Two New Sciences

This book aims to make Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) accessible to the modern reader by refashioning the great scientist's masterpiece "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences" in today's language. Galileo Galilei stands as one of the most important figures in history, not simply for his achievements in astronomy, physics, and engineering and for revolutionizing science and the scientific method in general, but also for the role that he played in the (still ongoing) drama concerning entrenched power and its desire to stifle any knowledge that may threaten it. Therefore, it is important that today's readers come to understand and appreciate what Galilei accomplished and wrote. But the mindset that shapes how we see the world today is quite different from the mindset -- and language -- of Galilei and his contemporaries. Another obstacle to a full understanding of Galilei's writings is posed by the countless historical, philosophical, geometrical, and linguistic references he made, along with his often florid prose, with its blend of Italian and Latin. De Angelis' new rendition of the work includes translations of the original geometrical figures into algebraic formulae in modern notation and allows the non-specialist reader to follow the thread of Galileo's thought and in a way that was barely possible until now.

As enjoyable as it is important, this classic encompasses 30 years of highly original experiments and theories. Its lively, readable expositions discuss dynamics, elasticity, sound, strength of materials, more. 126 diagrams.

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in Florence in 1632, was the most proximate cause of his being brought to trial before the Inquisition. Using the dialogue form, a genre common in classical philosophical works, Galileo masterfully demonstrates the truth of the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic one, proving, for the first time, that the earth revolves around the sun. Its influence is incalculable. The Dialogue is not only one of the most important scientific treatises ever written, but a work of supreme clarity and accessibility, remaining as readable now as when it was first published. This edition uses the definitive text established by the University of California Press, in Stillman Drake’s translation, and includes a Foreword by Albert Einstein and a new Introduction by J. L. Heilbron.

How did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential Two New Sciences? In 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, Two New Sciences. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In Reading Galileo, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of Two New Sciences which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonical vision. Raphael alleges that it was written—and originally read—as the eclectic product of the types of discursive textual analysis and meandering descriptive practices Galileo professed to reject in favor of more qualitative scholarship. Focusing on annotations period readers left in the margins of extant copies and on the notes and teaching materials of seventeenth-century university professors whose lessons were influenced by Galileo’s text, Raphael explores the ways in which a range of early-modern readers, from ordinary natural philosophers to well-known savants, responded to Galileo. She highlights the contrast between the practices of Galileo’s actual readers, who followed more traditional, “bookish” scholarly methods, and their image, constructed by Galileo and later historians, as “modern” mathematical experimenters. Two New Sciences has not previously been the subject of such rigorous attention and analysis. Reading Galileo considerably changes our understanding of Galileo’s important work while offering a well-executed case study in the reception of an early-modern scientific classic. This important text will be of interest to a wide range of historians—of science, of scholarly practices and the book, and of early-modern intellectual and cultural history.

'Bertoloni Meli reexamines such major texts as Galileo's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, and Newton's Principia, and in them finds a reliance on objects that has escaped proper understanding. From Pappus of Alexandria to Guidobaldo dal Monte, Bertoloni Meli sees significant developments in the history of mechanical experimentation, all of them crucial for understanding Galileo. Bertoloni Meli uses similarities and tensions between dal Monte and Galileo as a springboard for exploring the revolutionary nature of seventeenth-century mechanics.' (Back cover)

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

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