“Though some people are of the opinion that it was a friend of Galileo who did the famous experiment involving the leaning tower of Pisa, Galileo has to be credited with arguing and coming to a conclusion based on an experiment, without actually doing the experiment. Whether Galileo or his friend dropped two bodies of unequal masses from the leaning tower simultaneously, what Galileo wanted his contemporaries to believe was that the experiment was done in a vacuum. It is only in a vacuum that bodies of unequal masses dropped simultaneously from the same height would reach the earth simultaneously.”_____________________________________
by Prof. Nalin de Silva
(February 13, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Though Copernicus is credited with "discovering" the heliocentric motion of the earth it is known that the ancient Bharaths were aware of this knowledge before him. It may be that Copernicus who received this information through the Arabs, introduced the idea to Europe and came to be recognised as the "discoverer" of the heliocentric motion of the earth. However it was Galileo who was the more abstract thinker who took up the challenge of convincing the west, that included the Pope and the Catholic Church, that the earth went round the sun and not the other way around.
Galileo is undoubtedly the father of western mechanics. Newtonian Mechanics has been built on the epistemology that Galileo introduced into the science of mechanics in the west, and may be not enough credit is given to this pioneer of western dynamics associated with western modernity. The English who took control over the western modernity has seen to it that Newton reins supreme in western Physics and Calculus without any challenge from Galileos and Leibnitzes who had respectively contributed to these fields. Incidently it is also known that the basic ideas of Calculus were known to the Bharaths before both Newton and Leibnitz. The prevailing mechanics in the west at the time Galileo was born was that of Aristotle. Though Aristotelian logic is different from the logic of the Catholic Chinthanaya, the Aristotelian Physics was concrete and not abstract.
According to Aristotle the heavier bodies fell to the earth faster than the lighter bodies. It was an observation that many people were familiar with, as a feather dropped from the same height as a stone would take a longer time to reach the ground. It is wrong to say that it was Galileo who introduced the so-called experimental method as Aristotle would have come to the above conclusion through observation. Moreover it is known that the Brahmins in ancient Bharath had carried out an experiment to find out whether the soul escaped the human body after death. What Galileo did was to introduce abstract thinking into western science.
Though some people are of the opinion that it was a friend of Galileo who did the famous experiment involving the leaning tower of Pisa, Galileo has to be credited with arguing and coming to a conclusion based on an experiment, without actually doing the experiment. Whether Galileo or his friend dropped two bodies of unequal masses from the leaning tower simultaneously, what Galileo wanted his contemporaries to believe was that the experiment was done in a vacuum. It is only in a vacuum that bodies of unequal masses dropped simultaneously from the same height would reach the earth simultaneously. However, there was no way that either Galileo or his friend would have created a vacuum in the seventeenth century in Pisa in a room let alone round a tower. Thus it was left to the imagination of those who could do so to imagine that there was a vacuum around the leaning tower of Pisa. Had Galileo or his friend done the experiment with a feather and a stone, neither would have been able to demonstrate that the bodies dropped from a height fall with the same acceleration towards the earth. Galileo or his friend were careful in selecting the objects. They showed what they wanted to demonstrate.
In "demonstrating" that the earth goes round the sun Galileo used analogies and abstract logic and not "experiments". The famous question asked by his contemporaries and also by intelligent students even today is "if the earth moves how can an object dropped from the top of a building fall to the ground at the foot of the building and not at some distance away from it." It is easy to reason out that if the earth moves then during the time that the object takes to fall to the ground the earth together with the building would have moved some distance away from the object and as a result the object would have fallen to the ground at some distance away from the foot of the building. Since the object falls to the ground at the foot of the building the rational intelligent people concluded using "reductio ad absurdum" method of Aristotelian logic that the assumption that the earth moved was wrong. Galileo appeared to be irrational in assuming that earth moves.
Galileo constructed an ingenious argument to "establish" that the earth moves. He said that only the motion relative to an observer is visible. The other motions though they could exist are invisible. What Galileo said in essence was that the object moved not only vertically but also in other directions but the motion in the other directions were invisible to the observers on the earth, as the earth also moved in those directions. He wanted the others to conclude that invisible motions exist. For the so-called educated people living at present it is easy to believe that the earth moves round the sun without observing it because the educated people have been trained to "believe" and not to think. Any type of education is in the final analysis a brain washing, and more so the present western education given to us through the schools and the universities. I suppose the difference between a scholar and a thinker is that the former "thinks" according to the rules, the assumptions, the theories etc., that he/she has been taught, which amounts to non thinking, while the latter tries to break away from the foundation of the knowledge that has been imparted to him/her. Galileo was a thinker and also a creative person. Only the creative thinkers could come out with new knowledge. When I say new knowledge I have in mind new assumptions, rules etc., and not the type of so-called contributions to knowledge one makes through theses submitted for postgraduate degrees and through ordinary research papers even if they are published in the "reputed" international journals. Sometimes newspaper articles contain original thinking that is not found in the "research papers" published in the so-called cited journals, though most of the academics in Sri Lanka may not agree with me.
"Only relative motion is visible" said Galileo. What a profound statement that was. What had been assumed until then was that only the visible exist. Galileo said "no even others exist though we do not observe them". One could call him the Father of Western Theoretical Physics that very often predicts the "existence" of objects including fields before they are "observed". Once Theoretical Physics predicts the existence of particles the experimentalists "observe" them according to the rules that the theoretical physicists construct. What is called observation is not observation through naked eye but through microscopes, telescopes, cloud chambers etc., according to some rules and interpreted as particles. What are "observed" are not electrons but "images" of "electrons" that are recorded on photographic plates. The images are interpreted as electrons according to the rules constructed by the theoretical physicists. What is considered to be in existence is what we think is in existence. It is in the final analysis a game of construction of rules and assumptions. It has to be emphasised that even the assumptions are created or constructed. If somebody says this is relativism then blame Galileo for opening the floodgates. It is not for nothing that relativity in Newtonian Mechanics is known as Galilean Relativity. One may conclude, as any Sinhala Buddhist and not an Olcott Buddhist would do, that even the observations with the naked eye and in fact all our perceptions are made according to conceptions. There are no perceptions without conceptions and western Phenomenology is in a muddle because it does not recognise this "phenomenon".
Galileo was a western modernist. Though he was a Catholic in religion, in spirit he was a reformist. We may even say that he was a reformist in culture, and he lived after the so-called renaissance, and Luther. The motion of the earth round the sun was not observable. Neither could it be "experienced". It was not "revealed" to anybody, though one would say that the Bharaths knew it. However, armed with a principle of relativity he created for the purpose, Galileo was able to "demonstrate" that the earth moves around the sun, a "phenomenon" not observed, not experienced by anybody, nor revealed to anybody. Galileo made use of abstract reasoning to "demonstrate" this "fact", or rather to construct this "fact", the facts being all creations, and in my view, it was this abstractness that the Catholic Church could not come to terms with rather than the displacement of the earth being the central position. No wonder being a profound thinker and a man with a mission Galileo would have been arrogant, (In my opinion the only non arrogant thinker who wanted to teach the others what he knew was Buddha, but then in strict terms the Buddha was not a thinker and in a sense Buddha taught "no knowledge". When Arhath Kondanna Thero became the first to "understand" Buddha Dhamma he was called Anna Kondanna, Kondanna who had no "Gnana", indicating that one becomes an Arhath not by gaining more knowledge but "understanding" that all knowledge is constructed due to "avidya". We are seeking knowledge due to "avidya" and all "science" whether western or eastern is a result of "avidya".) and the Catholic Church would have found him to be a difficult person to handle. It is said that the Catholic Church was against propagating the idea that the earth went round the sun, without any proof. The Church would not have agreed with Galileo's proof based on abstract reasonings that went against the methods of acquiring knowledge, such as observations, experience, revelations known to the western medieval world.
Western modernism began with renaissance that moved away from collectivity towards individualism. The person or the individual, rather than the group or the community became the important unit. Collective thinking is more concrete than abstract, and a community has feelings that could be described as concrete. The western renaissance emphasised individualism and even God became more personal than a collective "focal point". The assemblies and congregations had to gradually give way to individualism. The Bharath concept of "gana" (group) was not alien to the Catholics and even to the Jews who had their congregations. However, gradually "atomisation" of the society took over and "reason" became the common standard between the atomised individuals. Galileo was instrumental in giving "reason" its "due place" by making it abstract and making it devoid of any personal biases. It is ironical that the westerners in order to give prominence to "individualism" had to do away with the so-called personal biases. The relativism of Galileo was possible only with the introduction of the "objectivity" that "existed" beyond relativity. Even the so-called postmodernists have not been able to do away with this "objectivity" that lies beyond the relative features they talk of.
(Professor Nalin de Silva is a Sri Lankan theoretical physicist, philosopher and a political analyst. He is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.)
by Prof. Nalin de Silva
(February 13, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Though Copernicus is credited with "discovering" the heliocentric motion of the earth it is known that the ancient Bharaths were aware of this knowledge before him. It may be that Copernicus who received this information through the Arabs, introduced the idea to Europe and came to be recognised as the "discoverer" of the heliocentric motion of the earth. However it was Galileo who was the more abstract thinker who took up the challenge of convincing the west, that included the Pope and the Catholic Church, that the earth went round the sun and not the other way around.
Galileo is undoubtedly the father of western mechanics. Newtonian Mechanics has been built on the epistemology that Galileo introduced into the science of mechanics in the west, and may be not enough credit is given to this pioneer of western dynamics associated with western modernity. The English who took control over the western modernity has seen to it that Newton reins supreme in western Physics and Calculus without any challenge from Galileos and Leibnitzes who had respectively contributed to these fields. Incidently it is also known that the basic ideas of Calculus were known to the Bharaths before both Newton and Leibnitz. The prevailing mechanics in the west at the time Galileo was born was that of Aristotle. Though Aristotelian logic is different from the logic of the Catholic Chinthanaya, the Aristotelian Physics was concrete and not abstract.
According to Aristotle the heavier bodies fell to the earth faster than the lighter bodies. It was an observation that many people were familiar with, as a feather dropped from the same height as a stone would take a longer time to reach the ground. It is wrong to say that it was Galileo who introduced the so-called experimental method as Aristotle would have come to the above conclusion through observation. Moreover it is known that the Brahmins in ancient Bharath had carried out an experiment to find out whether the soul escaped the human body after death. What Galileo did was to introduce abstract thinking into western science.
Though some people are of the opinion that it was a friend of Galileo who did the famous experiment involving the leaning tower of Pisa, Galileo has to be credited with arguing and coming to a conclusion based on an experiment, without actually doing the experiment. Whether Galileo or his friend dropped two bodies of unequal masses from the leaning tower simultaneously, what Galileo wanted his contemporaries to believe was that the experiment was done in a vacuum. It is only in a vacuum that bodies of unequal masses dropped simultaneously from the same height would reach the earth simultaneously. However, there was no way that either Galileo or his friend would have created a vacuum in the seventeenth century in Pisa in a room let alone round a tower. Thus it was left to the imagination of those who could do so to imagine that there was a vacuum around the leaning tower of Pisa. Had Galileo or his friend done the experiment with a feather and a stone, neither would have been able to demonstrate that the bodies dropped from a height fall with the same acceleration towards the earth. Galileo or his friend were careful in selecting the objects. They showed what they wanted to demonstrate.
In "demonstrating" that the earth goes round the sun Galileo used analogies and abstract logic and not "experiments". The famous question asked by his contemporaries and also by intelligent students even today is "if the earth moves how can an object dropped from the top of a building fall to the ground at the foot of the building and not at some distance away from it." It is easy to reason out that if the earth moves then during the time that the object takes to fall to the ground the earth together with the building would have moved some distance away from the object and as a result the object would have fallen to the ground at some distance away from the foot of the building. Since the object falls to the ground at the foot of the building the rational intelligent people concluded using "reductio ad absurdum" method of Aristotelian logic that the assumption that the earth moved was wrong. Galileo appeared to be irrational in assuming that earth moves.
Galileo constructed an ingenious argument to "establish" that the earth moves. He said that only the motion relative to an observer is visible. The other motions though they could exist are invisible. What Galileo said in essence was that the object moved not only vertically but also in other directions but the motion in the other directions were invisible to the observers on the earth, as the earth also moved in those directions. He wanted the others to conclude that invisible motions exist. For the so-called educated people living at present it is easy to believe that the earth moves round the sun without observing it because the educated people have been trained to "believe" and not to think. Any type of education is in the final analysis a brain washing, and more so the present western education given to us through the schools and the universities. I suppose the difference between a scholar and a thinker is that the former "thinks" according to the rules, the assumptions, the theories etc., that he/she has been taught, which amounts to non thinking, while the latter tries to break away from the foundation of the knowledge that has been imparted to him/her. Galileo was a thinker and also a creative person. Only the creative thinkers could come out with new knowledge. When I say new knowledge I have in mind new assumptions, rules etc., and not the type of so-called contributions to knowledge one makes through theses submitted for postgraduate degrees and through ordinary research papers even if they are published in the "reputed" international journals. Sometimes newspaper articles contain original thinking that is not found in the "research papers" published in the so-called cited journals, though most of the academics in Sri Lanka may not agree with me.
"Only relative motion is visible" said Galileo. What a profound statement that was. What had been assumed until then was that only the visible exist. Galileo said "no even others exist though we do not observe them". One could call him the Father of Western Theoretical Physics that very often predicts the "existence" of objects including fields before they are "observed". Once Theoretical Physics predicts the existence of particles the experimentalists "observe" them according to the rules that the theoretical physicists construct. What is called observation is not observation through naked eye but through microscopes, telescopes, cloud chambers etc., according to some rules and interpreted as particles. What are "observed" are not electrons but "images" of "electrons" that are recorded on photographic plates. The images are interpreted as electrons according to the rules constructed by the theoretical physicists. What is considered to be in existence is what we think is in existence. It is in the final analysis a game of construction of rules and assumptions. It has to be emphasised that even the assumptions are created or constructed. If somebody says this is relativism then blame Galileo for opening the floodgates. It is not for nothing that relativity in Newtonian Mechanics is known as Galilean Relativity. One may conclude, as any Sinhala Buddhist and not an Olcott Buddhist would do, that even the observations with the naked eye and in fact all our perceptions are made according to conceptions. There are no perceptions without conceptions and western Phenomenology is in a muddle because it does not recognise this "phenomenon".
Galileo was a western modernist. Though he was a Catholic in religion, in spirit he was a reformist. We may even say that he was a reformist in culture, and he lived after the so-called renaissance, and Luther. The motion of the earth round the sun was not observable. Neither could it be "experienced". It was not "revealed" to anybody, though one would say that the Bharaths knew it. However, armed with a principle of relativity he created for the purpose, Galileo was able to "demonstrate" that the earth moves around the sun, a "phenomenon" not observed, not experienced by anybody, nor revealed to anybody. Galileo made use of abstract reasoning to "demonstrate" this "fact", or rather to construct this "fact", the facts being all creations, and in my view, it was this abstractness that the Catholic Church could not come to terms with rather than the displacement of the earth being the central position. No wonder being a profound thinker and a man with a mission Galileo would have been arrogant, (In my opinion the only non arrogant thinker who wanted to teach the others what he knew was Buddha, but then in strict terms the Buddha was not a thinker and in a sense Buddha taught "no knowledge". When Arhath Kondanna Thero became the first to "understand" Buddha Dhamma he was called Anna Kondanna, Kondanna who had no "Gnana", indicating that one becomes an Arhath not by gaining more knowledge but "understanding" that all knowledge is constructed due to "avidya". We are seeking knowledge due to "avidya" and all "science" whether western or eastern is a result of "avidya".) and the Catholic Church would have found him to be a difficult person to handle. It is said that the Catholic Church was against propagating the idea that the earth went round the sun, without any proof. The Church would not have agreed with Galileo's proof based on abstract reasonings that went against the methods of acquiring knowledge, such as observations, experience, revelations known to the western medieval world.
Western modernism began with renaissance that moved away from collectivity towards individualism. The person or the individual, rather than the group or the community became the important unit. Collective thinking is more concrete than abstract, and a community has feelings that could be described as concrete. The western renaissance emphasised individualism and even God became more personal than a collective "focal point". The assemblies and congregations had to gradually give way to individualism. The Bharath concept of "gana" (group) was not alien to the Catholics and even to the Jews who had their congregations. However, gradually "atomisation" of the society took over and "reason" became the common standard between the atomised individuals. Galileo was instrumental in giving "reason" its "due place" by making it abstract and making it devoid of any personal biases. It is ironical that the westerners in order to give prominence to "individualism" had to do away with the so-called personal biases. The relativism of Galileo was possible only with the introduction of the "objectivity" that "existed" beyond relativity. Even the so-called postmodernists have not been able to do away with this "objectivity" that lies beyond the relative features they talk of.
(Professor Nalin de Silva is a Sri Lankan theoretical physicist, philosopher and a political analyst. He is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.)
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