

A Very Rare Book: The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise - Thevet
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/a-very-rare-book

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devindotcom
I read this in print and it is an absolutely fascinating read. Take the time
with your morning coffee or lunch to take your time with it. Here is another
take:

[http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/faking-
galileo#](http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/faking-galileo#)

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davidw
What a fascinating read! It's kind of sad in some ways - the contrast between
Galileo doing his work here in Padova, and modern Italy, with the guy spending
a few months in jail and then being sentenced to house arrest in his villa
after having put all that time and energy into deceit and theft.

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smellf
Was anyone else thinking about The Ninth Gate as they began reading this
piece? The globetrotting, talk of valuable books and masterful antiquarian
knowledge, and slow but definite buildup of tension were the same. Anyone know
of another film or book that has this same feel?

Excellent piece, worth reading to the end.

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satori99
The book, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, comes to mind.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum)

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PaulRobinson
Foucault's Pendulum is best read as a satire. I wasn't told that it sort of
was before I read it and found it maddening. The moment I realised Umberto Eco
was mocking everybody who believed this stuff was important, it all made much
more sense.

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akkartik
_" Gingerich has examined nearly every extant first- and second-edition
copy—six hundred in all—of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres."_

That is a fascinating book; part history of science, part detective story and
part bibliophile's wet dream: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Nobody-Read-
Revolutions/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Nobody-Read-
Revolutions/dp/B000BNPG8C)

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Osmium
> "In addition to offering insights on celestial movement, the book rebutted
> Aristotle, who had maintained that heavenly bodies were smooth and
> “perfect”; with his telescope, Galileo had also looked extensively at the
> Earth’s moon, and could see mountains and craters on its surface."

Surely you can see the moon's unevenness with the naked eye?

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barwell
This is correct. But the belief in Aristotle's philosophy was even more
powerful:

 _" The medieval followers of Aristotle, first in the Islamic world and then
in Christian Europe, tried to make sense of the lunar spots in Aristotelian
terms. Various possibilities were entertained. It had been suggested already
in Antiquity that the Moon was a perfect mirror and that its markings were
reflections of earthly features, but this explanation was easily dismissed
because the face of the Moon never changes as it moves about the Earth.
Perhaps there were vapors between the Sun and the Moon, so that the images
were actually contained in the Sun's incident light and thus reflected to the
Earth. The explanation that finally became standard was that there were
variations of "density" in the Moon that caused this otherwise perfectly
spherical body to appear the way it does. The perfection of the Moon, and
therefore the heavens, was thus preserved."_

[http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/moon.html](http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/moon.html)

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SilasX
That ... seems like a lot of effort to avoid facing up to the moon looking
bumpy. And Aristotle? WTF dude, you saw the same thing!

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orf
Very interesting, I wanted some more info on the "Florence Sheet", but Google
turned up nothing but this article (or references to it). That seems strange.

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Thevet
Mario Biagioli has written about it (I think the Google issue is just that
historians usually call it "Galileo's Drawings of the Moon" or the like,
rather than "the Florence sheet").

Here's Biagioli on it:
[http://books.google.fr/books?id=XfKjO9I47QUC&pg=PA145&dq=gal...](http://books.google.fr/books?id=XfKjO9I47QUC&pg=PA145&dq=galileo+moon+florence&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZuYJVMj8PM3KaJzWgogO&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=galileo%20moon%20florence&f=false)

