Related papers: Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Views
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Andr\'e Tacquet, S.J. briefly discussed a scientific argument regarding the structure of a Copernican universe, and commented on Galileo Galilei's discussion of that same argument -- Galileo's…
It is difficult for the common sense to admit that an object dropped from the top of the mast of a ship moving at a constant velocity falls down at the bottom of the mast because it keeps inside the horizontal movement of the ship. This…
The dialogue develops arguments for and against adopting a new world system, info-computationalist naturalism, that is poised to replace the traditional mechanistic world system. We try to figure out what the info-computational paradigm…
In October 1604, when SN1604, the last naked-eye visible supernova in our Galaxy, exploded, Galileo Galilei was the professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Padua, teaching the mechanics of planets. He was therefore the…
Dialectical systems are a mathematical formalism for modeling an agent updating a knowledge base seeking consistency. Introduced in the 1970s by Roberto Magari, they were originally conceived to capture how a working mathematician or a…
The trial and condemnation of Giordano Bruno was mainly based on arguments of philosophical and theological nature, and therefore different from Galilei's. Such elements contribute to unfairly devalue the scientific contribution of Bruno…
Galileo Galilei believed that stars were distant suns whose sizes, measured via his telescope, were a direct indication of distance -- fainter stars (appearing smaller in the telescope) were farther away than brighter ones. Galileo argued…
Astronomers in the early 17th century misunderstood the images of stars that they saw in their telescopes. For this reason, the data a skilled observer of that time acquired via telescopic observation of the heavens appeared to support a…
Galileo's support to the Copernican theory was decisive for the revolutionary astronomical discoveries he achieved in 1610. We trace the origins of Galileo's conversion to the Copernican theory, discussing in particular the "Dialogo de…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
A hundred years ago (1920) in the auditorium of the Smithsonian Institution's U.S. National Museum there were two lectures under the auspices of the George Ellery Hale Lecture series, what has come to be called the 'Great Debate'. In the…
In this work, we use large language models (LLMs) to augment and accelerate research on the P versus NP problem, one of the most important open problems in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Specifically, we propose Socratic…
As a way to recall and honour Guido Altarelli I contribute to the discussion on the prospect for the future of Particle Physics. I do this because I am sure that Guido would have liked the discussion, even though I am not equally sure that…
In January of 1616, the month before before the Roman Inquisition would infamously condemn the Copernican theory as being "foolish and absurd in philosophy", Monsignor Francesco Ingoli addressed Galileo Galilei with an essay entitled…
With the famous Three Worlds of Karl Popper as template, the paper rigorously introduces the concept of software to define the counterpart of the physical subworld. Digesting the scientific-technical view of biology and neurology on a high…
An extension of the Bachelardian notion of epistemological profile allows us to establish the appearance of a strong conformist thinking component following certain formulations of the Galilean concept of the relativity of motion, namely…
In 1651 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli published within his Almagestum Novum, a massive 1500 page treatise on astronomy, a discussion of 126 arguments for and against the Copernican hypothesis (49 for, 77 against). A…
We consider generalized Galileon theories within general relativity in four-dimensional space-time. We provide the argument showing that the generalized Galileons described by a wide class of Lagrangians do not admit stable, static,…
This book is a philosopher's introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. I present and assess three versions of the idea: one version from philosophy, and two from physics. In short, they are: all the logically…
Recent research on argumentative dialogues has focused on persuading people to take some action, changing their stance on the topic of discussion, or winning debates. In this work, we focus on argumentative dialogues that aim to open up…