Galileo Galilei (1564–1642); his life and his work have been and continue to be the subject of an enormous number of scholarly works. One of the con- quences of this is the proliferation of identities bestowed on this gure of the Italian Renaissance: Galileo the great theoretician; Galileo the keen astronomer; Galileo the genius; Galileo the physicist; Galileo the mathematician; Galileo the solitary thinker; Galileo the founder of modern science; Galileo the heretic; Galileo the courtier; Galileo the early modern Archimedes; Galileo the Aristotelian; Galileo the founder of the Italian scienti c language; Galileo the cosmologist; Galileo the Platonist; Galileo the artist and Galileo the democratic scientist. These may be only a few of the identities that historians of science have associated with Galileo. And now: Galileo the engineer! That Galileo had so many faces; or even identities; seems hardly plausible. But by focusing on his activities as an engineer; historians are able to reassemble Galileo in a single persona; at least as far as his scienti c work is concerned. The impression that Galileo was an ingenious and isolated theoretician derives from his scienti c work being regarded outside the context in which it originated.
#3758449 in eBooks 2011-10-12 2011-10-12File Name: B007CL79IG
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