An imagined gathering
1638 · Arcetri, near Florence
Under house arrest, Galileo receives Descartes and talks through the arguments he can no longer publish freely.
Galileo is old, blind in one eye, and confined to his house at Arcetri, but his mind is as combative as ever. Descartes, who has avoided publishing on the motion of the Earth for fear of the same condemnation, comes to visit, and the conversation circles the question of how far a philosopher should go in the face of authority.
Galileo argues that the evidence for a moving Earth is overwhelming and that silence is a kind of lie; Descartes answers that a truth held privately is worth more than a truth retracted under threat. They disagree without rancour, over salt cod fritters, buttered peas, and a tart. Galileo's Two New Sciences is being smuggled out of Italy even as they speak.
Host: Galileo Galilei
René Descartes — French philosopher, cautious about the Church and uneasy about Galileo's fate.
First course
a period dish
Dessert
a period dish
Galileo Galilei
What Galileo saw through his improved spyglass — lunar mountains, Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus — and why it unsettled the received cosmos.
Nicolaus Copernicus
The claim that the Sun, not the Earth, sits at the center of the planetary system — and the slow, contested work of making it fit observation.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.