The Renaissance Mathematicus

Just addressing the Galileo part, but as was recently linked in hackernews [1][2], Galileo was wrong (in the sense that he was arguing for an already discredited theory, and that the theory he was arguing against was also already discredited). Using Galileo as the standard of the suppression of free thought is sorta painting the Church as overzealously standing up for good science, not highlighting the Church as an enemy of truth. 1. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-from.h… 2. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-…

It seems to be a blog post titled "Galileo’s great bluff and part of the reason why Kuhn is wrong." by Thony Christie dated Nov. 12, 2010, at https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-… Google led me there.

https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-… I guess...

The corpuscular theory of light was one of those theories that was wrong but useful. The successor wave theory was also wrong. It may turn out that general relativity is founded on incorrect reasoning ("God does not play dice" for one), but that matters much less than it being fantastically useful. The basic idea- if light interacts with gravity, if you pack enough mass into a region you will get a dark star- is correct. It just turns out that the interaction can't be described by treating light as little particles and calculating by Newton's equations. There's been lots of wrong-but-useful theories, like phlogiston or arguably luminiferous aether: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/the-phlogiston-theory-wonderfu…

If you like this then https://thonyc.wordpress.com/ is the hard stuff.

The author actually considers Galileo to have been a self-promoting second-rater (at best) who has been inordinately over-praised, and he is not at all happy that Galileo is presented as a sort of secular saint who stood up to the church, so part of his paradox is to include Newton and Einstein but exclude Galileo from the pantheon of the Great Scientists. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/extracting-the-stopper/

By far the best writing on this subject I have found is over at the fantastic Renaissance Mathematicus blog. Galileo, the Church and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-and-helioce… Galileo, Foscarini, The Catholic Church, and heliocentricity in 1615 Part 1 – the occurrences: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic… And part 2 https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic… Acceptance, rejection and indifference to heliocentricity before 1610. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection-and-indif…

Does she like math puzzles? I came across this recently, about Mary Somerville. She's not exactly Ada Lovelace, but close. At the age of fifteen she came across a mathematical puzzle in a ladies magazine (mathematical recreation columns were quite common in ladies magazines in the 18th and 19th-centuries!) [1] http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/the-queen-of-science-the-woman-…

There was an article a couple days ago about why everyone believes Columbus proved the world was round[1], even though that isn't true[2]: The real myth of the medieval flat earth begins first in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has two principal sources. Probably the most influential of these was the American author Washington Irving who in his fictional biography of Columbus claimed that Columbus had to fight against the Church’s belief that the world was flat in order to get permission and backing for his voyage, a complete fabrication. I see an interesting parallel between the two cases. When you're the most influential person talking about something (or the only person at all...), people who later want to learn about the subject treat you as the best available authority, even if you're a bad one. Information is copied from authorities and self-reinforcing over time, much like genes in a population. What that means is when there's a bottleneck in the number of people talking about a topic, you can see a founder effect[3]. [1]https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/repeat-after-me-they-knew-it-w… [2]That Columbus proved it, that is, not that the world is round. [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect

Ahh yes please do go through my posts about how brains of women and men are not the same... might churn your stomach a bit. :) Again some logic please... the man who created the machines would not know how to run them? Since you love to quote wikipedia you could have scrolled down a little on the same page and seeen this - Allan G. Bromley, in the 1990 essay Difference and Analytical Engines, wrote,[71] All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a 'bug' in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so. Blue plaque to Lovelace in St. James's Square, London In his PhD thesis, Bruce Collier, who went on to write a biography of Babbage, claimed: It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Babbage wrote the 'Notes' to Menabrea's paper, but for reasons of his own encouraged the illusion in the minds of Ada and the public that they were authored by her. It is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine There is a google talk about Babbage's machines and the speaker also talked about Ada at the 36 min mark --…

Newton, Babbage, and Kepler were born on the 25th, 26th, and 27th. The Renaissance Mathematicus blogs about Kepler every year (part 3) https://thonyc.wordpress.com/the-trilogies-of-christmas-past/

If you would like to know more about her: Her legacy https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=6967 About her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether Where she lived and studied https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/the-house-where-emmy-lived/

This has long been a very thony issue https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-unfortunate-backlash-in-th…

Thanks for your enlightening comment. This seems to be a well-written article that goes more into depth: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-and-helioce…

Yeah, this was discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13636277 And division basically works the same. Discussed article is https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/the-widespread-and-persistent-… Nowhere as complex as it's made out to be.

The ruling in 1616 was about the notion that heliocentrism was proved fact, using it as a hypothesis and pointing out it gave better results was fine. See for example the letter from the very cardinal that delivered the verdict to Galileo: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/galileo-roberto/ Also, keep in mind that in 1616, how the motion of the Earth would escape the notice from everyone standing on it was a serious scientific challenge, and that predictions of heliocentrism such as stellar parallaxes were not being observed.

I also enjoyed Longitude when I read it, but it's been described as "suffer[ing] however from a major flaw, it is a distortion of the real history it is claiming to relate." https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/dava-sobel-tries-her-hand-at-h…

Some links on previous discussion that I'm aware of: - Barany's original post on Scientific American Guest Blog: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mathematicians-are-ove… - Thony Christie's responses concerning Barany's interpretation of history of mathematics: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/some-rather-strange-history-of… and https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/a-spirited-defence/

Fludd by himself had a large confrontation with Kepler, and by his anti-science position brought Kepler to state that he hates all Cabbalists. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/kepler-contra-fludd-science-co…

https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/christmas-trilogy-2012-part-ii… http://www.juliansanchez.com/2012/10/16/much-ada-about-nothing/

Don't use the term "Dark Ages". The article does not. Use "early European medieval period". Repeating it perpetuates the myth. If you must use it, say "European Dark Ages", and be aware that you are still perpetrating a false anti-religion narrative. > if in the future scholars were dismissing Newton's novel contributions to astronomy because his physics model is not that accurate compared to Einstein's. Newton's came first. Einstein improved on Newton. The example you point to came after the Ptolemaic system and made worse predictions. Plus, there are no compounding rotations of homocentric spheres. And there were other heliocentric models. > of western biased scholars making their scientist/engineers/technologist contributions even more significant Sure. And you didn't mention ancient Indian contributions to tides either, like the one I quoted from Wikipedia. I see from your posting history that you posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37184786, with someone else posting a comment linking to https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-unfortunate-backlash-in-th… . Quoting from it: "In earlier versions of this narrative, its European propagators claimed that the Islamic scholars who appropriated Greek knowledge in the eighth-century and then passed it back to their European successors, beginning in the twelfth-century, only conserved that knowledge, effectively doing nothing with it and not increasing it. ... a later…

The OP is right to raise questions about this in academics. The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics: The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people see the credit that way. The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the last author is kept on lengthy author lists in many. It's because last author doesn't mean least work anymore. I know a colleague who quietly started jockeying to be last author on papers because he knew it was almost as/more prestigious than first. The grad student is first and the professor is anywhere else but people assume that it's the profs work because "grad students are just learning" or some such thing. The grad student deserves the credit but is second or third or something else because of power differentials involving all the other authors. The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback. A coauthor formulating and doing the analyses, without whom the paper could not exist because they were the ones translating the theories into quantifiable testable models, are left off the paper because "analyses don't deserve credit" or something. Really, anything and everything goes in academics. It's broken. I realize that there are people/groups who…