The Logos Scripture · The Book of Galileo

On Whether an Instrument Counts

The Book of Galileo 2 · Written by himself, from the Starry Messenger, The Assayer, the Letter to the Grand Duchess, and the Two New Sciences

Galileo Galilei, born at Pisa in 1564, died at Arcetri in 1642. He improved the telescope and turned it on the sky, and saw four bodies going round Jupiter, mountains on the moon, and that the Milky Way is made of stars. The Starry Messenger came out in 1610, The Assayer in 1623, and the Two New Sciences in 1638 — that last written under house arrest and carried abroad to Leiden to be printed. The law of falling bodies is his. He wrote a great deal. He was a churchman all his life. Yet that is no bar at all — that an argument must not be closed on divine will he states more plainly than anyone else in this scripture, having written a long letter arguing that the words of scripture must not be used to settle questions about the heavens. Newton kept the door between two rooms shut (cf. The Book of Newton 4); Faraday went and served in the other and wrote nothing there (cf. the note to The Book of Faraday); this man is the one who reasoned the rule out. In 1633, at sixty-nine, he was brought to Rome and tried. They showed him the instruments. He knelt, signed, and said that what he had said before was false. The Order records this without covering for him, and does not rank him against Bruno (cf. The Book of Bruno 4). The two met the same door and went different ways: Bruno was fifty-two, held eight years, and did not write it; this man was sixty-nine, signed, and spent nine years under house arrest, in which he wrote the best book of his life and had it carried abroad to be printed. Chapter five is him saying why he signed. Let the reader read both books and judge; the Order will not judge for you. Lastly: a sentence is said to have been muttered by him after signing — and yet it moves. It first appears in a book published more than a hundred years after his death and cannot be checked. The Order records that the story exists and that it cannot be checked (cf. The Highest Covenant 1.1).

2.1A question was put to me. It was a good question, and I will answer it in earnest.
2.2They said: what you see in that tube, we cannot see with the naked eye.
2.3Then how do we know those things are in the sky and not in your tube?
2.4Perhaps your two pieces of glass are producing them.
2.5The question is not perverse. Before me, a man had only a pair of eyes. What the eye could not see did not count as being there.
2.6Now I hold up an instrument and say it sees further than the eye. On what ground should it be believed?
2.7My answer is this, and I will take it step by step.
2.8First: turn it on things you already know.
2.9Look through it at the bell-tower outside the town. Then walk out, measure it, come back and compare.
2.10It agrees. It agrees once, and it agrees ten times.
2.11When an instrument has never deceived you where you can check it, then you have grounds for turning it where you cannot.
2.12Second: change the tube, change the hand, change the night — and the same things are seen.
2.13If the glass were producing them, two different pieces of glass would not produce the same things.
2.14Third: what it shows has an order of its own. Those four small points beside Jupiter shift every night, but they shift in a pattern, and I can calculate where they will be tomorrow night.
2.15I calculated. I looked the second night, and there they were.
2.16A trick of glass will not calculate tomorrow night for you.
2.17So I say the instrument counts. Not because I say it counts, but because it stands up to those three tests.
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