“If Galileo had never pointed a telescope to the sky we wouldn’t have cell phones.” What did you mean?
Galileo turns out to be one of those personalities who actually did stuff. He didn’t just talk about it. He experimented and didn’t take for granted the things that were said to be true. He tested. The heart of science is testing your knowledge. You understand your knowledge is limited. You understand that what you might successfully discern today could be overtaken by subtler discoveries later on. The scientific revolution is rooted in a mentality that doesn’t rely on authority. Galileo had that.
Every one of those questions reflects the bankruptcy of the human brain.
When Galileo made a telescope, he did this remarkable thing. Instead of using it like a military device to look at ships, he uses it to look at the sky. He points it to the moon and he sees the surface is irregular, there are features on it. He looks at Jupiter and he sees it’s accompanied by four other objects that are moving systematically around it, like planets in a solar system. He looks at Venus and sees it changes as it’s moving around the sun. He looks at Saturn, and his telescope isn’t good enough to make out the rings, but he sees that there’s something there. We take all of these discoveries for granted today, but at the time, it was like the universe was a whole new place. Galileo leverages that information, that sense of discovery, into a whole transformation of human endeavor.
Ultimately you have to link Galileo’s celestial observations to the laws of motion, to Kepler and Newton, who was able to define the mathematical way the forces work to make all this happen. So it’s really a short jump from Newton’s laws to putting satellites in orbit around the earth to smart phones.
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