Related papers: On Galileo's self-portrait Mentioned by Thomas Sal…
With the manuscript of the Sidereus Nuncius preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence are included 7 watercolors of the Moon painted by Galileo himself. We suggest that some of them, and in particular the drawing of the 30 Nov 1609…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
In 1492, for the first time, an unknown ocean opened up before sailors: weeks of navigation and no idea how to pinpoint their location. Since ancient times, navigators had known how to determine latitude by using the North Star, but the…
What are the historical evidence concerning the turning of the spyglass into an astronomical instrument, the telescope? In Sidereus Nuncius and in his private correspondence Galileo tells the reader what he did with the telescope, but he…
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…
Galileo Galilei had sufficient skill as an observer and instrument builder to be able to measure the positions and apparent sizes of objects seen through his telescopes to an accuracy of 2" or better. However, Galileo had no knowledge of…
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…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
Unusual features of water waves that Galileo described in a letter to Cardinal Orsini in 1616 are revisited from the perspectives of singular optics and geometric analysis.
The scientific revolution in the first half of the seventeenth century, pioneered by figures such as Harvey, Galileo, Gassendi, Kepler and Descartes, was disseminated to the northernmost countries in Europe with considerable delay. In this…
The art of advertising one's scientific achievements, of which Galileo was an early master, is a trademark of successful modern science. Dedicated believers and mystics of science, such as Kepler, are less popular. Yet, an alleged rigorous…
In one of his paintings, the School of Athens, Raphael is depicting Leonardo da Vinci as the philosopher Plato. Some image processing tools can help us in comparing this portrait with two Leonardo's portraits, considered as self-portraits.
During the voyages that led him to discover the new continent bearing his name, Amerigo Vespucci made interesting astronomical observations of the southern sky. In the past, his data have been interpreted with criteria that do not follow…
Galileo's realization that nature is not scale invariant, motivating his subsequent discovery of scaling laws, is traced to two lectures he gave on the geography of Dante's Inferno.
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction…
In his 1616 discourse on the tides, Galileo claimed that diurnal tides occurred in Lisbon, Portugal, bolstering his theory of the tides. Lisbon does not feature such tides, but in an exchange of letters in 1629-1630, Giovanfrancesco…
Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age,…
Galileo Galilei was a skilled writer and explored several genres, from the well-known scientific writings (often in the form of dialogs) to theater and poetry. His last published poem, "Mostro son io" (A Monster am I), is a riddle written…
Probably, the long-term monitoring of the solar atmosphere started in Italy with the first telescopic observations of the Sun made by Galileo Galilei in the early $17^{\mathrm{th}}$ century. His recorded observations and science results, as…
What can physics students learn about science from those scientists who got the answers wrong? Students encounter little science history, and what they have encountered typically portrays scientists as The People with the Right Answers. But…