Galileo, his life and times (history of science for mathmos)

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A series of 8 extra lectures this Michaelmas term, in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Mondays 4 pm in MR14 .

I will cover some highlights of the life and times of Galileo (in a non-technical way), from his fairly mediocre mathematics and frankly ludicrous physics to his out of date (and wrong) astronomy … debunking the mythology about his squabble with the Church, and talking about what he did that was really interesting to contemporaries: his revolutionary observations of the heavens, his revolutionary claim that kinematics is a new science and a new //kind// of science and his brilliant polemic against traditional science, using the terms of that traditional science.

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