Thursday

Good Morning, (89-4)

Here is a question for you. We had seen a lot of Prince Harry in the British Military. Every member of the British military must have his/her last name on a name tag attached to their uniform. What is/was on Prince Harry's name tag? Answer at the end of this segment.

I was looking through my wallet the other day and saw an old American Express receipt and it reminded me of this episode. I was living on Daniel Island, SC which is across the Cooper River from Charleston. There was a bar across the street from my condo that I visited on a regular basis after work. On one particular occasion after a few cocktails I decided to go to a fairly fancy restaurant about a mile away for dinner. I paid my bar tab with my American Express card. After a great dinner I gave the server my card and she came back and said that American Express wants you to call them. I called them and they asked me if I had been on a cruise lately. I said that I had went on a 13 day cruise aboard a Holland America ship out of Dover, England. Then she asked when was the last time I had used the card and I told them about an hour ago at the Soda Water Grill on Daniel Island, SC. She said that they had canceled my card because someone in New York City had just tried to pay for $300 worth of baby clothes with an American Express card with your number on it. I thanked them for being alert for an obvious fraud but would they reactivate my card for 10 minutes so I could pay for dinner. She said “You have 10 minutes and we will send you another card via overnight Fedex.” My question is how could anyone copy my card number, make another card with those numbers in one hour. Maybe the world is getting too complicated.

The regular history lesson will follow this biography.

Galileo Galilei

The Father of Modern Science

Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. He was the son of Vincenzo Galilei who was a mathematician and musician. His mother was Guilia Ammannati. Galileo was the youngest of seven children. From a very early age he was tutored and attended the University of Pisa but was forced to cease his study there for financial reasons. But his brilliance was recognized and he was offered a mathematic teaching position on the faculty in 1589. A little later he took a position on the faculty of the University of Padua teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy. He held this position until 1610. It was during this time that he explored science and made his most important discoveries.

Even though Galileo was a devout Catholic he fathered three children out of wedlock, two daughters and one son. All were the children of Galileo and Marina Gamba. By the law in those days, the daughters had to go to a convent because of their illegitimacy and attended the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri.

In 1612 he went to Rome and joined the Accademia dei Lincei. Opposition to the Copernican theory which Galileo supported arose primarily from the Catholic Church. The Copernican theory suggested that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the “universe”. In 1614 a Catholic priest from the pulpit denounced Galileo’s opinions about the motions of the planets as being on the cusp of heresy. Galileo went to Rome to defend himself from these accusations. But in 1616 Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino personally handed Galileo an admonition enjoining him from advocating or teaching the Copernican theory as religious doctrine. Galileo did not back off totally from his beliefs and published two different books that danced around the Copernican theory without really advocating it. In 1632 he was called to appear before the Holy Office in Rome. The court condemned his teachings and was held in prison until December 1633 when he was allowed to retire to his villa in Arcetri under house arrest. This outrage with the church sticking their bloody nose into academia just confirms my belief that the church should stick to saving my soul and let academia do its thing unmolested. Anyway, this great mind left this earth on January 8, 1642 at the age of 78. Galileo was totally blind for the last year of his life and was escorted by one of his students, Vincenzo Viviani, who was with him when he died.

Galileo’s contributions to the scientific world are almost too many to count. The biggest problem that he had was before he could teach a theory to his students he had to pass it before the hierarchy of the church first. He was staunchly opposed to the blind obedience to an authority (like the church) or other thinkers (like Aristotle) in matters of science so as to keep a separation between philosophy and religion. These thoughts are why Galileo is known as “the father of science”. He pioneered the use of quantitative experiments and analyzing the results mathematically. There had never been such a procedure used in the history of science but it is well used to this day. Galileo said “The language of God is mathematics.” Up until this point the scientists followed Aristotle’s logic unquestioned, not mathematics. Then came Galileo explaining that all falling bodies fall at the same rate regardless of their weight, air resistance not withstanding. This is the exact opposite of what was taught by Aristotle. Galileo did an experiment off the leaning tower of Pisa whereby he dropped two different sized balls simultaneously and they hit the ground at the same time. Later scientists used his information in computing terminal velocity. Galileo did not invent the telescope but improved it enough to where he could discern the four moons of Jupiter and determined that they were in orbit around Jupiter and was able to plot sun spots. He published his first treatise on what he had observed in the sky with a small pamphlet named “Sidereal Messenger”. When Galileo stated that the four moons of Jupiter were in orbit around Jupiter, the other scientists and the ever loving church about peed their pants because it was the church’s theory that everything orbited the Earth. Another thing that went a long way toward the Earth not being the center of the universe was that Galileo saw that Venus went through phases like the moon meaning it was orbiting the sun, not the Earth. He also observed that the Moon had a rough and irregular surface and he made rough estimates as to their height by observing the shadows. Aristotle had said that the Moon was a perfect sphere. All of the brilliant scientific minds of the time could not describe what caused the tides, including Galileo. He said it was centrifugal force, he was wrong. It took Isaac Newton and his laws of gravity to settle this issue. Galileo understood the mathematics required to dissect and measure the area of a parabola. There is almost no limit to where Galileo’s star would have risen had it not been for the interference of the church. Speaking of Isaac Newton, he was born one year, almost to the day, after Galileo died. And that ain’t all. The famous present day astrophysicist Stephen Hawking was born to the day 300 years after the death of Isaac Newton. Both Hawking and Newton were Englishmen, both attended Cambridge University and both were/are presidents of the Lucasian and Royal Societies. I ask this question: Are Galileo, Newton and Hawking the same person? In my mind, there are too many coincidences to ignore.

By the way, It took the Catholic Church until the 19^th century to admit they were wrong about fostering the earth as being the center of the Universe. Religious beliefs taught in schools? I don’t think so.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow

The name tag on Prince Harry was “Wales” since he is the Prince of Wales