Abstract
The spirit of Stillman Drake’s contribution to our knowledge of Galileo is best captured in the title of his distinguished biography, Galileo at Work, with its clear emphasis on the working scientist rather than the armchair philosopher. No one has followed Galileo so carefully, not only from the library to the lecture-room, but from the workshop to the gardens and rooftops where he pointed his telescope to the sky. As a result, we have a better understanding of Galileo as a practicing scientist, and a clearer grasp of the genesis of his method.
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Stillman Drake and Charles T. Kowal, “Galileo’s Sighting of Neptune”, Scientific American, 243 (December 1980) 52–59. The instrument is explained and illustrated in this article. Galileo himself never described it but it was mentioned by his disciple Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (Theoricae Mediceorum Planetarum, Florence, 1666; pp
Stillman Drake, “Galileo’s Platonic Cosmogony and Kepler’s Prodromus”, Journal of the History of Astronomy 4 (1973) 174–191. Drake has offered a brilliant reconstruction of Galileo’s reasoning based, in part, on his interpretation of the only word on the document as an abbreviated form of momento. My examination of folio 146 leads me to conclude that the word is rather an abbreviated form of ratio. This has implications for the interpretation of the passage but it does not alter Drake’s completely satisfactory analysis of Galileo’s mathematical procedure.
Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, translated by Stillman Drake, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962; pp. 29–30 (Opere di Galileo, Vol. VII; p. 53–54). He repeats the same claim in the Fourth Day of the Discourses on Two New Sciences ( Opere di Galileo, Vol. VIII; pp. 283–284 ).
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Shea, W.R. (1990). Galileo Galilei: An Astronomer at Work. In: Levere, T.H., Shea, W.R. (eds) Nature, Experiment, and the Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 120. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1878-8_2
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