trying to ignore history?
If so, that is very interesting...
Yours truly,
Thingumbob Esq.
I've deleted no comments by you. Your other (strange) comment about Newton appears in my email alerts about comments here, but I have no idea why it hasn't also appeared here. Blame UA-cam, not me.
@@historyforatheists9363 I sincerely apologize. And I am not insinuating that atheists in any way believe in the tenets of magicians like Isaac Newton.
@@historyforatheists9363 BTW as to my strange reference to Newton, this Wikipedia entry is pretty straightforward on the issue of Newton’s magical beliefs en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies. As far as Jon Dee magical imperialism that is another story…
@@robertarnold3394 I think you'll find Thony is well aware of Newton's magical beliefs and knows vastly more about them than you do. I have no idea what point you're trying to make here.
@@historyforatheists9363 I am surprised at your condescending assumptions. How would you know what I know about anything?
At 45:20, Thony Christie rightly states that : "Basically, (Johannes Kepler) kept backtracking. He actually came up with a model which wasn't an ellipse - but which is much more accurate than anything produced before - but it didn't do justice to the accuracy of Tycho's observations" (yet, it was the most accurate diagram he ever made of Mars' motions!). Indeed, Kepler came up with this beautiful diagram that traces the trajectory of Mars over a 16-year period (1580-1596): www.researchgate.net/figure/Keplers-sketch-of-the-orbit-of-Mars-for-the-years-1580-1596-according-to-the-Ptolemaic_fig1_330008783
As it is, according to my TYCHOS model (described at my tychos[dot]info website), Mars behaves exactly as predicted by Kepler in his above diagram (which he unfortunately / eventually discarded). Here's how my TYCHOSIUM 3D simulator traces the motions of Mars in that 16-year period (1580-1596): septclues.com/TYCHOS%20SLIDESHOW%20NEW/SLIDE_22.jpg (NOTE: for some reason, UA-cam automatically deletes the direct link/URL to my Tychosium 3D simulator. However, you may easily find it by googling "Tychosium 3D simulator").
At 45:00, Thony makes an amusing (yet quite appropriate) comment upon Kepler's ellipses: "They're not actually ellipses, they're sort of... f@cked ellipses." In fact, at the end of his relentless 6-year-long efforts (which he called his "War on Mars") trying to make Tycho's observations fit into his own pet heliocentric theory (and thus, treacherously flipping his master's model on its head!), Kepler eventually resorted to 'fudge it' - so to speak. This was revealed only in 1988 by the English translator of "Astronomia Nova", W.H. Donahue: articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1988JHA....19..217D/0000217.000.html
As it is, Kepler's tortuous "mathemagics" eventually spawned a theoretical monster which, in order to "work", necessitated the introduction of two wholly arbitrary, 'ad hoc' parameters (i.e. elliptical orbits + variable orbital speeds) formerly unheard of in astronomy. Before Kepler, astronomers had generally agreed upon the natural concepts of uniformly circular motions and constant speeds - even though (for reasons expounded and illustrated in my Tychos model) a fully satisfactory agreement with observations had always eluded them. It is worth mentioning that Kepler based his famed laws of planetary motions entirely on his work on Mars - and never attempted to verify whether they also applied to the other bodies of our solar system.
To be sure - and contrary to popular belief - Kepler's 'solution' did NOT resolve the pesky issue of Mars, as it entailed macroscopic aberrations of spatial perspective - as illustrated in point 8 of this appendix I wrote back in 2019: "WHY MARS?": septclues.com/TYCHOS%20Appendix%20folder/App34_WHY%20MARS.pdf