| One day Galileo was sitting in church (it may have been Santa Croce) watching the swinging of a chandelier. Perhaps it was a particularly boring service. In any event, he timed the swinging of the chandelier using his pulse. Galileo dared to venture beyond the dogmatic speculations of Aristotle dominating contemporary science that said that all motion must be ultimately traceable to the Prime Mover in the ninth celestial sphere. Galileo believed that in science it was more productive to appeal directly to careful observation of nature and mathematical analysis than to metaphysical final causes. For example, let's imagine he counted the total number of pulses occurring during five complete oscillations of the chandelier. (A complete oscillation is the movement from one extreme position to the opposite one and then back to the original position.) Dividing the total number of pulse counts by five would then give a good estimate of the number of pulses per complete oscillation, called the period of oscillation. After several timings he noticed that the period of oscillation did not vary with the amplitude of the oscillation. In other words, when the chandelier was barely swinging it had the same period as when it was making significant excursions from equilibrium. After leaving church he set up a much more accurate experiment to confirm his initial findings. Rather than use his pulse, he devised an ingenious clock based upon the flow of water. He later built upon these pendulum results to develop fundamental ideas about the mechanics of motion. In this pendulum example we see three important characteristics of Galileo. First... Galileo wanted to abandon all authorities such as Aristotle and completely separate science from both theology and philosophy. ... Second, Galileo was an extraordinarily careful and ingenious experimenter. In contrast to the speculative and deductive way science was done by the Aristotelian natural philosophers, Galileo appealed directly to careful measurement. In 1605 he caustically said, "What does philosophy have to do with measurement." Third, regardless of how clever the measurement, Galileo always employed mathematics to quantify his observations and reveal the underlying laws of motion, for... without mathematics "one wanders about in a dark labyrinth." He used mathematics quantitatively to reveal laws about nature and avoided the more mystical and symbolic approach of the Platonists who used it to grasp archetypal truths about the divine. These three principles—freedom from authority, appeal to careful and repeatable experiment, and mathematical quantification of results—are cornerstones of the scientific method that Galileo helped build. By today's standards the amplitude independence of the pendulum period found by Galileo is a very modest piece of knowledge. Nevertheless, Galileo's genius in this example deeply impresses today's scientists, especially because he was one of the first to break free of speculation and dogma and turn to careful quantitative measurements for the study of natural phenomena. Through observation and the employment of mathematical methods, he revealed an objective truth about nature... In church, while worshipping the old Christian God, Galileo was laying the foundation for the new god of modern science, one worshipped with meticulous observation supplemented by mathematical quantification. He was igniting the revolution that ushered in the scientific age. | — Victor Mansfield, Synchronicity, Science, and Soulmaking: Understanding Jungian Synchronicity Through Physics, Buddhism, and Philosophy, Chapter 5 – From a Medieval to a Modern World View | Indexes/14 |
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After several hours, he did not see this as a period of oscillation amplitude of the vibration. In other words in the other, when the chandelier is barely swing, it's the same period of time, it is a major hiking, from the balance. After stepping down, he set up a church more precise experiment to confirm his preliminary findings.
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