[ Music ]
>> I'm Dr. Mario Livio.
I'm an astrophysicist and an author
of seven popular science books,
the most recent of which is called
Galileo and the Science Deniers.
I live in Baltimore, and I
currently am in Baltimore at my home.
As you can see, I imagine, in front of some
chairs with books, actually I have something
that looks like that in every room in the house,
so it almost doesn't matter where I film this.
So the book, as I said, is called
Galileo and the Science Deniers.
This is a fresh biography of Galileo, but at the
same time, with an eye on science denial today,
which unfortunately we have quite a bit of.
So the idea is to study from this fascinating
person who lived in the 17th Century,
but we'll see what lessons we can learn
from that, or you know, what extent he,
in some sense, already fought some
battles that we have to fight again today.
So you know, when people
hear that I wrote a book
about Galileo a natural question is how come
I decided to write a book about Galileo,
given that there are already quite
a few biographies of Galileo.
And there were several reasons for this,
and they were all important at some level.
One is that I'm an astrophysicist.
Galileo is considered by many to be one of the
founders of modern astronomy and astrophysics.
I was always completely fascinated by
this person, and of course, you know,
was familiar with him, but not all the
details, and I wanted to write a book.
The second thing is that, you know,
searching through the literature,
I discovered that actually very few, if any
of the existing biographies were written
by active researchers in
the field of astrophysics.
More often, they were written by science
historians, science writers, and so on,
so I thought that maybe I could bring a
certain new perspective to his discoveries,
and especially to put them in the
context of what we know today.
The other thing is that the scholarly
written biographies of Galileo,
some of which are fantastic,
usually are very, very detailed,
and they are not so appropriate actually
for just a regular reader who wants to,
you know, read something simpler.
And so I decided to write
a somewhat shorter book,
but tried nevertheless to
stay as accurate as I could.
And finally, and perhaps most
importantly, I was struck by the fact
that we are encountering science
denial today on many fronts.
You know, meet climate change, or even the
initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And of course, Galileo is famous for fighting
for intellectual freedom,
and again science denial.
So for all of these reasons, I decided that
this is a book that I really want to write.
Now, of course, there is a
difference between science denial
in Galileo's time, and science denial today.
His battle was mostly, I
mean, it's sometimes described
as a class between science and religion.
It wasn't, and he never saw it as such.
What he was fighting against
was a clash between science
and literal interpretations
of the biblical text.
I mean, he basically argued that the
Bible was not written as a science book.
You know, we borrowed words from a
Cardinal [inaudible], who said, you know,
scripture tells us how to go to
heaven, and not how the heavens go.
So it was this type of clash.
Today the reasons for science
denial are different.
Usually they have to do with political
conservatism, though occasionally they also go
into religion, but you know, for example, in the
case of climate change, it definitely has to do
with conservatism, with economic
issues, sometimes with political--
pure political issues, you know, that have to do
with being an election year,
and things like that.
So the causes are somewhat different, but
the effect at the end is somewhat similar.
Galileo, by the way, was not only in terms
of the time in which he lived, you know,
he lived in late renaissance, but
he was largely a renaissance person.
He got an education in what we
would call today the liberal arts.
He studied the drawing and actually
used that knowledge in his--
when he did his wash drawings of the
moon, as he saw it through his telescope.
He gave two lectures when he was 24
years old, about Dante's Inferno.
So he knew the great Italian
poet, Dante, Ariosto.
He didn't like so much Tasso, but
you know, he wrote about that.
He even wrote an essay comparing
sculpture and painting
and some painters were his personal friends.
So he really was very, very
well-versed in areas other than science.
Of course, in science, he
wrote about breakthroughs,
especially in astronomy, but also in mechanics.
Galileo was, no doubt, a fighter for
intellectual freedom and he wrote about that,
and you know, this was very,
very close to his heart.
And you know, when we talk about ingenuity
and creativity, you really cannot have those
if you don't have intellectual freedom.
Now, in terms of himself being, you know,
showing ingenuity, he was fantastic at that.
For example, he wanted to study freefall.
So you know, he would drop
objects and see them fall.
But there were no good time measurements at
the time, because there were no good clocks.
So he had to find a way to somehow
dilute gravity, if you like,
so that the times would be a
bit longer, the times of fall.
And he had this clever idea of
instead of dropping balls like this,
to actually make them roll down inclined planes.
And by taking the angle of the inclined plane to
be small, you know, the motion was much slower,
and he was able to measure times much better.
Now, you know, over the years, of
course, his name has inspired a lot
of American ingenuity, and ingenuity in general.
Just, I mentioned two things, the
famous spacecraft was named Galileo,
which visited Jupiter, because Galileo
observed Jupiter, discovered its four moons.
Well, Jupiter is many more moons,
but he discovered the first four.
That space craft was launched in 1989, was
called Galileo, reached Jupiter, and its moons,
observed other things as well along the way,
through asteroids along the way and so on.
Astronaut David Scott, who was on the moon, did
the famous experiment where he dropped a hammer
and a father from on the moon, to show that they
fall at the same rate, which is again something
that Galileo was the first
to discover and write about.
We see how, you know, his name
even, and of course the work he did,
compared ingenuity today
and a lot of creativity.
I mean David Scott started the experiment
by saying the reason we are here today is
because of some gentleman named Galileo.
One other thing in which Galileo
showed ingenuity and in any case, very,
very creative thinking, was
in the fact that he declared
that the universe was written
in the language of mathematics.
Today, we take that for granted, because you
know, all the loss of physics, for example,
are written as mathematical equations.
But at his time, there really
were no such laws of physics.
In fact, he wrote the very first few of those.
And yet he had this incredible intuition
that somehow the universe has to be written
in the language of mathematics, and of course,
people after him, you know, picked up on that,
in particular, Isaac Newton in his, you know,
theory of gravitation and in writing his laws
of mechanics, picked up on that idea,
and of course, today, we all do that.
I mean, when we want to write a theory in
physics, or in any fundamental science,
it is written in the language of mathematics.
But he really was the first to somehow feel
this by some incredible intuition of his.
Galileo was a very complex personality.
He had a very complex personality.
I mean, I don't want anybody to get the
impression that he was the nicest person.
He could be nice and supportive to members of
his own family, but when it came to, you know,
people who objected to him,
in science or otherwise,
he had an extraordinarily sharp
tongue, and then even sharper pen.
And he was-- really could be very, very strong.
I mean, his sarcasm was almost unparalleled.
He wrote in a very witty way, you know, in one
case, he mocked somebody who told this story
about the ancient Babylonians cooking eggs by
whirling them on slings like this, and he said,
oh yeah, that's an interesting story,
you know, but we also have slings,
and we have strong people who can whirl the
eggs, and we have eggs, and yet they don't cook.
So what is it that we lack
that the Babylonians had.
And he said well the only thing we
seem to lack is being Babylonian,
so it must be that the eggs are cooking
because they are Babylonians who are whirling?
So this type of thing I wanted to convey
this personality of Galileo, that you know,
not the nicest person, a genius, intellectual
freedom extremely important to him.
At the same time, a lot of self-righteousness
in the, you know, he was very,
very feisty, even when he was wrong.
And he was wrong, you know, a
good number of times he was wrong.
He was not always right.
But this is part of the thing
that we have to learn today too.
You see, scientists are actually the first
to admit that science is only provisional
and as good as the data that
exists at a certain time.
So, but the good thing about
science is that it self-corrects.
Sometimes the self-correction happens
fast, sometimes you have to wait, decades,
or even centuries for it to self-correct,
but it does self-correct, and
this we have to understand.
Science is the best guide that we can have, at
the time, for example, now, of the pandemic,
there is no other way than
to follow the science.
Or if you look at climate change.
You have to follow what the scientists
are telling us, because you know,
that's the best guide that we can have on this.
To bet against the judgment of
science, at a time when human life,
or even the entire evolution of the biosphere of
the earth is at stake, it's just unconscionable.
We have to follow the science.
So thank you very much for listening.
I hope you will enjoy the book
Galileo and the Science Deniers.
This is a book about a great person with
important lessons, I believe, for today.
And I hope that we will learn from his example,
even though the person himself, you know,
had his own flaws like we all do.
Thank you very much.
[ Music ]