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Our book review
Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel is the first complete biography of the Galilei family at a critical inflection point in world history. Scientists had begun to use observation and reason to understand the universe and our place in it, the last frontier. But the Enlightenment was a capital crime, the quest for knowledge itself was a prisoner chained up in the darkness of fear and superstition. The two central characters are the far-thinking astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and his devoted daughter Maria Celeste (1600-1634), a nun at the convent at San Matteo. Maria Celeste, originally named Virginia, was born in the same year that the Church and the Inquisition sent Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake for voicing the speculation that there might be other planets much like our own, all revolving around the sun. [Page 4] The thousand years of the Dark Ages would end soon, but this didn't help the the father and daughter who could console each other only by entrusting handwritten letters to wanderers or merchants who were planning to ride in the general direction of the addressees while weaving around towns that were quarantined by the plague. [6] 
Maria Celeste saved all the letters her father had sent her, but they were never found after her death. Scholars believe that a friend who believed the letters to be incriminating destroyed them. Galileo also saved and cherished the letters from his daughter. 124 of these letters have survived the ages and are now stored at the National Central Library in Florence, Italy. Galileo sketched mathematical doodles on some of them. The publication of Galileo's Daughter in 1999 was the first time these letters were translated into English and published. [10-11] Galileo was romantically involved with only one woman. He could never marry Marina Gamba, and they never lived together, because a university scholar was expected to remain single, but they had two daughters and a son. [24] Indeed, when Marina later married Giovanni Bartoluzzi, Galileo befriended Giovanni and gave the two of them financial support. [38] The two daughters were sent to a convent, not only because "illegitimate" girls were considered unlikely ever to find husbands, but because there was no other safe place for them to be, as long as their father was Italy's leading heretic. Upon taking the vows of the convent, Virginia took the name of Suor Maria Celeste and Livia took the name Suor Arcangela. [5-6, 44-45, 60] As different rules applied to boys, the son Vincenzio was "declared legitimate" by order of Galileo's friend, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and went to the University to study law. [6] Two ideas are central to the story -- the incorrect geocentric theory of Aristotle and Ptolemy that the sun revolves around the earth (the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic model), and the correct heliocentric theory of Copernicus that the earth revolves around the sun (the Copernican model). To the Church, the discussion was closed. Quoting the Bible easily "proved" that the sun moved and the earth did not. Psalms 103:5 says that God "fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever." Solomon refers to the sun rising and going down. The sun must be in motion since Joshua describes a miracle in which God momentarily made the sun stand still. [7, 62, 77] But Galileo was influenced by a remark of Cardinal Cesare Baronio to the effect that "the Bible is a book about how one goes to Heaven -- not how Heaven goes." [65] Galileo concluded, "I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these." He noted that the solar system is not even mentioned in the Bible, and added, "Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely." [65] Dava Sobel sees Galileo's manner of interpreting Scripture as being aware of the "literary devices inserted into the Bible for the sake of the masses." [63] His daughter was supportive; the author writes, "She accepted Galileo's conviction that God had dictated the Holy Scriptures to guide men's spirits but proferred the unraveling of the universe as a challenge to their intelligence." [8] Besides all that, Galileo had the radical idea that knowledge isn't best obtained by placing faith in what someone has said or wrote, but by performing experiments, collecting measurements, and applying logic [92-93] -- in effect, by asking nature a question. Galileo was ordered twice by the Inquisition to travel to Rome to answer for his opinions. The first interrogation was in 1616, shortly after the pope appointed a panel of eleven theologians to vote on the Copernican theory. The panel voted unanimously that Copernican theory is heretical, and Galileo was served a summons. [77-78] Galileo and his prosecutor Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino came to an "agreement" that the claim of Copernicus was merely "hypothetical." The pope and cardinal inquisitor informed him that Copernicanism is in error, and ordered him to stop studying the motions of celestial bodies, because these motions were mentioned in the Psalms, and were therefore among the subjects that only the church had the right to interpret. He was, Dava Sobel writes, "silenced but exonerated." [81] Galileo obeyed the church's 1616 instruction until 1623 when, in the author's words, "Galileo found reason to return to the Sun-centered universe like a moth to a flame." [7] However, it was in 1633 that he was actually tried for heresy. Now, after the astronomer's publication of yet another banned book, the author writes, the pope "demanded that Galileo be interrogated 'on intent' -- to determine, technically by torture if necessary, his true purpose...." [269]. Sobel's book includes pages of the trial transcript, the reading of the sentence, and the defendant's final remarks.[270-277] It was during the 1633 trial that Galileo began to equivocate, saying "... for I have neither maintained nor defended in that book the opinion that the Earth moves and that the Sun is stationary, but have rather demonstrated the opposite of the Copernican theory, and have shown that the arguments of Copernicus are weak and inconclusive." Such a defense, Sobel explains, "encapsulates the agony of his position.... he appreciated the danger he faced...." [253]
Galileo also attempted to avoid a heresy conviction by confessing to the sin of vanity. He testified, "My error, then, has been -- and I confess it -- one of vainglorious ambition, and of pure ignorance and inadvertence." [258] "Those flaws that can be seen scattered in my book were not introduced through the cunning of an insincere intention, but rather through the vain ambition and satisfaction of appearing clever above and beyond the average among popular writers." [262] The insincerity of his defense only made the inquisitors more angry, and all of them agreed "that Galileo had, at the very least, disobeyed direct orders." [263] The result was that Galileo was ordered to spend the rest of his life in assigned houses. The pope later moved Galileo's residence from Siena to Arcetri, the author writes, "to make it harsher." [341] He would be "limited in his social contacts" and must "refrain everafter from all teaching activities." [341] "He was forbidden to receive any visitors who might discuss scientific ideas with him. Nor could he go anywhere except to the neighboring convent." [344] Readers who enjoy the history of science need little encouragement to read Dava Sobel's book, but, more importantly, I wish that anyone who feels that some expressions of opinion which cause public outrage should be censored, or who is not yet thoroughly convinced of the need for separation of church and state, might read and contemplate this tragic story. Book review by Mike Lepore for crimsonbird.com B&W illustrations; 6-page timeline in appendix; 22-page 2-column index |