Because Galileo thought the way some of his predecessors thought and
also anticipated the thinking of some of his successors, his views are of
special interest in understanding scientific method. He sought respectable
authority for his way of establishing conclusions in the writings of
ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, and there are, too,
connections between his ideas and those of his more immediate
predecessors and contemporaries in Italy. But he also helped to develop
the role of experiment, particularly as a useful means for discovering
and exploring new connections in nature, and partly because of this we
detect in him ideas and methods which were further developed by his
successors. There is no doubt that his claims about what is true and
why it is true were particularly influential in the seventeenth century.
His ideas played an important part in the early development of scientific
method although, as we shall see, the differences between Galileo’s
views and those familiar to us are at least as significant as the
similarities.
He was born in 1564, the year of Michelangelo’s death and of
Shakespeare’s birth. After studying and teaching mathematics at the
University of Pisa, he became, in 1592, a teacher of mathematics at the
prestigious University of Padua in the Venetian Republic. There he
remained until he was forty-six years of age, when he received an
invitation from one of his former pupils, Cosimo II de’ Medici, the
Grand Duke of Tuscany, to continue his scientific work in Florence as
Chief Mathematician and Philosopher. He acquired, that is, a patron,
just as artists and writers of the period also did, and it was during this
period of service to the Tuscan court that he accomplished much of the
scientific work that we associate with his name. In 1616, Galileo was
instructed on the authority of Pope Paul V to abandon a theory for
which he had been arguing with increasing skill and ingenuity, namely
Nicholas Copernicus’s theory that it is the Earth, rather than the Sun,
that moves. A panel of ecclesiastical authorities had examined this
theory and had decided that, because the theory ‘contradicted Holy