Research Public Lecture series youtube page and see previous talks you might have missed. This event will conclude with time for questions. If you want to ask the awe their something go to the ask a question abouton at the bottom of the screen and submit your questions. Well get through as many as time allows. Also the bottom of the screen youll see a button to purchase tonights featured book gray and the science deniers. All sales support Harvard Book Store so a huge thank you. Your purchases and financial contributions, theres also a donate button at the bottom of the screen. Make this virtual author series possible and now they ensure the future of a landmark independent book store, thank you to Tower Partners at Harvard University and thank you to all of you for tuning in and showing up for authors, publishers, indy book selling and especially for science because it really matters. And finally, as you might have experienced in virtual gatherings, technical issues can arise and well do our best to resolve them quickly. Thank you for your patience and understanding. So now, i am very pleased to introduce tonights speaker, a world renown astrophysicist and best selling author, mario livio is known for his many books which include why, what makes cure you, the golden ratio, brilliant blunder, is god a mathematician and the equation that couldnt be solved, the basis for an emmy nominated program. as a fell already the American Association for the advance0. Science he has made significant theoretical contributions, topics range from cosmology, super nova explosions and black holes and the emergence of life in the universe. Moving in this world of Scientific Research and popular re noun, he has appeared on numerous programs such as the day hi show, 6 minute, all things considered, on being and many others. Tonight he is present his seventh book, galileo and the science denears, hailed as a beautiful where i lint, entraveling and insightful history of a courageous genius. One call this poock one would happen the galileo story could be treat just as a fascinating history this books makes clear it is but we really need this because with arelying through the next chapter of science denial with stakes that could not be higher. We are so happy to have hitch digitally here tonight. Without further adieu the video podium is you. Thank you very much. With your permission i will try to share the screen. Sounds good. Yes . And just one second. Okay. Galileo and the science teeniers. This the cover of the book. So, some people ask me why did i decide to write this book . So, there are very simple reasons. One is that im an as trophies zits, galileo is the founder of, and he is a fascinating person in general ask this business of science denial, which unfortunately we still have to deal with today, so these are i think good enough reasons to do this. So, i started by noting the fact that galileo is wait. I apologize. My presentation jumped to the very last slide. I will start again. So, i start with the fact that galileo is really a larger than life hero of our intellectual history and for reasons that many of you know im sure but some of you will find out here. So, because he was such a hero, many works of art in various area of the humanities were devoted to him. So so i just collected a few of paintings where he is being painted, and i just throw them one on top of the other like you take bunch of photographs and look at them and throw them one on top of the other. This is the very earliest portrait known of galileo when he was 40 or so. Done by an unknown tuscan painter. His id are notsome metric, there was something that not symmetric which is in other paintings as well. Probably had a problem there. This particular painting is attributed to a famous painter about not clear where whether that is true. This is one of the most famous paint little of galileo. Hes holding the telescope in his hand and well be talking about that. But galileo appeared in many other types of paintings. For example, here is a painting of him showing the through the telescope to try to observe things, and this is even a cartoonish painting done in the last century with galileo trying to explain his discovers to people from the catholic church. But in addition to just regular standard classical paintings in are other types of works of art. For example, pop art. He appears in pop art. He appears even in graffiti. I was a florence for the week and saw this on one of the walls of the houses in florence. Here he is painted as if he is a scuba diving or something. Of course, he made it to the Google Doodle as well, the telescope, and he made it into works of art in other areas. There is a very, very famous, play, the life of galileo and this is a scene from one of the productions and there is even an opera written about galileo by phillip glass. I have small piece of that opera, but believe it or not, we were unable to make the sound work on this shared screen through crowdcast so youll not hear the music but see at least the images from the opera by phillip glass. Here are the images. And imagine that here there is some singing going on, only that it doesnt happen. Not only doesnt happen but in fact even the things dont at vans. Which is even worse. I cannot tell you why that is happening. So i will just jump over that. And let me jump to the discoveries. I apologize. I never used crowdcast before and i dont know how to arrange any kind of tech numberrallities here. Some of the discoveries had to do with pure fuse fixes. Galileo was very interested in freefall, and in freefall in particular he dropped objects from certain heights, makes heavy thats dropped objected from the loning tower of pisa. As far as i could tell based on me research he probably has never done that. He did drop balled from various heighted but i found in reliable evidence he dropped from the leaning tower, even though his first biographer wrote he did but wrote that when galileo was very young and the biographer was very young so imbell lisch hements could happen. What he suspected and wanted to study was whether or not heavy balls indeed fall faster than light balls because aristotle say that the heavier the ball, the faster it falls, and not only that but that it falls faster in proportion to the weight. And galileo wanted to test that. But you see at the time of galileo, there were no good time measuring devices, so to measure small differences in time was very, very difficult so he came up with this incredible clever idea of using inclined planes. He realized that freefall is in some sense can be seen as an extreme case of balls rolling down inclined plane when the inclined plane is actually vert tell to the ground. But by making the angle of the inclined plane very, very small, he was able to sort of dilute forget, if you like, to slow down the motion sufficiently so that he could make more accurate measurements for the motion. But he did more than that. By allowing the ball to roll down a plane and then fly into the air, he was able to see the trajectory that projectiles do when thrown into the air and the discovered that the trajectory is actually a concern that was wellknown from antiquity, from the ancient greeks and he was the first to discover that, that the projectiles trace a parabul how to the air he discovered laws of freefall, for example, the distance traveled is proportional to the square of the time, meaning if a ball falls for twice, lets say, one ball falls for a knowledge another for two seconds the ball falls for two second covers a distance four times if it is two squared, the distance covered by the ball that falls only one second. And many other such things. Of course, most famous discovers were with a telescope. So, he did not invent the telescope. The telescope was invented in neglect netherlands but as soon as he heard but the invention he realize it this could be a fantastic instrument help basically took tubes from organs and polish his own lenses and put two lenses at the two ended of the tube. These are two of his original telescopes. The only two that survived the Galileo Museum in florence. Instead of using this telescope to look at ships, after all he was in the or to spy on his neighbors, he turn his telescope to the skies and there he saw incredible things. This was one of the lenses that he polished. Its has now this very onate sort of frame around it but this is the very quickly managed to generate telescopes that had the power of about 20. I mean, the original telescope had a power of four and he did telescopes that had a power of 20. When he looked at the first object he look to was the moon, and here is the First Encounter we have with a situation where galileos artistic education helped him in his scientific discoveries. At the same time there was this english astronomer, who also looked at the moon, but when you look at what he drew from what he saw, you cannot understand anything and neither did hairot himself. Even though he saw some features there insuring but galileo because otherwise training in drawing and artist industry andlight and shot dough, he understood what he was observing was a rugged surface of the moon, surface with mountains and craters, by locking at looking t the dark part near the terminator, at the bottom right small figure, the one that has three above it, you will see that there are points of light in the dark side in the dark parts sorry unilluminated part he understand that was tops of mountains that were ill illuminated by the son and noticed that as the time was progressing, light sort of was creeping down the mountains just as it would do on earth. So he understood very well what he was seeing and was extremely important because until that time, the idea was that there was a huge difference between things at the rays central and selesat. Things 0 on earth spored to be corruptible, full of blemishes but thing in the heaven were supposed to be pristine, perfect, and no blemishes. What he showed was that the moon had a surface just about like the surface of the earth. And of course, we know now that to be true and this is an image taken astronaut bill lander from the obitter of the orbiter of the moonout can see hills and craters and we see the earth rise there. This has become a very, very famous painting because of that. As i told you, he galileo studied freefalling objects and what he concluded at the end, which was amazing, was that actually all objects in freefall, fall exactly at the same rate, irrespective of their weight and the only difference on earth is because of the airs resistance. Has at this time there was no vacuum pump so it was really more his intuition and basing this things on thought experimental thinking, what would happen of you drive a heavy ball and a light ball. This experiment was done on the moon by astronaut scott, and i want to show you the video of that now but im now a little bit concerned because that video also has sound in it and since the sound doesnt work im not sure if the video will work but let see. I dont now of you hear him but he has a hammer and [loss of audio] drop bowling of them on the moon. And you see they hit the ground at the same time. And he says i guess mr. Galileo was correct. Again, im not sure if you heard the sound but im telling you what he was saying. He said we get here to the moon because of a certain gentleman named galileo who made some certain discoveries but falling objects and then did this experiment. Turning hill telescope to other celestial objects the discovered four satellites of jupiter and that was an immense discovery. The wrote in a letter, and you can see his drawings very simple drawings showing four, sometimes you see all four satellites, timeouts saw only three, or two two on juan side, two on the other side, the on one side and one on the other side and so on. But the importance of this discovery cannot be overemphasized. The thing is the following. First of all this were the very first object since antic quit antiquity, new object in the solar system. Second, the people who objected to the the cap person cuss all the items in the sun resolved around the world. Galileo adopted the capernicum model where all the planets, including the earth, revolve around the sun. Now, people who objected to this raised a variety of objections. Some of those were the falling. Wait a second. If the earth is really just another planet like all other planets, how come it is the only planet that has a moon . Well, galileo thought that jupiter not just one moon put four. Second, they were saying, oh, well, if the earth were to resolve around the sun, surely it would have lost its moon. How come that it manages to preserve it moon . Well, here was jupiter revolving around something. You choose whether you want to make it revolve around the argentina or sun but obviously keeping it four moons. That kills that objection as well. This was extraordinarily important. It is less nope that galileo dethey could planet neptune in 1612. This is the point on he theft of the figure. Didnt recognize it as a planet because his telescone scope was fat good enough to be able to tell it was moving but he did detect it. The discovery of neptune was delayed until the middle of the 19th century when it was really discovered to be a planet. One of the most important discovers of galileo and im not giving you all of them, just a favor of the discoveries is the faces phase of the planet venus. Venus was known to be between the earth and the sun, and if venus is revolving around the sun, then it should show a whole set of phase just like the moon. For example, when it is the farthest from the earth, in the top of the figure, it should look smallest and fully lit. When it is closest to earth, as it is in the bottom of the figure, shirt look largest it should look largest and basically dark and the between it some show crescent phase just like the mon. It is not expecting if venus is involving around the earth. So by showing this galileo gave strong argument, perhaps the strongest, against the model. I want now to move to Something Else and which is particularly important since we are talking in the context of a book store and so on. There is this author and chemist who in the 1950s noticed the following. Noticed in england that starting from about the 30s, people in the literary circles started to refer to themselves as the intellectualsthereby santa clauses scientists from that definition. And furthermore they were complaining about scientists not knowing much about the humanities at all. At the same time, cp snowedden noted those same intelligence hules knew almost nothing but the sciences and they did not seem to bother them. so he rote a bookgive a talk and wrote the book called the two cultures where he basically described a schism he thought has developed between the humanities and the sciences. Now, if you look at galileo, galileo would not have even understood what cp snow is talking about. You see galileo lived during late renaissance, so even in terms of the chronology, we could call him the rein sawn person, but he was a renaissance person in every other aspect. Already at page 24 he gave two lectures on the on dantes inferno. So, he was very familiar with that. He could cite dante and gave lectures on the location and structure of the inferno. He was also a great admirerrer of this poet, he could cite spire passages from him. He actually wrote essay comparing him to another poet. But it wasnt just in literature and poetry. First of all he was a musician. His father was a musician in the music theorist and galileo was an accomplished flute player and very often played with his father. But not only that, as i said, he studied himself drawings but in addition to that he had painter friends. The famous painter was one of his friends, and this is here the chapel. The dome of the chapel, and i want to call your attention to the figure at the bottom which shows the virgin standing on the moon, and if you look closer at that, you will find that he painted the moon just as it was seen through galileos telescope. Until that time most painters who tried to paint this thing from the back of revelation they painted the book as perfect and pristine and with no blemishes but he painted it just like galileo saw it. Another famous painter that was a friend of his was one of the great painters of the renaissance, but perhaps the one of the very few women painters, and she painted this painting which was this was her first version of the painting. But she spoke to galileo and he told her about this business of projectiles tracing parabula when shooting in the air, and she applied it to the blood squirting from the neck. So in her second version if you look at the same area of the bottom, you will see this, where you actually see the blood creating this palabalic Tropical Storm and his is her second version of this painting. And for some reason things got stuck on me here and i cannot tell why. I have no idea what is hang here if apologize but we have a technical issue here which im trying to resolve. I cannot even escape from the presentation. I dont know what is happening. You want me to cancel out of it and bring it back up again . Please do. All right. One moment, everyone. You want to hit screen share again. Okay. Im not getting it. Sit tight for one second. Im doing it again. Awesome. Thats great. Let see that however advances me or not. Perfect i wouldnt say because i have now at vaned to a place where advanced to a place i didnt want. Okay. Ill go now back. Okay, yes, so, we saw the second version of her painting and this is the full second version. Thank you very much, kate. Okay. Let now jump over a few decade inside galileos life and this book that he wrote and tried to publish in 1633. This was called the dialogue on the two chief world systems, and the book was written as a conversation among three people. One of whom represented galileo himself, another one was an educateed but layperson and the third one was supposed to be an avid galileo called that person simple my joe which was lamed after a great supporter of gray, of aristotles theories but also has somewhat of a connotation of a simpleton. Said he holds the opinion. The earlier there is an injunction against it. Which in the strict version it did not allow either to hold nor defend nor teach in any way. He, haddock has possession of the old letter from the chief cardinal at the time, which was a somewhat softer version that basically said he could not hold the position but did not say he couldnt teach it or talk about it. He thought he was okay. But that did not fly very well and he was put on trial. I want to emphasize now a few points that he had in his discussion with the inquisition. Very often, when people talk about the galileo affair, they presented as if this was a clash between science and religion. It absolutely was, and galileo never saw it as such. He was himself a religious person. The clash was between the science he was presenting and literal interpretations of the bible. His point was that one shouldnt interpret the bible literally because the bible is not a science book. Lets