SCIENCE HISTORY SHOWS HEROISM

THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE SHOWS HEROISM … 

The history of Science shows men and women who wanted nothing but the truth – and they often paid with their lives. One of those heroes is Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the Italian.

He showed that the Aristotelian theory (after Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)) on the effect of gravity on different masses, though accepted for almost two thousand years as fact, was not true.

Photo: Galileo Galilei, the true experimentalist. (Pic from en.wikipedia.org)

It is for this reason that Galileo is known as the pioneer of experimental science which has the philosophy “if a theory cannot be proven by experimentation/mathematics/logic, then it cannot be accepted as fact”.

Galileo is known as the first true experimentalist scientist/physicist.

Remember that Galileo was a churchman, and educated by the church, and by watching the moons of Jupiter, he realized that the moons (smaller objects) where orbiting the planet (the larger object).

With that logic, he said the planets revolved around the Sun – and not the other way around - as believed by the science world and the church, where the Sun and planets were said to revolve around the Earth.

 It was the case of the Geo-centric model versus the Helio-centric model, an age-old battle.

(It was Galileo also who made use of the idea of arranging lenses in a telescope and training them on the planets and their moons and stars.)

You know, everybody was against Galileo for suggesting that the Earth orbited the Sun. The church told him to keep quiet and not suggest false ideas.

They even locked him in a cell for days.

But every time he looked up to the sky, he said “and yet is moves”, referring to the Earth’s motion around the Sun.

The history of Science teaches that we must dig deep.

Do not accept a theory, idea or issue without analyzing it properly.

In Science we use experimentation/tests/mathematics/logic.

In Christianity, you test everything by the Book.

In the court room, the law books and good logic is needed to investigate a case.

In everyday life, we must test ideas/theories/philosophies by using other information we have.

That is why you must learn to keep yourself informed.

The “2012-end-of-the-world” theme fooled even the highly-educated because most of them have not been digging deeper in certain fields – fields that really matter.

 Cheers.