Conversations with Galileo: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONVERSATIONS WITH GALILEO: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts by William R. Shea. London, UK: Watkins Media, 2019. xi + 115 pages, including notes and further reading. Hardcover; $14.95. ISBN: 9781786782496. *Have you ever wanted to engage in an extended conversation with a famous person whose work and historical milieu you have studied carefully for many years? William R. Shea, one of the world's leading Galileo scholars, invites you to sit down, relax with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, to engage in a conversation with Galileo. Conversations with Galileo: A Fictional Dialogue incorporates many of Galileo's own words taken from his works or letters. This slim book will allow you to experience how such a dialogue may have transpired. *Shea, a Canadian historian, was Galileo Professor of the History of Science at the University of Padua, Italy from 2003-2012, the very university where Galileo once taught. He has authored many books about Galileo and the Scientific Revolution. The latest, co-authored with Mariano Artigas, are Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (2003) and Galileo Observed: Science and the Politics of Belief (2006). Conversations with Galileo is part of a series of books published by Watkins Media Ltd., offering conversations with luminaries such as JFK, Oscar Wilde, Casanova, Buddha, Charles Dickens and Isaac Newton. *First, a word about the format of Conversations with Galileo: A three-page introduction by Dava Sobel, author of Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1999), is followed by a short (21-page) biography by Shea entitled "Galileo (1564-1642): His Life in Short." Then we are offered 13 chapters dealing with a vast range of topics. Each chapter then begins with Shea posing a leading personal question. These questions cover what, I suspect, most people would want to ask Galileo: questions about censorship, the earth as a planet, scientific failures, what do you take the Bible to say, relations with the Roman Catholic Church Congregation of the Holy Office, also known as the Roman Inquisition, and the Congregation of the Index, other church officials, and, perhaps a final question: what is your claim to fame? The Galileo I remember: the rebel, the seat-of-the-pants philosopher, the "heretic," the defender of the Copernican world-picture, and the creator of a "science of motion" (appearing in the last chapter, "His Claim to Fame") are all present. *So, what more would you want to ask? To me it was surprising to see what else Shea does in fact ask. There are conversations/chapters dealing with "Family Burdens," "Wine, Women and Song," "The Burdens of Teaching," "Moonlighting," "Mind your Horoscope," "The Plague," and "On Art and Literature." This is a Galileo with a human face, with human foibles, jealousies, amorous interests, financial pressures and responsibilities, work-load issues, social conventions, concerns about the plague and social distancing, and literary interests. These are subjects which are usually hidden or absent in many accounts of Galileo's exploits. For instance, we learn of Galileo the lutenist and of his musical family: his father Vincenzo, his brother Michelangelo (a court musician to the grand duke of Bavaria in Munich). We meet his children: his two daughters, Virginia and Livia, who both entered a convent, and his son Vincenzo who had no scientific interests. We also learn about Galileo's life as a student. At seventeen, Galileo attended the University of Pisa to study medicine and "natural philosophy" (science in our parlance). He attended lectures for four and one-half years without acquiring a degree (which was quite common at the time) but did develop his mathematical interests. These are only a few of the personal details in Galileo's life which Shea explores in this book. *All in all, this is a delightful and inviting book, carefully constructed, written in an engaging style, and easy to read. Don't let the poorly designed cover keep you from picking it up. This is a good read for anyone wanting to get a look behind the scenes and meet an illustrious natural philosopher as he lived his rich and complex life. *Reviewed by Arie Leegwater, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49456.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".