QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Like Kepler, Galileo had established a reputation as a mathematician at an early stage in his
academic career. At the age of 25, he was appointed to the position of professor of mathematics
at Pisa, and three years later, in 1592, he moved to Padova. There he studied falling bodies and
developed his epoch-making laws of motion, which proved that Aristotle’s ideas concerning the
motion of bodies were incorrect. With the help of observations and accurate measurements,
Galileo concentrated on studying how objects actually moved in reality. Others before Galileo
had asked why heavy bodies fall, but he also subjected terrestial motion to precise mathematical
study. His first concern was not to explain, but to describe. Even more than to Kepler, nature
presented herself to Galileo as a simple orderly system. He was continually astonished at the
marvellous manner in which natural happenings folloved the principles of geometry. Aristotle,
like the preceding traditions of natural philosophy, was concerned with searching for the cause or
purpose of motion. He believed that objects were seeking their natural positions from which they
could not be removed except by an external force, but Galileo now concluded that while objects
could indeed be at rest if nothing was forcing them to move, they could also be moving at
constant velocity. 189
In contrast to everyday observation, no force was required to maintain uniform motion, force was
only required to change the state of motion. The change in the concept of inertia which Newton
later formulated more precisely probably constitutes the most important element in the transition
from antique and mediaeval science to classical science. It is one of the foundations which
underlie the most essential parts of the new world-view, and it is beyond dispute that this change
was largely brought about by Galileo. When he is talking about the phenomena of inertia,
Galileo often, however, more-or-less lapses into the modes of expression and thought employed
by the Scholastics of the 1300s and also by modern schoolchildren: everything that moves is
moved by something else. This should not be a surprise, because Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo
continued to view the universe as a sphere with a finite radius, even if they believed that radius
to be much large than their predecessors had done. 190
Galileo, like Kepler made a clear distinction between the world which is absolute, objective,
immutable and mathematical, and that which is relative, subjective, fluctuating and sensible.
189 Dijksterhuis 1986, 380. Tarnas 1998, 264. Burtt 1980, 73-5. Galileo’s speculations about inertia, relativity and
the composition of motions were largely directed at refuting the physical objections that had previously been raised
to the idea that the earth was in motion. Using his new concept of inertia, Galileo was able, for example, to explain
why a body thrown vertically upwards into the air fell back on its starting position even though the earth was
moving. It was indeed moving - like all other things on earth - forwards at the same velocity as the earth. This
common motion of all things could not however be observed via any experiments carried out on the earth.
77