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In the early 1600s, Catholic theologians argued
that Psalm 104 required a fixed Earth and a geocentric
cosmology. After his pioneering telescopic discoveries,
Galileo Galilei suggested that "the Bible tells
how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." When
he defended the heliocentric system too vigorously, he
was forced by the Inquisition to disclaim such beliefs
and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Gingerich will examine the intellectual controversy over
the Book of Nature versus the Book of Scripture, novel
scientific interpretations versus a highly literal reading
of the Bible. He will explain how Galileo abandoned the
traditional ways of establishing scientific truth, and
by so doing effectively changed the rules of science
forever.
Gingerich is Research Professor of Astronomy and
of the History of Science at Harvard University. His
research interests have ranged from the recomputation
of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation
of stellar spectra. He is also a coauthor of two successive
standard models for the solar atmosphere.
In the past three decades, Gingerich has become a leading
authority on the seventeenth-century German astronomer
Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus, the sixteenth-century
cosmologist who proposed the heliocentric system. His
most recent book is The Book Nobody Read: Chasing
the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, which describes
Gingerich's 30-year search for all extant copies
of Copernicus' book De Revolutionibus, to
prove, via notes written in the margins, that this book
was indeed read by Copernicus' contemporaries.
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