Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (review)

Abstract

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies. By David Wootton. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 328. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-12536-8.) This book is primarily an intellectual biography, but also covers most of Galileo's personal life. Additionally, it belongs to the genre of history, as the author states in the introduction. However, he does not distinguish between two subgenres: plausible and implausible conjectural history. Their difference may be characterized in terms of whether the conjectures are based on such practices as exaggerations, textual misinterpretations, injudicious emphases, arbitrary assumptions, prejudicial assessments, and so forth. Unfortunately, this book exemplifies implausible conjectural history. Consider its three principal theses. The first (pp. 56, 261-62, 266) is an account of Galileo's attitude toward Copernicanism, claiming that he became a Copernican in the early 159Os, and the rest of his career was an attempt to prove its truth. This is an exaggeration of the fact that, since the early 159Os, Galileo was implicitly pursuing a Copernican research program - namely a general physics of moving bodies, one of whose consequences was the physical possibility of the earth's motion. The second major thesis (pp. 240-50) is that, although Galileo outwardly tried to appear a good Catholic, in reality he was not a Christian but privately held esoteric beliefs. He was allegedly a materialist, pantheist, or deist, who denied the existence of a provident personal God, the reality of salvation and redemption, and the supernatural origin of miracles. This thesis inflates the fact that Galileo was largely uninterested in theological questions and religious discussions; was usually silent about them; but was willing to pay lip service to Catholic religious doctrines and go through the motion of religious rituals, as long as the demands were not too great. The third principal thesis attributes to Galileo a reluctant empiricism (p. 265): he occasionally used observations and experiments, but chose not to become a careful experimental scientist (p. 255), and instead practiced mostly abstraction, idealization, deduction, and speculation. This is an overstatement of the truth that Galileo was a self-reflective and critical empirical thinker, equally appreciative of observation and reason; his emphasis on active experimentation (as distinct from passive observation) and on mathematical quantification (as contrasted with qualitative thinking) were his way of judiciously combining the requirements of both observation and reason. …