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100-420: Cimento may refer to: Accademia del Cimento , a 17th-century learned society Nuovo Cimento , a series of scientific journals published starting in the 19th century Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Cimento . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change

200-475: A polymath . He was born in the city of Pisa , then part of the Duchy of Florence . Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy , modern-era classical physics, the scientific method , and modern science . Galileo studied speed and velocity , gravity and free fall , the principle of relativity , inertia , projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing

300-604: A book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo and had opposed the admonition of Galileo in 1616. Galileo's resulting book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission. Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in

400-594: A brief treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius ( Starry Messenger ). On 30 November 1609, Galileo aimed his telescope at the Moon . While not being the first person to observe the Moon through a telescope (English mathematician Thomas Harriot had done so four months before but only saw a "strange spottednesse"), Galileo was the first to deduce the cause of the uneven waning as light occlusion from lunar mountains and craters . In his study, he also made topographical charts, estimating

500-605: A debate with Galileo, sending him an essay disputing the Copernican system. Galileo later stated that he believed this essay to have been instrumental in the action against Copernicanism that followed. Ingoli may have been commissioned by the Inquisition to write an expert opinion on the controversy, with the essay providing the basis for the Inquisition's actions. The essay focused on eighteen physical and mathematical arguments against heliocentrism. It borrowed primarily from Tycho Brahe's arguments, notably that heliocentrism would require

600-409: A friend of Galileo, included a realistic depiction of the Moon in one of his paintings; he probably used his own telescope to make the observation. On 7 January 1610, Galileo observed with his telescope what he described at the time as "three fixed stars, totally invisible by their smallness", all close to Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it. Observations on subsequent nights showed that

700-487: A genuinely pious Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock with Marina Gamba . They had two daughters, Virginia (born 1600) and Livia (born 1601), and a son, Vincenzo (born 1606). Due to their illegitimate birth, Galileo considered the girls unmarriageable, if not posing problems of prohibitively expensive support or dowries, which would have been similar to Galileo's previous extensive financial problems with two of his sisters. Their only worthy alternative

800-537: A lutenist and composer who added to Galileo's financial burdens for the rest of his life. Michelangelo was unable to contribute his fair share of their father's promised dowries to their brothers-in-law, who later attempted to seek legal remedies for payments due. Michelangelo also occasionally had to borrow funds from Galileo to support his musical endeavours and excursions. These financial burdens may have contributed to Galileo's early desire to develop inventions that would bring him additional income. When Galileo Galilei

900-401: A method for measuring the apparent size of a star without a telescope. As described in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , his method was to hang a thin rope in his line of sight to the star and measure the maximum distance from which it would wholly obscure the star. From his measurements of this distance and of the width of the rope, he could calculate the angle subtended by

1000-553: A pamphlet, An Astronomical Disputation on the Three Comets of the Year 1618 , which discussed the nature of a comet that had appeared late in November of the previous year. Grassi concluded that the comet was a fiery body that had moved along a segment of a great circle at a constant distance from the earth, and since it moved in the sky more slowly than the Moon, it must be farther away than

1100-563: A patron of the "new science" on the publication of the document. Other studies show the influence the trial of Galileo had on Prince Leopoldo. He wrote Magalotti and informed him that the manuscript be sent to Cardinal Ranucci and that "nothing will be printed against his wishes." Leopoldo even sent parts of the manual to the Pope for approval. Boschiero argues that leaving out all astronomical experiments and not advancing theories of why things happened in nature, just recording what happened when nature

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1200-627: A powerful argument against both the Ptolemaic system and the geoheliocentric system of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over claimed priority in the discovery of sunspots, and in their interpretation, led Galileo to a long and bitter feud with the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner . In the middle was Mark Welser , to whom Scheiner had announced his discovery, and who asked Galileo for his opinion. Both of them were unaware of Johannes Fabricius ' earlier observation and publication of sunspots. Galileo observed

1300-505: A practical use for his discovery. Determining the east–west position of ships at sea required their clocks to be synchronized with clocks at the prime meridian . Solving this longitude problem had great importance to safe navigation and large prizes were established by Spain and later Holland for its solution. Since eclipses of the moons he discovered were relatively frequent and their times could be predicted with great accuracy, they could be used to set shipboard clocks and Galileo applied for

1400-408: A starting point in the investigation of modern-day experimental methods such as parallel trials. Francesco Redi continuously disagreed with Athanasius Kircher in the proper way to conduct experiments. In one instance Kircher let meat out in the open. After a few days maggots appeared and Kircher said that the maggots were spontaneously generated. Redi conducted parallel trials where he took meat from

1500-514: A thing. Compounding this problem, other astronomers had difficulty confirming Galileo's observations. When he demonstrated the telescope in Bologna, the attendees struggled to see the moons. One of them, Martin Horky, noted that some fixed stars, such as Spica Virginis , appeared double through the telescope. He took this as evidence that the instrument was deceptive when viewing the heavens, casting doubt on

1600-772: Is observed was driven by Leopoldo's concern with offending the church. The first part of the Saggi discussed the highly accurate instruments the Cimento used to perform their experiments. Measurement of physical phenomenon was a new area and this section of the manual laid out what and how physical properties were to be measured for a variety of disciplines, to include heat ( thermometer ), humidity ( hygrometer ), time ( pendulum ) etc. The first set of experiments relates to determining air pressure with mercury barometers. The second set reviewed work done by Robert Boyle on variant air pressure and vacuums. The third set discussed artificial cooling and

1700-591: The Dialogue , his final interrogation, in July 1633, concluded with his being threatened with torture if he did not tell the truth, but he maintained his denial despite the threat. The sentence of the Inquisition was delivered on 22 June. It was in three essential parts: According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered

1800-533: The Duchy of Florence ) on 15 February 1564, the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei , a leading lutenist , composer, and music theorist , and Giulia Ammannati , the daughter of a prominent merchant, who had married two years earlier in 1562, when he was 42, and she was 24. Galileo became an accomplished lutenist himself and would have learned early from his father a skepticism for established authority. Three of Galileo's five siblings survived infancy. The youngest, Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo), also became

1900-613: The Florentine Academy , he presented two lectures, On the Shape, Location, and Size of Dante's Inferno , in an attempt to propose a rigorous cosmological model of Dante's hell . Being inspired by the artistic tradition of the city and the works of the Renaissance artists , Galileo acquired an aesthetic mentality . While a young teacher at the Accademia, he began a lifelong friendship with

2000-581: The Milky Way , previously believed to be nebulous , and found it to be a multitude of stars packed so densely that they appeared from Earth to be clouds. He located many other stars too distant to be visible to the naked eye. He observed the double star Mizar in Ursa Major in 1617. In the Starry Messenger , Galileo reported that stars appeared as mere blazes of light, essentially unaltered in appearance by

2100-557: The Roman Inquisition by Father Niccolò Lorini , who claimed that Galileo and his followers were attempting to reinterpret the Bible, which was seen as a violation of the Council of Trent and looked dangerously like Protestantism . Lorini specifically cited Galileo's letter to Castelli. Galileo went to Rome to defend himself and his ideas. At the start of 1616, Francesco Ingoli initiated

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2200-902: The Royal Society of London (founded 1660), and the Academie Royale des Sciences (founded 1666), the Accademia del Cimento never established rules to make it a formal body. There were no formal rules for joining the society, there was no established meeting calendar and the society never set up an organizational structure. Instead the society remained a close knit group of virtuosi under the direction of their patrons, Prince Leopold of Tuscany and Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany , both sons of Cosimo II de’ Medici. The society only published one manuscript during its existence, Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell'Academia del Cimento sotto la protezione del Serenissimo Principe Leopoldo di Toscana e descritte dal segretario di essa Accademia and all

2300-428: The Saggi were completed within the first two years of the Cimento and the rest of the time the book went through revisions. These revisions were caused by Magalotti’s perfectionism, his growing uninterestedness with the experiments themselves, further compounded by the fact the book was being written by a committee. Recent studies show the adverse impact of the patronage culture and Prince Leopold's desire to be known as

2400-554: The Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. In Ptolemy's geocentric model , it was impossible for any of the planets' orbits to intersect the spherical shell carrying the Sun. Traditionally, the orbit of Venus was placed entirely on the near side of the Sun, where it could exhibit only crescent and new phases. It

2500-519: The Tychonic , Capellan and Extended Capellan models, each either with or without a daily rotating Earth. These all explained the phases of Venus without the 'refutation' of full heliocentrism's prediction of stellar parallax. Galileo's discovery of the phases of Venus was thus his most empirically practically influential contribution to the two-stage transition from full geocentrism to full heliocentrism via geo-heliocentrism. In 1610, Galileo also observed

2600-525: The thermometer , and, in 1586, published a small book on the design of a hydrostatic balance he had invented (which first brought him to the attention of the scholarly world). Galileo also studied disegno , a term encompassing fine art, and, in 1588, obtained the position of instructor in the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, teaching perspective and chiaroscuro . In the same year, upon invitation by

2700-495: The "new" science, which meant emphasis on experiments and not causes. Giorgio Strano argues that the members of the Cimento, especially Galileo’s students, continued to use a deductive approach using ancient texts to drive their selection of experiments and how the experiments were conducted. In a debate about Galileo’s discovery of the Rings of Saturn these members developed an experiment which would demonstrate that Galileo’s discovery

2800-536: The Aristotelian belief in the immutability of the heavens. Perhaps based only on descriptions of the first practical telescope which Hans Lippershey tried to patent in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo, in the following year, made a telescope with about 3x magnification. He later made improved versions with up to about 30x magnification. With a Galilean telescope , the observer could see magnified, upright images on

2900-583: The Church, the majority of educated people subscribed to the Aristotelian geocentric view that the Earth is the centre of the Universe and the orbit of all heavenly bodies, or Tycho Brahe's new system blending geocentrism with heliocentrism. Opposition to heliocentrism and Galileo's writings on it combined religious and scientific objections. Religious opposition to heliocentrism arose from biblical passages implying

3000-411: The Cimento is the Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell'Academia del Cimento sotto la protezione del Serenissimo Principe Leopoldo di Toscan e descrittedal segretario di essa Accademia usually referred to as the Saggi . This document has been called the laboratory manual of the eighteenth century. The manual was published anonymously and took over 6 years to write. Most of the experiments discussed in

3100-413: The Cimento to project their power and prestige throughout Europe. The members of the society knew this and envisioned the publication of the Saggi would "return the applause that is merited by the talent and dilligence of thies gentleman [the accadmeician], and first of all by the manganimity of Your Highness.[sic?]" This prestige could only come about if the society was seen as being at the forefront of

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3200-665: The Earth—it was what is commonly known as a terrestrial telescope or a spyglass. He could also use it to observe the sky; for a time he was one of those who could construct telescopes good enough for that purpose. On 25 August 1609, he demonstrated one of his early telescopes, with a magnification of about 8x or 9x, to Venetian lawmakers. His telescopes were also a profitable sideline for Galileo, who sold them to merchants who found them useful both at sea and as items of trade. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in

3300-698: The Florentine painter Cigoli . In 1589, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics in Pisa. In 1591, his father died, and he was entrusted with the care of his younger brother Michelagnolo . In 1592, he moved to the University of Padua where he taught geometry, mechanics , and astronomy until 1610. During this period, Galileo made significant discoveries in both pure fundamental science (for example, kinematics of motion and astronomy) as well as practical applied science (for example, strength of materials and pioneering

3400-475: The Moon. Grassi's arguments and conclusions were criticised in a subsequent article, Discourse on Comets , published under the name of one of Galileo's disciples, a Florentine lawyer named Mario Guiducci , although it had been largely written by Galileo himself. Galileo and Guiducci offered no definitive theory of their own on the nature of comets, although they did present some tentative conjectures that are now known to be mistaken. (The correct approach to

3500-496: The Pope and the Jesuits , who had both strongly supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. During this time, he wrote Two New Sciences (1638), primarily concerning kinematics and the strength of materials . Galileo was born in Pisa (then part of

3600-601: The Sun or even the orbit of the Earth. It would not be until much later that astronomers realized the apparent magnitudes of stars were caused by an optical phenomenon called the airy disk , and were functions of their brightness rather than true physical size (see Magnitude#History ). Galileo defended heliocentrism based on his astronomical observations of 1609 . In December 1613, the Grand Duchess Christina of Florence confronted one of Galileo's friends and followers, Benedetto Castelli , with biblical objections to

3700-505: The Two Chief World Systems the Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea . The reference to tides was removed from the title by order of the Inquisition. For Galileo, the tides were caused by the sloshing back and forth of water in the seas as a point on the Earth's surface sped up and slowed down because of the Earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the Sun. He circulated his first account of

3800-615: The book and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher ( Simplicius in Latin, "Simplicio" in Italian),

3900-410: The chandelier took the same amount of time to swing back and forth, no matter how far it was swinging. When he returned home, he set up two pendulums of equal length and swung one with a large sweep and the other with a small sweep and found that they kept time together. It was not until the work of Christiaan Huygens , almost one hundred years later, that the tautochrone nature of a swinging pendulum

4000-406: The condemned opinions, and initially he denied even defending them. However, he was eventually persuaded to admit that, contrary to his true intention, a reader of his Dialogue could well have obtained the impression that it was intended to be a defence of Copernicanism. In view of Galileo's rather implausible denial that he had ever held Copernican ideas after 1616 or ever intended to defend them in

4100-481: The cooperative effort that did not allow for individual recognition. The Cimento did not disband as much as it just fizzled out. The Accademia del Cimento existed during the period of European history when, arguably, the foundations of modern science were established; a period sometimes referred to as the Scientific Revolution . Using ancient authority and divine revelation as the ultimate source of knowledge

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4200-479: The creation of medical experimentation protocols. From the fifteenth century through the age of enlightenment the intellectuals of Europe formed a network of knowledge exchange through the writing and sharing of letters and pamphlets known as the Republic of Letters . The scientific societies in the 17th century and their members were important members of this network. One of the most famous contributors to this Republic

4300-498: The eleventh investigated the speed of sound. The twelfth set demonstrated falling body laws Galileo discussed but did not perform experiments to prove. The Saggi is replete with pictures of laboratory instruments and how-to instructions on the use of the instruments. A modern translation of the manual is provided in Middelton’s book, The Experimenters: A Study of the Accademia del Cimento The Cimento never became an institution. It

4400-481: The existence of the moons. Christopher Clavius 's observatory in Rome confirmed the observations and, although unsure how to interpret them, gave Galileo a hero's welcome when he visited the next year. Galileo continued to observe the satellites over the next eighteen months, and by mid-1611, he had obtained remarkably accurate estimates for their periods—a feat which Johannes Kepler had believed impossible. Galileo saw

4500-607: The experiments. Recent studies have cast doubt about society member's acceptance of this new method for acquiring knowledge and determining truth. The intellectual elite of the early modern period functioned within a prestige-conscious society. At the top of the intellectual hierarchy were the philosophers; the people who used their ability to think and reason to determine how the world works. The prestigious chairs at universities were allocated to philosophy and theology , people who thought not mathematicians. Francis Bacon ’s utopia world, described in his book New Atlantis described

4600-461: The fixed nature of the Earth. Scientific opposition came from Brahe, who argued that if heliocentrism were true, an annual stellar parallax should be observed, though none was at the time. Aristarchus and Copernicus had correctly postulated that parallax was negligible because the stars were so distant. However, Brahe countered that since stars appear to have measurable angular size , if the stars were that distant, they would have to be far larger than

4700-480: The fourth on 13 January. Galileo named the group of four the Medicean stars , in honour of his future patron, Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany , and Cosimo's three brothers. Later astronomers, however, renamed them Galilean satellites in honour of their discoverer. These satellites were independently discovered by Simon Marius on 8 January 1610 and are now called Io , Europa , Ganymede , and Callisto ,

4800-460: The fourth set discussed natural cooling. The fifth set looked at the effect of heat and cold on various objects. The sixth set investigated the compressibility of water while the seventh series put a nail in Aristotle’s idea of the natural state of fire by proving that smoke does not rise in a vacuum. The eighth set discussed magnetism and the ninth discussed amber. The tenth set looked at color while

4900-453: The heights of the mountains. The Moon was not what was long thought to have been a translucent and perfect sphere, as Aristotle claimed, and hardly the first "planet", an "eternal pearl to magnificently ascend into the heavenly empyrian", as put forth by Dante . Galileo is sometimes credited with the discovery of the lunar libration in latitude in 1632, although Thomas Harriot or William Gilbert may have done so before. The painter Cigoli,

5000-530: The legal heir of Galileo and married Sestilia Bocchineri. Although Galileo seriously considered the priesthood as a young man, at his father's urging he instead enrolled in 1580 at the University of Pisa for a medical degree. He was influenced by the lectures of Girolamo Borro and Francesco Buonamici of Florence. In 1581, when he was studying medicine, he noticed a swinging chandelier , which air currents shifted about to swing in larger and smaller arcs. To him, it seemed, by comparison with his heartbeat, that

5100-432: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cimento&oldid=1218612296 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Accademia del Cimento The Cimento published a manual of experimentation which began

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5200-495: The motion of the Earth. Prompted by this incident, Galileo wrote a letter to Castelli in which he argued that heliocentrism was actually not contrary to biblical texts and that the Bible was an authority on faith and morals, not science. This letter was not published but circulated widely. Two years later, Galileo wrote a letter to Christina that expanded his arguments previously made in eight pages to forty pages. By 1615, Galileo's writings on heliocentrism had been submitted to

5300-500: The myth that the Cimento was exclusively concerned with experimentation, when reality paints a different picture. It was only when the Cimento decided to publish their work to their European colleagues, that they decided to describe an atheoretical experimental practice. Experimental procedures pioneered by one of the Cimento’s members crossed the boundaries between physician-mathematical and medico-anatomical disciplines and can be used as

5400-451: The name "Simplicio" in Italian also has the connotation of "simpleton". This portrayal of Simplicio made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book. However, the Pope did not take

5500-432: The names given by Marius in his Mundus Iovialis published in 1614. Galileo's observations of the satellites of Jupiter caused controversy in astronomy: a planet with smaller planets orbiting it did not conform to the principles of Aristotelian cosmology , which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth, and many astronomers and philosophers initially refused to believe that Galileo could have discovered such

5600-504: The natural philosophers quest as determining “...the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible. described a society ruled by nine levels of knowledge creators, and at the very top of the organization were the Interpreters of Nature, who raised the “discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms.” Italian society of

5700-525: The opinion that the sun stands still at the centre of the world and the Earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing." The decree of the Congregation of the Index banned Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and other heliocentric works until correction. For the next decade, Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing

5800-529: The painting, Stillman Drake wrote "there is no doubt now that the famous words were already attributed to Galileo before his death". However, an intensive investigation by astrophysicist Mario Livio has revealed that said painting is most probably a copy of an 1837 painting by the Flemish painter Roman-Eugene Van Maldeghem. After a period with the friendly Ascanio Piccolomini (the Archbishop of Siena ), Galileo

5900-473: The planet Saturn , and at first mistook its rings for planets, thinking it was a three-bodied system. When he observed the planet later, Saturn's rings were directly oriented to Earth, causing him to think that two of the bodies had disappeared. The rings reappeared when he observed the planet in 1616, further confusing him. Galileo observed the planet Neptune in 1612. It appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars. He did not realise that it

6000-421: The positions of these "stars" relative to Jupiter were changing in a way that would have been inexplicable if they had really been fixed stars . On 10 January, Galileo noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days, he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter: he had discovered three of Jupiter's four largest moons . He discovered

6100-459: The previous decade, Barberini, the future Urban VIII, had come down on the side of Galileo and the Lincean Academy . Galileo's dispute with Grassi permanently alienated many Jesuits, and Galileo and his friends were convinced that they were responsible for bringing about his later condemnation, although supporting evidence for this is not conclusive. At the time of Galileo's conflict with

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6200-472: The prizes. Observing the moons from a ship proved too difficult, but the method was used for land surveys, including the remapping of France. From September 1610, Galileo observed that Venus exhibits a full set of phases similar to that of the Moon . The heliocentric model of the Solar System developed by Nicolaus Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around

6300-415: The process of standardizing processes, instruments and measurements throughout Europe. Their motto Provando e riprovando means “proving and disproving”, i.e. providing proofs of true facts and confuting false ones, while a literal translation may read "trying and trying again". Unlike many of the other scientific societies formed in the seventeenth century, such as the Accademia dei Lincei (founded 1603),

6400-472: The properties of the pendulum and " hydrostatic balances". He was one of the earliest Renaissance developers of the thermoscope and the inventor of various military compasses . With an improved telescope he built, he observed the stars of the Milky Way , the phases of Venus , the four largest satellites of Jupiter , Saturn's rings , lunar craters and sunspots . He also built an early microscope . Galileo's championing of Copernican heliocentrism

6500-492: The pseudonym Lothario Sarsio Sigensano, purporting to be one of his own pupils. The Assayer was Galileo's devastating reply to the Astronomical Balance . It has been widely recognized as a masterpiece of polemical literature, in which "Sarsi's" arguments are subjected to withering scorn. It was greeted with wide acclaim and particularly pleased the new pope, Urban VIII , to whom it had been dedicated. In Rome, in

6600-483: The rebellious phrase " And yet it moves ". There was a claim that a 1640s painting by the Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo or an artist of his school, in which the words were hidden until restoration work in 1911, depicts an imprisoned Galileo apparently gazing at the words "E pur si muove" written on the wall of his dungeon. The earliest known written account of the legend dates to a century after his death. Based on

6700-415: The result of several secondary causes including the shape of the sea, its depth, and other factors. Albert Einstein later expressed the opinion that Galileo developed his "fascinating arguments" and accepted them uncritically out of a desire for physical proof of the motion of the Earth. Galileo also dismissed the idea, known from antiquity and by his contemporary Johannes Kepler, that the Moon caused

6800-405: The same animal and left some exposed to the air, some exposed to air, but covered so flies could not land on it and some under a glass cover. Only that meat which was exposed to flies generated maggots. In another experiment concerning the efficacy of SnakeStones Kircher used letters from other Jesuits in the field which said snakestones could counteract poison. Kircher poisoned a dog, placed

6900-443: The sense of Holy Scripture". The Inquisition found that the idea of the Earth's movement "receives the same judgement in philosophy and ... in regard to theological truth, it is at least erroneous in faith". Pope Paul V instructed Cardinal Bellarmine to deliver this finding to Galileo, and to order him to abandon heliocentrism. On 26 February, Galileo was called to Bellarmine's residence and ordered "to abandon completely ...

7000-426: The seventeenth century was governed through a culture of patronage. In the book Galileo, Courtier , Mario Biagioli argues that many of Galileo's actions, the most famous Italian scientist of the time, were dictated by the patronage system. This patronage system also influenced the actions and output of the Cimento. The Medici family had long been a supporter of arts and culture within Florentine society and wanted to use

7100-496: The smaller sizes were not small enough to answer Tycho's argument. Cardinal Bellarmine had written in 1615 that the Copernican system could not be defended without "a true physical demonstration that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun". Galileo considered his theory of the tides to provide such evidence. This theory was so important to him that he originally intended to call his Dialogue Concerning

7200-459: The snakestone on the wound and the dog recovered. Therefore, according to Kircher, Snakestones worked. Redi, on the other hand conducted many trials using different animals, different poisons and found that the Snakestone did not work all the time. The historian Meli believes that further investigation into the spread of this type of experimentation may show the Cimento and its members as pioneers in

7300-528: The society can only be pieced together through the letters and diaries of the people associated with the operation. The National Library of Florence recently digitized all of these documents and they are available on-line. [1] Since the workings of the Academy were not formalized there can be no clear cut answer to the exact date of the founding of the Cimento suggests that the Cimento was the formal organization of meetings held by Prince Leopold in his study, and that

7400-410: The society did not exist, except when Leopold was present. Middleton agrees that the overall emphasis was on what Leopold and Ferdinand wanted to study but makes the case that the society performed experiments according to each individuals curiosity. Nevertheless they both agree with The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence which gives the starting date of 1657. The main publication of

7500-465: The society they did not come to fruition. However, Lorenzo Magalotti made a special trip to London to present the Royal Society with a copy of the Saggi . It is argued that the reason no correspondence was established was that Robert Boyle was sensitive to having his ideas stolen and saw the Cimento as a direct competitor for priority and stature. A chance to have two prestigious societies collaborate

7600-436: The star at his viewing point. In his Dialogue , he reported that he had found the apparent diameter of a star of first magnitude to be no more than 5 arcseconds , and that of one of sixth magnitude to be about / 6 arcseconds. Like most astronomers of his day, Galileo did not recognise that the apparent sizes of stars that he measured were spurious, caused by diffraction and atmospheric distortion, and did not represent

7700-422: The stars as they appeared to be much larger than the Sun. The essay also included four theological arguments, but Ingoli suggested Galileo focus on the physical and mathematical arguments, and he did not mention Galileo's biblical ideas. In February 1616, an Inquisitorial commission declared heliocentrism to be "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places

7800-570: The study of comets had been proposed at the time by Tycho Brahe.) In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner , and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work. The Jesuits were offended, and Grassi soon replied with a polemical tract of his own, The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance , under

7900-578: The surname "Galilei") derives from the Latin "Galilaeus", meaning "of Galilee ". The biblical roots of Galileo's name and surname were to become the subject of a famous pun. In 1614, during the Galileo affair , one of Galileo's opponents, the Dominican priest Tommaso Caccini , delivered against Galileo a controversial and influential sermon . In it he made a point of quoting Acts 1:11 : "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?". Despite being

8000-550: The suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the Copernican advocacy. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings in September 1632. He finally arrived in February 1633 and was brought before inquisitor Vincenzo Maculani to be charged . Throughout his trial, Galileo steadfastly maintained that since 1616 he had faithfully kept his promise not to hold any of

8100-573: The telescope). His multiple interests included the study of astrology , which at the time was a discipline tied to the studies of mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Tycho Brahe and others had observed the supernova of 1572 . Ottavio Brenzoni's letter of 15 January 1605 to Galileo brought the 1572 supernova and the less bright nova of 1601 to Galileo's notice. Galileo observed and discussed Kepler's Supernova in 1604. Since these new stars displayed no detectable diurnal parallax , Galileo concluded that they were distant stars, and, therefore, disproved

8200-440: The telescope, and contrasted them to planets, which the telescope revealed to be discs. But shortly thereafter, in his Letters on Sunspots , he reported that the telescope revealed the shapes of both stars and planets to be "quite round". From that point forward, he continued to report that telescopes showed the roundness of stars, and that stars seen through the telescope measured a few seconds of arc in diameter. He also devised

8300-687: The tides in 1616, addressed to Cardinal Orsini . His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure. If this theory were correct, there would be only one high tide per day. Galileo and his contemporaries were aware of this inadequacy because there are two daily high tides at Venice instead of one, about 12 hours apart. Galileo dismissed this anomaly as

8400-514: The tides—Galileo also took no interest in Kepler's elliptical orbits of the planets . Galileo continued to argue in favour of his theory of tides, considering it the ultimate proof of Earth's motion. In 1619, Galileo became embroiled in a controversy with Father Orazio Grassi , professor of mathematics at the Jesuit Collegio Romano . It began as a dispute over the nature of comets, but by

8500-567: The time Galileo had published The Assayer ( Il Saggiatore ) in 1623, his last salvo in the dispute, it had become a much wider controversy over the very nature of science itself. The title page of the book describes Galileo as a philosopher and "Matematico Primario" of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Because The Assayer contains such a wealth of Galileo's ideas on how science should be practised, it has been referred to as his scientific manifesto. Early in 1619, Father Grassi had anonymously published

8600-526: The time, surnames were optional in Italy, and his first name had the same origin as his sometimes-family name, Galilei. Both his given and family name ultimately derived from an ancestor, Galileo Bonaiuti , an important physician, professor, and politician in Florence in the 15th century. Galileo Bonaiuti was buried in the same church, the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence , where about 200 years later, Galileo Galilei

8700-520: The true sizes of stars. However, Galileo's values were much smaller than previous estimates of the apparent sizes of the brightest stars, such as those made by Brahe, and enabled Galileo to counter anti-Copernican arguments such as those made by Tycho that these stars would have to be absurdly large for their annual parallaxes to be undetectable. Other astronomers such as Simon Marius, Giovanni Battista Riccioli , and Martinus Hortensius made similar measurements of stars, and Marius and Riccioli concluded

8800-500: The works in the manuscript were published anonymously. This means there are very few actual records of the workings of the society. The lack of historical sources was compounded by the fact that although sixteen volumes of writings of the Accademia del Cimento were copied in the early eighteenth century by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, assistant librarian of the Magliabecchi Library, the original manuscripts were lost. The history of

8900-583: Was Henry Oldenburg , the secretary of the Royal Society of London. Oldenburg laid the foundation for the exchange of information and ideas between scientific societies and institutionalized this exchange of ideas with the publication of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665. Robert Southwell, a friend of Robert Boyle , told Boyle and Oldenburg about the Cimento after he attended a Cimento meeting while traveling in Rome in 1660. Although Oldenburg continually tried to establish consistent contacts with

9000-419: Was a planet, but he did note its motion relative to the stars before losing track of it. Galileo made naked-eye and telescopic studies of sunspots . Their existence raised another difficulty with the unchanging perfection of the heavens as posited in orthodox Aristotelian celestial physics. An apparent annual variation in their trajectories, observed by Francesco Sizzi and others in 1612–1613, also provided

9100-536: Was also buried. When he did refer to himself with more than one name, it was sometimes as Galileo Galilei Linceo, a reference to his being a member of the Accademia dei Lincei , an elite science organization founded in the Papal States . It was common for mid-16th century Tuscan families to name the eldest son after the parents' surname. Hence, Galileo Galilei was not necessarily named after his ancestor Galileo Bonaiuti. The Italian male given name "Galileo" (and thence

9200-416: Was also possible to place it entirely on the far side of the Sun, where it could exhibit only gibbous and full phases. After Galileo's telescopic observations of the crescent, gibbous and full phases of Venus, the Ptolemaic model became untenable. In the early 17th century, as a result of his discovery, the great majority of astronomers converted to one of the various geo-heliocentric planetary models, such as

9300-549: Was always dependent upon the rules and orders of its patrons, Leopold and Fernando. Although it has been said that the Pope made the dissolution of the Cimento a prerequisite to Leopold becoming a cardinal, this has not been proven. Instead, it seems as if the main members of the society performed the experiments that most interested them with the best instruments currently available from the patrons and then all moved to different pursuits. Borelli, in particular, seemed to tire of having to share his accolades with others and grew tired of

9400-477: Was eight, his family moved to Florence , but he was left under the care of Muzio Tedaldi for two years. When Galileo was ten, he left Pisa to join his family in Florence, where he came under the tutelage of Jacopo Borghini. He was educated, particularly in logic, from 1575 to 1578 in the Vallombrosa Abbey , about 30 km southeast of Florence. Galileo tended to refer to himself only by his first name. At

9500-526: Was met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that his opinions contradicted accepted Biblical interpretations. Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which appeared to attack and ridicule Pope Urban VIII , thus alienating both

9600-449: Was never realized. Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( / ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ oʊ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ / , US also / ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l iː oʊ -/ ; Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛːi] ) or mononymously as Galileo , was a Florentine astronomer , physicist and engineer, sometimes described as

9700-408: Was replaced by a belief that knowledge of nature could only be obtained through detailed observations or artificial experiments. If one read the Saggi alone, it would seem that this new experimental science underlay the Cimento's every activity. The Saggi epitomized the new way of doing science, concentrating on the experiments themselves, with little or no analysis or explanations of the results of

9800-460: Was the religious life. Both girls were accepted by the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri and remained there for the rest of their lives. Virginia took the name Maria Celeste upon entering the convent. She died on 2 April 1634, and is buried with Galileo at the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence . Livia took the name Sister Arcangela and was ill for most of her life. Vincenzo was later legitimised as

9900-399: Was used to create an accurate timepiece. Up to this point, Galileo had deliberately been kept away from mathematics, since a physician earned a higher income than a mathematician. However, after accidentally attending a lecture on geometry, he talked his reluctant father into letting him study mathematics and natural philosophy instead of medicine. He created a thermoscope , a forerunner of

10000-415: Was validated by Christiaan Huygens theory. Not only was this experiment never published but all references to the members being motivated by a desire to determine the causes of nature were stricken from published works. The patron’s desire to gain stature in society overshadowed the members desire to be thought of as Philosophers of Natural History. Thus, the patronage system the Cimento worked under created

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