The topic for this week is Kepler and Galileo. Both Kuhn and Dear survey their roles in the scientific revolution, and the Matthews anthology contains selections from three of Galileo's works.

Tuesday (9/27). Begin with Kuhn to complete ch. 6 and then turn to Dear's ch. 4. (We're skipping the discussion of Bacon at the end of Dear's ch. 3 until next week.) Kuhn gives a quite a bit of detail concerning the contributions of Kepler and Galileo to astronomy, and running through those will be our main focus. Dear's concern is less with the details of their scientific contributions than with the project of elevating the status of mathematical science. (Both Kuhn and Dear provide illustrations of Kepler's early geometrical account of the relative sizes of planetary orbits. It's hard to make the full detail visible on an ordinary book page. If you'd like to see it go to the online page images of an early book containing the illustration reproduced in Dear:

http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/books/book.cgi?call=520_K38PP

go to the illustration following p. 26:

http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/books/pages.cgi?call=520_K38PP&file=0042

and click on "Large Image." If your browser is set to automatically scale images, you won't see the full detail since the enlarged version is big enough to fill a 39"×45" screen.)

Thursday (9/29). Matthews has selections from three works of Galileo. The selection from the first is a self-contained discussion of the distinction between what came to be referred to as "primary" and "secondary" qualities, a distinction that was very important in philosophical discussions of knowledge in the 17th century. (The work the selection is drawn from, The Assayer, was actually a polemical work that was part of a controversy concerning the nature of comets.) The remaining two selections come from Galileo's two major works and reflect the content of those works as a whole. In the first, a selection from the Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the character who represents his views (be sure to read the description of the cast of characters in the footnote on p. 61) responds to arguments against the idea of a moving earth. The second selection is from the Discourses Concerning the Two New Sciences and is part of Galileo's account of falling bodies. (That is one of the "two new sciences" of the title; the other is a discussion of what Galileo refers to as the "resistance which solid bodies offer to fracture by external forces," something that is another example of the continuity between modern science and practical applications that Dear points to at the end of his chapter 4.)