Today is Galileo’s birthday, and it’s worth pausing for a moment to celebrate one of the founders of modern science, and one of the giants of its history.
The standard biographies of Galileo are by the late Stillman Drake, one of the world’s greatest authorities on Galileo and his life (see here, here, and here). There is also a work by Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter, that looks very interesting.
I had the pleasure of being in Syracusa, Sicily, in May 2009:
(This post first appeared at my other (now deleted) blog, and was transferred to this blog on 25 January 2021.)