Galileo's Finger

Why Galileo's finger? Galileo marks the turning point, when the scientific endeavour took a new direction, when scientists - an anachronistic term at the time, of course - rose from their armshairs, questioned the efficacy of the preceding attempts to come to grips with the nature of the world by thought in alliance with authority, and took the first faltering steps down the path of modern science. In the process they rejected untested authority, and while not letting go entirely of armchair speculation & inner contemplation, forged a new, more powerful alliance with the technique of publicly verifiable experimental observation. We see this aspect of Galileo's finger dabbling in all our current scientific pies. We see it in physics, where it first began to stir; in chemistry, where it found its way at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and in biology, especially since biology ceased being merely a source of wonder during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In short, this book celebrates the effectiveness of Galileo's symbolic finger for the winkling out of truth. "We are about to set out together on a challenging but ultimately deeply satisfying journey. Science is the apotheosis of the spirit of the renaissance, an extraordinary monument to the human spirit & power of comprehension of the puny human brain. My principal hope is that as the journey progresses and I lead you carefully to the summit of understanding, you will experience the deep joy of illumination that science alone provides!" Peter Atkins, the Author.