| Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems |
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While writing the book, Galileo referred to it as his ''Dialogue on the Tides''; and this was its title when the manuscript went to the Inquisition for approval: ''Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea''. He was ordered to remove all mention of tides from the title and to change the preface, because granting approval to such a title would look like approval of his theory of the Tide s, which attempted to prove the motion of the Earth physically. As a result, the formal title on the title page is ''Dialogue'', which is followed by Galileo's name and academic posts, followed by a long subtitle. The name by which the work is now known is extracted from deep within the subtitle. This must be kept in mind when discussing Galileo's motives for writing the book. The book is presented as a series of discussions, over a span of four days, among two philosophers and a layman:
Although the book is presented formally as a consideration of both systems (as it needed to be in order to be published at all), there is no question that the Copernican side gets the better of the argument. What the discussion would have been like if Simplicio had been as smart and well informed as Salviati is a matter of speculation, as no one has attempted to construct a version of the dialogue in which the traditionalists come out ahead. The dialogue does not treat the Tychonic System , which was becoming the preferred system of the Catholic church at the time of publication. The Tychonian system is mathematically equivalent to the Copernican system, and therefore there was at the time no valid disproof of it on empirical grounds. Galileo never took Tycho's system seriously, as can be seen in his correspondence, regarding it as an inadequate and physically unsatisfactory compromise. A reason for the absence of Tycho's system (in spite of many references to Tycho and his work in the book) may be sought in Galileo's theory of the tides, which provided the original title and organizing principle of the ''Dialogue''. For, while the Copernican and Tychonic systems are equivalent geometrically, they are quite different dynamically. Galileo's tidal theory entailed the actual, physical movement of the Earth; that is, if true, it would have provided the kind of proof that Foucault's Pendulum actually provided two centuries later. With reference to Galileo's tidal theory, there would be no difference between the Ptolemaic and Tychonic systems. The discussion is not narrowly limited to astronomical topics, but ranges over much of contemporary science. Some of this is to show what Galileo considered good science, such as the discussion of and refutes the objection that if we were moving hundreds of miles an hour as the Earth rotated, anything that one dropped would rapidly fall behind and drift to the west. The bulk of Galileo's arguments may be divided into three classes:
By and large, these arguments have held up well in terms of the knowledge of the next 350 years. Just how convincing they ought to have been to an impartial reader in 1632 remains a contentious issue. Galileo attempted a fourth class of argument:
As an account of the causation of tides or a proof of the Earth's motion, it is a failure. But Galileo was fond of the argument and devoted the "Fourth Day" of the discussion to it. The degree of its failure is, like nearly anything having to do with Galileo, a matter of controversy. On the one hand, the whole thing has recently been described in print as "cockamamie." On the other hand, Einstein used a rather different description:
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