GALILEO AND THE NEW PHYSICS 



A?TER Galileo had felt the strong hand of the 

 Inquisition, in 1632, he was careful to confine 

 his researches, or at least his publications, to topics 

 that seemed free from theological implications. In 

 doing so he reverted to the field of his earliest studies 

 namely, the field of mechanics; and the Dialoghi 

 delle Nuove Scienze, which he finished in 1636, and 

 which was printed two years later, attained a celebrity 

 no less than that of the heretical dialogue that had 

 preceded it. The later work was free from all ap- 

 parent heresies, yet perhaps it did more towards the 

 establishment of the Copernican doctrine, through 

 the teaching of correct mechanical principles, than 

 the other work had accomplished by a more direct 

 method. 



Galileo's astronomical discoveries were, as we have 

 seen, in a sense accidental ; at least, they received their 

 inception through the inventive genius of another. 

 His mechanical discoveries, on the other hand, were 

 the natural output of his own creative genius. At 

 the very beginning of his career, while yet a very 

 young man, though a professor of mathematics at 

 Pisa, he had begun that onslaught upon the old 

 Aristotelian ideas which he was to continue through- 

 out his life. At the famous leaning tower in Pisa, the 



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