Final Reflection Question.
In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) Galileo wrote: “It is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly, rather than those from which a man may receive some just encouragement. Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from their very pulpits with unwonted confidence, thus doing impious and inconsiderate injury not only to that doctrine and its followers but to all mathematics and mathematicians in general.”
In his Philosophical Letters (1734), Voltaire wrote: “When one considers that Newton, Locke… would have been persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, and burned at Lisbon, what are we to think of human reason? In the time of Queen Mary there was a violent persecution…They who put Galileo before the Inquisition were still more so; and every inquisitor ought to blush, from the bottom of his soul, at the sight of the sphere of Copernicus. Nevertheless, had Newton been born in Portugal, and had a Dominican friar happened to discover a heresy in his inverted ratio of the squares of the distances of the planets, Sir Isaac Newton had certainly walked in procession…at some auto-de-fé.”
In 1740, Émilie du Châtelet explained and analyzed Newton’s theories of gravity and planetary motion in Chapter 16 of her Foundations of Physics, a work with which we began the semester, writing: “Attraction is a property given by God to all matter, by which all parts of matter tend toward one another in direction proportion to their mass and inverse proportion to the squares of their distances. It is certain that if we grant the Newtonians this assumption of an attraction distributed in all the parts of matter, they explain marvelously by this attraction the Astronomical Phenomena, the fall of bodies, the ebb and flow the sea; the effects of light, the cohesion of bodies and the chemical processes; and it is certain that almost all natural effects become a consequence of this force that one assumes is distributed to all matter, when one has once admitted it.”
What were the conditions that Galileo faced in his seventeenth-century career? How might his situation have been compared to that of the fifth-century Hypatia of Alexandria?
How did Voltaire view Galileo’s career? Based upon his statements about Newton, how might Voltaire have viewed the career and death of Hypatia of Alexandria?
How do the careers of these philosophers and scientists show that conditions for scientific and mathematical study changed between 300 and 1740? (Please provide at least one example.)
Are there any ways in which you believe the conflicts and challenges faced by Galileo, Newton and Madame du Châtelet are still with us today? Why or why not?
The answers do not need to be long.
