Re: APOD: Pelican Nebula Close Up (2010 Aug 19)
Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2010 7:43 pm
León wrote:
Giuseppe Baretti said that after Galileo's abjuration [he] said the phrase "Eppur si muove"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove wrote:
<<The Italian phrase "Eppur si muove" means And yet it moves (Nonetheless, it moves). Legend has it that the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei muttered this phrase after being forced to recant in 1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the Earth moves around the Sun. It is occasionally used in modern speech to indicate that although publicly someone who is in a knowledgeable position may discount or deny something, that does not stop it from being true.
At the time of Galileo's trial, the dominant view among theologians, philosophers and scientists was that the Earth is stationary, indeed the center of the universe. Galileo's adversaries brought the charge of heresy, then punishable by death, before the Inquisition. Since Galileo recanted, he was only put under house arrest until his death, nine years after the trial.
There is no contemporary evidence that Galileo muttered this expression at his trial; it would certainly have been highly imprudent for him to have done so. The earliest biography of Galileo, written by his disciple Vincenzio Viviani, does not mention this phrase, and depicts Galileo as having sincerely recanted. The legend first became widely published in Querelles Littéraires (1761), recounting a tale published by an Italian living in London in 1757 (124 years after the supposed utterance). In 1911, the famous line was found on a Spanish painting owned by a Belgian family, dated 1643 or 1645. The painting is obviously ahistorical, since it depicts Galileo in a dungeon, but nonetheless proves that some variants of the "E pur si muove" legend had been circulating for over a century before it was published, perhaps even in his own lifetime.>>
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheNote.html wrote:
George: I think it moved.
Jerry: Moved?
George: It may have moved, I don't know.
Jerry: I'm sure it didn't move.
George: It moved! It was imperceptible but I felt it.
Jerry: Maybe it just wanted to change positions?
__ You know, shift to the other side.
George: No, no. It wasn't a shift, I've shifted, this was a move.
Jerry: Okay, so what if it moved?
George: That's the sign! The test; if a man makes it move.
Jerry: That's not the test.
_ Contact is the test, if it moves as a result of contact.
George: You think it's contact? It has to be touched?
Jerry: That's what a gym teacher once told me.