What Galileo Saw Imagining the Scientific Revolution Lawrence Lipking 9781501704390 Books
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The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has often been called a decisive turning point in human history. It represents, for good or ill, the birth of modern science and modern ways of viewing the world. In What Galileo Saw, Lawrence Lipking offers a new perspective on how to understand what happened then, arguing that artistic imagination and creativity as much as rational thought played a critical role in creating new visions of science and in shaping stories about eye-opening discoveries in cosmology, natural history, engineering, and the life sciences.When Galileo saw the face of the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, Lipking writes, he had to picture a cosmos that could account for them. Kepler thought his geometry could open a window into the mind of God. Francis Bacon's natural history envisioned an order of things that would replace the illusions of language with solid evidence and transform notions of life and death. Descartes designed a hypothetical "Book of Nature" to explain how everything in the universe was constructed. Thomas Browne reconceived the boundaries of truth and error. Robert Hooke, like Leonardo, was both researcher and artist; his schemes illuminate the microscopic and the macrocosmic. And when Isaac Newton imagined nature as a coherent and comprehensive mathematical system, he redefined the goals of science and the meaning of genius.What Galileo Saw bridges the divide between science and art; it brings together Galileo and Milton, Bacon and Shakespeare. Lipking enters the minds and the workshops where the Scientific Revolution was fashioned, drawing on art, literature, and the history of science to reimagine how perceptions about the world and human life could change so drastically, and change forever.
What Galileo Saw Imagining the Scientific Revolution Lawrence Lipking 9781501704390 Books
What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution is an insightful, intelligent look at the time period that saw so many advances in natural philosophy/science. In particular, Lawrence Lipking focuses on several familiar names, including Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Hook, Bacon, Descartes, and Boyle, though he often ranges further afield to place these actors in their proper context, adding smaller discussions of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus, for instance, among others.Lipking’s explanations of the advancements in knowledge, as well as what those advancements were built upon, are clear and eminently readable. But what made this book stand out for me was not his survey of the various experiments/concepts/theories, excellent as those segments were. No, what made it stand out were three other aspects of the book.
One was Lipking’s refusal to focus too narrowly on the natural philosophers/scientists. These men did not work in a cultural vacuum; their ideas both were both inspired and also inspired the artists of their day. And so Lipking also delves quite formidably into Milton, Shakespeare (Lear especially), Donne, and others, highlighting the connective tissue of “imagination” that links these spirits together. And when I say, “delve,” I mean just that. This is not some surface level discussion of Milton’s poetry or Shakespeare’s stage plays. Lipking dives in deep, boring into the language, the use of simile and metaphor, the imagery. I confess, his section on literary birds went a bit too far for me—both in length and in the points being made—but outside of those few pages, this English major loved the ease with which Lipking pivoted from the sciences to the humanities and the insights he brought to bear on the art and literature of the time.
Secondly, he points out that as much as the story of the Scientific Revolution likes to hold these men up as paragons of rationality, of “science,” they were, despite their visionary nature, products of their time, and too often the mythologizing glosses over or simply ignores their “less rational” beliefs, such as alchemy, sympathetic magic, and the like. If Newton’s obsession with alchemy is by now well known, others’ similar beliefs, while logically deducible based on their time period, are far less familiar both in the generalities and the specific details.
Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed how Lipking constantly questions the “story” of the Scientific Revolution itself—how it first came about, how the story has been passed on, maintained, changed over time. He questions its starting points, its ending points, its objects of focus, its very existence as a meaningful term. No matter one’s views on the matter, a healthy skepticism (skepticism being something else he discuss, particularly in the section on Descartes) almost always raises the level of discussion and thought, and it does so here as well.
Engaging, readable, insightful, fluid and wide-ranging, this is an excellent examination of the time period—its natural philosophy, its science (once that word came about), its larger-than-life figures and those whose work preceded theirs, its writers and artists, and the general manner in which “imagination” became much the dominant mode of thought that drove all this. Highly recommended.
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What Galileo Saw Imagining the Scientific Revolution Lawrence Lipking 9781501704390 Books Reviews
I was interested in this book because of the question the title itself suggests what did Galileo see? Not literally what were the images he saw through his telescope — we have his drawings as evidence of that — but what did it mean to him, how did he interpret what he saw?
The mythology that has come down to us is that what Galileo saw was the confirmation, if not the revelation, that the heavens were not populated by perfect, unblemished spheres of light. He saw the Moon like we see it — spotted, rough, undeniably imperfect, maybe beautiful in its own way but not the “heavenly object” that the Church had prepared us to see. And what happened was the birth of modern science, a blow against superstition and a struggle that we still fight today.
But Lipking wants us to think a little more closely, especially about Galileo’s historical and intellectual context. The seventeenth century is often taken to be the century in which the scientific revolution bloomed, and it certainly was an amazing century — Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Bacon, . . . We might forget that this was also the century that began with Shakespeare, gave us Milton, Locke, Hobbes — poets, philosophers, . . . writers and thinkers of all sorts. Not everyone was a scientist.
I’ve always had difficulty thinking of the seventeenth century as one thing — it seems like a collection of almost unconnected lanes — the lanes occupied by Shakespeare and the poets, political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, early modern thinkers about the nature of knowledge and the methods of science like Bacon and Descartes, and scientists themselves like Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton. But Lipking’s message is that those lanes don’t really exist — all of these thinkers, writers, and researchers lived in a much more common intellectual world.
He does not give us a tightly focused study of Galielo’s observations. What he does instead is fill in the landscape of the seventeenth century mind, one that would no doubt see very different things through Galileo’s telescope than we see in retrospect. That mind blended spaces of mathematics, physics, and astronomy with theology, astrology, alchemy, and poetry, all as ways to see the truth about our world and ourselves.
For us now, the Moon that appears in poetry is quaint and metaphorical. For the mind of the seventeenth century, poetry was itself revelatory of meaning. Poetry gave us something different from theories and facts, something that rivaled science for truth.
Lipking doesn’t offer a simple answer to the question of what Galileo saw, and the book is not a discussion of that moment of looking through the telescope. Instead he paints the broader picture of the seventeenth century, to help us see that it wasn’t as single-minded a march toward science against superstition as we are prone to see it today. And whether we call astrology and alchemy errors, the theology of the church superstition, or the poetic world of Milton a flight of fanciful imagination, those things, in the here and now of the seventeenth century, were real and valid and world-infusing.
Lipking’s book is not so much an explicit argument for one position or another as an exposition of the intellectual landscape in which Galileo, and others, lived. Galileo, from this perspective, is not an ahistorical genius — he is, like anyone, a person of his time. Understanding what he saw requires that we understand what a person of his time brought to his experience. To look through the telescope then and to look through it now are two very different experiences.
What Galileo Saw Imagining the Scientific Revolution is an insightful, intelligent look at the time period that saw so many advances in natural philosophy/science. In particular, Lawrence Lipking focuses on several familiar names, including Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Hook, Bacon, Descartes, and Boyle, though he often ranges further afield to place these actors in their proper context, adding smaller discussions of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus, for instance, among others.
Lipking’s explanations of the advancements in knowledge, as well as what those advancements were built upon, are clear and eminently readable. But what made this book stand out for me was not his survey of the various experiments/concepts/theories, excellent as those segments were. No, what made it stand out were three other aspects of the book.
One was Lipking’s refusal to focus too narrowly on the natural philosophers/scientists. These men did not work in a cultural vacuum; their ideas both were both inspired and also inspired the artists of their day. And so Lipking also delves quite formidably into Milton, Shakespeare (Lear especially), Donne, and others, highlighting the connective tissue of “imagination” that links these spirits together. And when I say, “delve,” I mean just that. This is not some surface level discussion of Milton’s poetry or Shakespeare’s stage plays. Lipking dives in deep, boring into the language, the use of simile and metaphor, the imagery. I confess, his section on literary birds went a bit too far for me—both in length and in the points being made—but outside of those few pages, this English major loved the ease with which Lipking pivoted from the sciences to the humanities and the insights he brought to bear on the art and literature of the time.
Secondly, he points out that as much as the story of the Scientific Revolution likes to hold these men up as paragons of rationality, of “science,” they were, despite their visionary nature, products of their time, and too often the mythologizing glosses over or simply ignores their “less rational” beliefs, such as alchemy, sympathetic magic, and the like. If Newton’s obsession with alchemy is by now well known, others’ similar beliefs, while logically deducible based on their time period, are far less familiar both in the generalities and the specific details.
Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed how Lipking constantly questions the “story” of the Scientific Revolution itself—how it first came about, how the story has been passed on, maintained, changed over time. He questions its starting points, its ending points, its objects of focus, its very existence as a meaningful term. No matter one’s views on the matter, a healthy skepticism (skepticism being something else he discuss, particularly in the section on Descartes) almost always raises the level of discussion and thought, and it does so here as well.
Engaging, readable, insightful, fluid and wide-ranging, this is an excellent examination of the time period—its natural philosophy, its science (once that word came about), its larger-than-life figures and those whose work preceded theirs, its writers and artists, and the general manner in which “imagination” became much the dominant mode of thought that drove all this. Highly recommended.
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