nted; they really werent interested in scientific explanations of the cosmos. Prior to Galileos time, the Greek and medieval mind, science was a kind of formalism, a means of coordinating data, which had no bearing on the ultimate reality of things. The point was to give order to complicated data, and all that mattered was the hypothesis that was simplest to understand and most convenient. Astronomy and mathematics were regarded as the playthings of intellectuals. They were accounted as having neither philosophical nor theological relevance. There was genuine puzzlement among Churchmen that they had to get involved in a quarrel over planetary orbits.Aristotle had refuted heliocentricity , and by Galileo's time nearly every major thinker subscribed to a geocentric view. Copernicus had delayed the publication of his book for years because he feared not the censure of the Church, but the mockery of academics. It was the hide-bound Aristotelians in the schools who offered the fiercest resistance to the new science. Aristotle was the Master of Those Who Know; perusal of his texts was regarded as almost superior to the study of nature itself. The Aristotelian universe comprised two worlds, the superlunary and the sublunary. The former consisted of the moon and everything beyond; it was perfect and imperishable. The latter was the terrestrial globe and its atmosphere, subject to decay.GalileoGalileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564. He entered Pisa University in 1581 as a medical student but was soon drawn to the study of mathematics and physics. When he was 19, in 1583, he observed the swinging chandeliers in the Cathedral of Pisa and discovered that regardless of the amplitude of the arc of sway [the oscillation], the time of movement was the same for each, thus discovering the isochronic nature of the pendulum. His reputation as a scientist grew as he invented the hydrostatic balance, discovered that the path of a projectile was a parab...
