14) Gia nel Sidereus
nuncius, che si definisce appunto "avviso" e non "trattato", Galileo invita a condividere e partecipare delle sue scoperte "omnes verae philosophiae cupidos convocantes" ("convocando tutti gli studiosi della vera filosofia"), di cui prevede anche dubbi e reazioni: "Verum magna hic dubitatione complures affici sentio, adeoque gravi difficultate occupari" ("Qui veramente prevedo che molti saranno assaliti da grande incertezza, e impigliati in cosi grave difficolta"), ma proprio per questo li chiama a dare il loro contributo: "Astronomos omnes convocantes, ut ad illorum periodos inquirendas atque definiendas se conferant" ("Invitando tutti gli Astronomi a dedicarsi a indagare e definire i loro periodi").
Heffernan unhappy with ban Seamie Heffernan received a three-day ban for using his whip when his chance had gone on the Flann Costello-trained Attorney Street in the race won by Sidereus
Nuncius.
Yet Galileo wrote the
Nuncius after he had been observing the heavens with a telescope for only a few months.
The historian of science Stillman Drake, one of the leading modern experts on Galileo, followed Meeus' work and, in an appendix to his 1983 translation and commentary on Sidereus
Nuncius, analysed all 65 Jupiter observations, comparing the descriptions of the satellites' positions with their positions calculated by modern ephemerides.
It was in 1609, exactly 400 years ago, that Galileo observed the Moons of Jupiter, now known as the Galilean Moons, which he recorded in his treatise, the Sidereus
Nuncius, published in 1610.
published his essay Sidereus
Nuncius, the first scientific publication
The earliest encounters with the telescope, from the first application for a privilege by a spectacle-maker in Middelburg in September 1608 to the printing of the first celestial observations with this instrument in Galileo's Sidereus
Nuncius in Venice in March 1610, have been construed in terms of breathtaking speed.
This copy of the Sidereus
nuncius was irreplaceable, its condition dangerously fragile.
The fourth chapter, for instance, examines dedicatory letters by Kepler and Galileo which accompanied their seminal works--Astronomia Nova (1609) and Sidereus
Nuncius (1610)--bringing into sharp relief the wider socio-political milieu of the two scientists.
Including an actual copy of Galileo's landmark book Sidereus
Nuncius (1610), it's an exhibition filled with possibilities and imagination, from incredible 19th century star maps which find fantastic characters and creatures in the sky, through to Stanley Kubrick's seminal sci-fi tale, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Its exhibits range from the priceless (a copy of Galileo's Sidereus
Nuncius of 1610, which might be taken as the starting point of modern man's contemplation of the sky) to the worthless (Steve McQueen's slideshow, which fills a huge part of the modern gallery to little discernible purpose), and the overall impression is of a confusing ragbag.
Among them were Galileo's 1610 Sidereus
Nuncius - worth pounds 180,000 - and Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica from 1687, now valued at pounds 135,000.
