Welcome to another edition of "Friday's Elk." I'm sending out this newsletter every other week, barring deadlines and such. It's free, but any support you may want to offer will be most appreciated!

A Science Writer in Florence

Since my last newsletter, I turned in a revised draft of my next book (more details soon!) and headed off with my family to Florence. I had never been there before, and it did not disappoint. It is almost absurdly rich with the histories of art, business, and politics. And it's got plenty of history for a science writer, too.

After all, Florence was Galileo's home for many years. If you end up in Florence someday, I highly recommend a trip to the Galileo Museum, where you can see a lot of exquisitely beautiful scientific instruments, such as a sixteenth-century armillary sphere, which places Earth at the center of the cosmos. I zoomed in for a picture that would capture its awesome intricacy.

The sumptuous creations at the museum got me thinking about my faulty grasp of Galileo's place in history. Today, his discoveries seem self-evident. Of course the Earth is not the center of the cosmos. Of course we can cling to the planet even as it hurtles through space. Of course physics on Earth works the same way in the heavens. It's hard to imagine people thinking otherwise. It's easy to picture scholars in the late 1500s just sitting around in glum silence, waiting for Galileo to arrive and set them straight.

But they were actually very busy. They were constructing exquisitely engineered devices to predict the movements of the stars and planets. They were charting the skies, mapping the oceans, and erecting immense buildings (some of which still stand in Florence). On our trip, I finished reading Galileo: Watcher of the Skies; the author, the British historian David Wootton, does an excellent job of conjuring up the intellectual world that produced Galileo. It was a crowded community of scholars who championed many different views about how the world worked. Some became Galileo's champions, others his rivals. Wootton makes it clear that Galileo was a part of that world, not floating above it. We may picture Galileo as a fully modern astronomer, but he was also an astrologer for many years, creating horoscopes to predict the future.

As you walk further through the Galileo Museum, you reach the telescopes and other instruments he used to launch a scientific revolution. The sight of the telescopes made me think back to Wootton's account of how Galileo used them to discover the moons of Jupiter, which he named the Medici planets in honor of his patrons in Florence. When we think back on that discovery from the twenty-first century, it seems like a game-over moment. As soon as Galileo spotted Jupiter's moons, the old system based on Aristotle and Ptolemy had to collapse, right?

In fact, Galileo struggled at first to persuade people of what he was seeing and what it meant. In the early 1600s, people could not see the evidence for themselves. Very few telescopes existed at the time, and only Galileo could build them with enough power to reveal the moons of Jupiter. To advance his claims, Galileo shipped his telescopes to Renaissance influencers so that they could look through them. But they did not know how to operate the devices to bring the moons into focus and keep them in sight. Galileo had to help people in person to see what he saw. Facts do not automatically speak for themselves.

We kept walking on through the museum, and soon we were looking at instruments created by other Florentine scientists after Galileo's death. It took a while for me to realize that the museum pretty much skipped over Galileo's condemnation by the church and his final years spent essentially under house arrest in Florence. Perhaps the curators didn't want to get bogged down in controversial matters. But it's still a glaring gap, given that Galileo's conflict with the church is one of the best known chapters in his life.

It's also caked with myths. Wootton is very good as sweeping away the simplistic science-versus-religion fables that have built up since Galileo's death. You may have heard how Galileo, forced to deny Copernicanism, muttered under his breath, "And yet it moves." But, as Wootton explains, Galileo probably never said that. It was just a story that people made up after his death. It still survives today because it feels true, even if it probably isn't.

Instead of simple stories, Wootton offers a complex picture of Galileo's relationship with the church. Galileo tried to convince the Vatican that his vision of the cosmos was actually more in line with Christianity than a vision based on Aristotle and Ptolemy. And Pope Urban VIII was willing, at first, to allow Galileo to present his ideas. All he had to do was temper the presentation, acknowledging that there was lot about the world that humans did not understand. Galileo did not quite meet the pope's standards, however, and things fell apart..

Galileo's final years were full of misery and pain. When he died in 1642, his family wanted to bury him in their tomb at the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Instead, he had to be interred in a small room outside of the main church, almost in secret. For a century, the Medici family pushed for a monument in his honor. It wasn't until 1737 that his body was reburied inside Santa Croce, across the building from Michaelangelo's tomb. In the eighteenth century, the age of the Enlightenment, it was finally possible to celebrate Galileo with a huge marble monument.

The tomb, just a few minute's walk from the museum, is a fitting place to end a Galilean afternoon. (And once you're done admiring the tomb, I'd also recommend walking a few minutes more to Gelateria dei Neri.)

Hippie Apes No More, Social Viruses, and Bomb-Proof Water Bears

Since my return, I've published three stories that you may find interesting:

Hippie Apes No More: Bonobos are more aggressive than scientists previously appreciated. That discovery may have a lot to say about the roots of human violence.

Social Viruses: For Quanta, I wrote a feature about "sociovirology": a scientific view of viruses not as isolated particles, but a community of cooperators and cheaters.

Bomb-Proof Water Bears: Why is it that tardigrades can withstand a thousand times more radiation than we can? Because they can fix their shattered DNA, using tricks we would do well to learn.

If you'd like to learn more about my books, you can visit my web site

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