Talk:Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

message: A recent edit added text which maintained that Galileo's argument in favour of Copernicus's system from the apparent motion of sunspots "is wrong, as the relative motions of sunspots are the same whether in both the Ptolemaic and Copernican system".  No source was provided for this assertion, and it is contradicted by numerous modern reliable sources.  I have therefore provided three such sources and rewritten the relevant passage to conform to what is contained in those sources.
It does seem to me to be true—if I may be permitted to peddle a modest piece of original reseach of my own—that the explanation of the apparent motion of sunspots in geostatic systems doesn't need to be quite as complicated as the cited sources appear to make out.  It could be accounted for by having the Sun's axis of rotation precess uniformly about another axis, parallel to the Earth's, with a period of precisely one sidereal day.  However, this is still rather more implausible than the simple explanation available in Copernicus's system, and, in any case, I don't see how it can be included in the article until someone has found a reliable source which contains it.
David Wilson (talk · cont) 18:19, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sunspots 

message: If I remember it well, what was concerned was not the conclusions of Galileo himself (as at the time, and because nobody had thought about the yet to come Foucault pendulum experiment, both systems could be seen as functionally identical, one of them allowing just much easier computations as Copernic had signalled it), but the fact that he explained the reasons to consider geocentrism as superior were "irrelevant". They were, but that statement seemed at the time an insult towards Aristotes and the university teachers (as well as a blasphemy, for the Church). Galileo, overestimating the intelligence of his peers, has already irritated most university professors at the time by showing Aristote's affirmation that heaviest objects always fell faster was incorrect (by dropping weights from the tower of Pisa). 212.198.146.177 (talk) 16:17, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:   Galileo was convicted of "grave suspicion of heresy" based on the book 

message: The origin given in the article for the "Simplicio" character appears to be contrary to the one Galileo gave in the prologue of the Dialogue itself.
The Dialogue's prologue (I'm using the English translation by Stillman Drake, which can be found at various places on the Net) has this to say:
:I often talked with these two [Sagredo & Salviati] of such matters in the presence of a certain Peripatetic philosopher whose greatest obstacle in apprehending the truth seemed to be the reputation he had acquired by his interpretations of Aristotle.
A little further on it adds (parenthetically):
:Nor shall the good Peripatetic lack a place; because of his excessive affection toward the Commentaries of Simplicius, I have thought fit to leave him under the name of the author he so much revered, without mentioning his own.
In other words ALL THREE characters derive from real individuals, not just Sagredo & Salviati. In the case of "Simplicio", however, Galileo chose to conceal the name of the real individual behind a nom-de-guerre, doubtless for good reason!
So what does the article have to say? First of all it does not state that the origin of all of three names (let alone Simplicio's) is given by Galileo himself in the Dialogue.
Bearing that failure in mind, it makes the following claims:
:He is supposedly named after Simplicius of Cilicia, a sixth-century commentator on Aristotle, but it was suspected the name was a double entendre, as the Italian for "simple" (as in "simple minded") is "semplice".
That word "supposedly" conveys doubt as to the truth of the origin of that name. Had Galileo been cited as the origin of the name, that word would have conveyed doubt as to the truth of Galileo's account. However, since Galileo has not been mentioned in that context it instead carries the imputation that the Simplicius origin is a mere hypothesis by some OTHER individual trying to work out where Galileo got these names from--which in turn would make the double entendre alternative a competing hypothesis by yet another individual.
All of which is kind of weird given that the statement in the article which follows would appear to itself be an hypothesis despite being presented as undisputed fact:
:Simplicio is modeled on two contemporary conservative philosophers, Ludovico delle Colombe (1565-1616?), Galileo's fiercest detractor, and Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), a Paduan colleague who had refused to look through the telescope. Colombe was the leader of a group of Florentine opponents of Galileo's, which some of the latter's friends referred to as "the pigeon league".
So instead of Galileo's one anonymous individual masquerading as "Simplicio" we now have an amalgam of two!
So who do we believe? Galileo or the hypothesizers?
I have no idea and the article is itself short on details as to why Colombe and Cremonini are suspected to be Simplicio.
For my own part I can't argue one way or the other, nor do I want to. I merely point out that on such matters the article would seem to be deficient and misleading and needs to be modified.
--114.73.70.230 (talk) 11:19, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of the Name "Simplicio" 

message: About four passages have been omitted from Einstein's remarks.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.205.224 (talk) 15:07, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no actual deception, as the word "condensed" is used.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.205.224 (talk) 15:15, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Even the word "condensed" is deceptive, as it gives the impression that the effort was to save time only, when it is actually for ideological reasons. The omissions are made to put Einstein and Galileo in a good light.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.205.224 (talk) 10:38, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Omissions 

message: I should point out that the "Ship" thought experiment for frame of reference did not originate with Galileo as the text suggests, it appears centuries earlier in Oresme's "Livre du ciel et du monde" and also in Cusa's "Learned Ignorance".  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.160.98.101 (talk) 00:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Nicholas of Cusa made several remarks that are close to modern ideas. Kepler might have mentioned him.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.43.110.15 (talk) 09:38, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Kepler mentioned Nicholas of Cusa in 1597.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.43.110.15 (talk) 09:44, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Nicholas of Cusa might have come to the notice of Galileo in 1597.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.245.205.174 (talk) 13:29, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ship Argument 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: In 1953, in his Preface to Stillman Drake's translation of the "Dialogue", Einstein said,  
"To be sure, he wanted to avoid an open commitment in these controversial questions that would have delivered him to destruction by the Inquisition." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.10.31.162 (talk) 12:17, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Galileo actually said, "A questo fine ho presa nel discorso la parte Copernicana, procedendo in pura ipotesi matematica". "I have taken the Copernican side".  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.10.31.162 (talk) 12:25, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Galileo's house arrest was spent in five places. He visited the French ambassador in Poggibonsi, in Italy.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.10.31.162 (talk) 12:33, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Galileo was in Rome, Siena, Poggibonsi, Florence and Arcetri during his house arrest.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.62.50.39 (talk) 12:46, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Einstein's opinion 

message: Because it predicted a parallex, and none could be observed, even with Galeleo's telescope.  Theories need to be tested against the data available at the time.
I think Ptolemy was aware of that and is why he rejected heliocentric.
Anyway, a note along those lines by someone more knowledgeable would be interesting. Tuntable (talk) 07:36, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: If a theory predicts an effect which is small or difficult to observe, then not observing it is not evidence against the theory. For example, Einstein's General Relativity predicts gravitational waves, yet it took nearly 100 years to actually detect them, because doing so is really difficult. Copernicus argued that the non-observation of stellar parallax meant that the stars are far away. He was, in fact, right. It took nearly 300 years for stellar parallax to finally be observed, but scientists accepted heliocentrism long before that. -Thucydides411 (talk) 07:17, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copernicus was actually wrong