THE TRIAL OF GALILEO GALILEI Lecture delivered at CERN on 20 February, 1964 on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's birth)

摘要

Galileo Galilei was born in Florence in February four hundred years ago. When he died in 1642, the same year that Newton was born, a new era in the history of science had begun. This remarkable change in the history of science was largely due to the work of Galileo. It is not surprising that an upheaval of such magnitude could not occur without violent controversy. The life of Galileo was rather tumultuous, all the more so that Galileo himself was everything else but shy or retiring. He threw himself into the fray with relish and with gusto. He was not only a scientist who made a number of original discoveries of the greatest importance but he was also a polemic who used the spoken and written language with supreme mastery in the service of his ideas. His ideas were not always right and his tactics were not always fair and his enemies were not only frustrated Aristotelians and bigots.