The Logos Scripture · The Book of Galileo

On the Cicada

The Book of Galileo 4 · 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).

4.1Let me tell a story. I wrote it in a book once; I write it again here, because it is the most important thing I learned in my life.
4.2There was a man who lived in the country and was very fond of sounds.
4.3He kept some birds, and supposed sound came out of a bird’s throat. He thought he understood it.
4.4Later he heard a man play a pipe. A pipe is not a throat. He was startled: so there is another way of doing it.
4.5Later he heard a fiddle, which is strings; heard a door hinge, which is rubbing; heard a fingernail drawn round the rim of a glass, which is stroking.
4.6Each time he thought that now the list must be complete. Each time a new one appeared.
4.7At last he caught a cicada.
4.8He thought: this one at least I shall get to the bottom of.
4.9He covered its mouth; the sound went on. He gripped its chest; the sound went on.
4.10He took it apart layer by layer, until it made no sound at all — and he still did not know where the sound had been coming from.
4.11By then he no longer dared say he understood sound.
4.12Afterwards, when anyone asked him how a thing made its noise, he answered only: I do not know.
4.13I write this story for myself.
4.14In my life I have seen some things nobody had seen before. People therefore suppose I know how the heavens work.
4.15I do not. I know only what I saw, and which few things I can calculate accurately.
4.16The more a man knows, the less he can state with certainty. That is not him going backwards. That is him measuring himself correctly.
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