Setting aside all authority
Subtitle: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the science against Copernicus in the age of Galileo
By: Christopher M. Graney
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9780268029883
Subjects: Astronomers; Jesuit scientists; Science; Astronomy; Biography; History
Description: "Setting Aside All Authority is an important account and analysis of seventeenth-century scientific arguments against the Copernican system. Christopher M. Graney challenges the long-standing ideas that opponents of the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were primarily motivated by religion or devotion to an outdated intellectual tradition, and that they were in continual retreat in the face of telescopic discoveries. Graney calls on newly translated works by anti-Copernican writers of the time to demonstrate that science, not religion, played an important, and arguably predominant, role in the opposition to the Copernican system. Anti-Copernicans, building on the work of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, were in fact able to build an increasingly strong scientific case against the heliocentric system at least through the middle of the seventeenth century, several decades after the advent of the telescope. The scientific case reached its apogee, Graney argues, in the 1651 New Almagest of the Italian Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli, who used detailed telescopic observations of stars to construct a powerful scientific argument against Copernicus. Setting Aside All Authority includes the first English translation of Monsignor Francesco Ingoli's essay to Galileo (disputing the Copernican system on the eve of the Inquisition's condemnation of it in 1616) and excerpts from Riccioli's reports regarding his experiments with falling bodies; 'Christopher M. Graney's Setting Aside All Authority makes a fine contribution to the history of science and especially the history of astronomy. The case Graney presents for the rationality of denying Copernicanism, as late as the mid-seventeenth century, is cogent, and he presents a good deal of novel historical material that urges a reevaluation of a major figure--Riccioli. The book will interest not only historians but also philosophers of science, and scientists in the relevant specialties (astronomy, physics) together with their students at both the undergraduate and graduate level'--Peter Barker, University of Oklahoma"--
Notes: "Including the first English translation of Monsignor Francesco Ingoli's essay to Galileo disputing the Copernican system, and the first English translation of Riccioli's Reports regarding his experiments with falling bodies and with the effect of air resistance on falling bodies."

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Giovanni Battista Riccioli's New Almagest; title: The Universe that Riccioli Saw; title: The Anti-Copernican Astronomer; title: Stars and Adventitious Rays; title: Science against Copernicus, God's Starry Armies for Copernicus; title: Jesuits on the Tower; title: 126 Arguments; title: An Angel and a Cannon; title: The Telescope against Copernicus; title: It Can No Longer Be Called "False and Absurd"; title: Appendix A: A Rendition into English of Monsignor Ingoli's 1616 Essay to Galileo; title: Appendix B: A Rendition into English of Giovanni Battista Riccioli's reports regarding his experiments with falling bodies and with the effect of air resistance on falling bodies.