Chatting Up A Storm - Claudia Cragg

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks with astrophysicist  @Mario_Livio about his new book, Galileo and the Science Deniers. This work aims for distinction in trying to place the original Renaissance man, Galileo, and his discoveries in modern scientific and social contexts. In particular, Livio argues, the charges of heresy that Galileo faced for his scientific claims in the seventeenth century have their counterparts in science deniers’ condemnations today.  Born in 1564 in Pisa, Italy, into an intellectual family of declining fortune, Galileo pursued medicine at the University of Pisa. But he soon abandoned his course to study mathematics, his enduring passion. The Universe, he famously wrote, “is written in the language of mathematics”. It was an argot that allowed him to break reliance on the Aristotelian cosmology prized by the Catholic Church, and to forge a new, quantitative study of nature. Many consider Galileo to have been the Stephen Hawking of his day – both famous and respected. Nonetheless, he was