Galileo Galilei’s “Two New Sciences” (eBook)

This book aims to make Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) accessible to the modern reader by refashioning the great scientist's masterpiece 'Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences' in today's language.

Galileo Galilei stands as one of the most important figures in history, not simply for his achievements in astronomy, physics, and engineering and for revolutionizing science and the scientific method in general, but also for the role that he played in the (still ongoing) drama concerning entrenched power and its desire to stifle any knowledge that may threaten it. Therefore, it is important that today's readers come to understand and appreciate what Galilei accomplished and wrote. But the mindset that shapes how we see the world today is quite different from the mindset -- and language -- of Galilei and his contemporaries. Another obstacle to a full understanding of Galilei's writings is posed by the countless historical, philosophical, geometrical, and linguistic references he made, along with his often florid prose, with its blend of Italian and Latin. De Angelis' new rendition of the work includes translations of the original geometrical figures into algebraic formulae in modern notation and allows the non-specialist reader to follow the thread of Galileo's thought and in a way that was barely possible until now.

Alessandro De Angelis is a high energy physicist and an astrophysicist. A professor at the Universities of Padua and Lisbon, he is Principal Investigator for the proposed space mission ASTROGAM and, for many years, has been Director of research at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, and Scientific Coordinator and Chairman of the board managing the MAGIC gamma-ray telescopes on the Canary Island of La Palma. His main research interest is in fundamental physics, especially astrophysics and elementary particle physics in accelerators. He graduated from Padua, was employed at CERN for seven years in the 1990s, ending as a staff member, and was later among the founding members of NASA's Fermi gamma-ray telescope project. His original scientific contributions have mostly been related to quantum chromodynamics, artificial neural networks, and the study of the cosmological propagation of photons. He has taught astro-particle physics in Italy and Portugal and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Paris VI, and at the the Max-Planck Institute in Munich. He has been author of books, scientific publications in journals including Science and Nature, popularization articles, and essays in the history and philosophy of science.