Galileo Galilei - When the World Stood Still

Przednia okładka
Springer Science & Business Media, 29 lis 2004 - 221

"I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years ...kneeling before you Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals ...I abjure, curse, detest the aforesaid errors and heresies."

Galileo Galilei in Rome, 22 June 1633, before the men of the Inquisition.

In the small village of Arcetri, on a wooded hillside just south of Florence, an old man sat writing his will. He had to make a journey to Rome and wanted to be prepared for every eventuality. If the plague did not get him on the road, the strain of travelling might finish him off; in addition he had been ill most of the autumn, with dizziness, stomach pains and a serious hernia. And even if he survived these difficulties, and the cold winter wind from the Apennines did not give him pneumonia, he had no idea what awaited him in Rome, only that his arrival was unlikely to be celebrated with a special mass.

The mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei is one of the most famous scientists of all times. The story of his life and times, of his epoch-making experiments and discoveries, of his stubbornness and pride, of his patrons in the house of Medici, of his enemies and friends in their struggle for truth - all is brought vividly to life in this book. Atle Næss has written a gripping account of one of the great figures in European history.
He was awarded the Brage Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Norway.

 

Z wnętrza książki

Spis treści

A Journey to Rome
1
The Musicians Son
5
A Gifted Young Tuscan
8
To Rome and the Jesuits
11
A Surveyor of Inferno
14
The Spheres from the Tower
17
From Pisa to Padua
20
Signs in the Sky
23
The Hammer of the Heretics
98
Deaths and Omens
103
Comets Portend Disaster
107
Weighing the Words of Others on Gold Scales
111
A Marvellous Combination of Circumstances
116
War and Heresy
120
European Power Struggle and Roman Nephews
122
The Old and the New
125

De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
26
Lecturer and Designer
29
A Professors Commitments
31
Modern Physics Is Born
33
A New Star in an Unchanging Sky?
37
Drawing Close to a Court
39
The Balls Fall into Place
42
The Roman Style
44
The Tube with the Long Perspective
47
A New World
51
Jupiters Sons
54
Johann Kepler Imperial Mathematician
58
Several Signs in the Sky
63
Friendship and Power
77
A Dispute About Objects that Float in Water
80
Sun Stand Thou Still upon Gibeon
84
The Letter to Castelli
88
How to Go to Heaven Not How the Heavens Go
92
Foolish and Absurd in Philosophy Formally Heretical
96
An Advantageous Decree
130
Two Wise Men and a Third
132
The Inquisitions Chambers
139
Diplomacy in the Time of the Plague
144
An Order from the Top
149
Nor Further to Hold Teach or Defend It in Any Way Whatsoever
161
Convinced with Reasons
165
I Galileo Galilei
170
Eternity
177
A Death and Two New Sciences
181
The Meeting with Infinity
187
That Universe Is Not Any Greater Than the Space I Occupy
192
Epilogue
197
Postscript
203
Appendix
207
References
209
Sources
213
Index of Names
219
Prawa autorskie

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Informacje o autorze (2004)

The author was born in 1949. He studied language and literature at Oslo University and worked for some years as a teacher at various levels before becoming an independent writer of novels and non-fiction. Among his books is a novel about the Italian painter Caravaggio, translated into English under the title "Doubting Thomas" [in German as "Caravaggio's Flucht"]. His biography of Galileo won the Brage Award for best Norwegian non-fiction book in 2001. Næss' most recent work is a biography of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.

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