Galileo’s Shadow is a book that pays particular attention to Galileo’s influence on physics. He is identified as that thinker who laid out the foundation concepts that have ruled that science ever since. The book’s analysis shows that Galileo made serious philosophical errors in this process. These errors included:
- He divided all physical phenomena into two classes, “primary qualities” and “secondary qualities”.
- Only the primary qualities could be used in science. They were basically matter and motion.
- The secondary qualities were verything else, perceived through the senses of touch, taste, smell and hearing. They were banned from science.
- Mathematics was “nature’s language”. It was thus more than mere theories invented by the human mind.
- For Galileo, if a theory was confirmed by experimental proof, it became a fact, a revealed secret of nature. The theory did not remain open-ended.
Thoughts on Physics After Scientific Determinism
Modern physics, that is relativity and quantum theory, grew out of certain errors and inconsistencies in the classical physics of Newton and Clerk Maxwell. The book follows the progress of the science right up to the very latest string theories. During all this time and all these upheavals in thinking, some of Galileo’s foundation concepts remained undisturbed:
The extreme constriction of focus of physics on just matter and motion is still largely true today. Only its mathematics has expanded greatly.
The replacement of God by natural law, which originated with Galileo, is still as true today as it was then.
His injunction, that physics ought to concern itself solely with phenomena that are measurable and quantifiable, is still followed today.
Physics, however, has also corrected some of Galileo’s errors in the course of its own development. These corrections were definite benefits to science and included:
- Galileo’s division of phenomena into primary and secondary qualities has simply been ignored by modern physics.
- Today, theories never become final facts. They always remain open to change, if new evidence arises.
- Mathematics is seen today as simply a product of the human mind. It does not represent an externally existing truth.
Physics never confronted Galileo directly, because his errors were largely philosophical and modern physics has not been concerned with philosophical disputes hundreds of years ago. This unfortunately led to an important failure to correct one of Galileo’s principal errors, his treatment of “reality”. For Galileo, his “secondary” qualities needed the presence of a person, which made all such perceptions hopelessly subjective. It was this subjective reality which made all such “qualities” unfit for science. His “primary” qualities of matter and motion, however, did not (in his opinion) need the presence of a person, which made them independently and objectively real and thus suitable for scientific treatment.
Galileo’s Shadow deals with both subjective and objective realities, as they relate to physics. Modern physics, in simply ignoring Galileo’s two classes or ”qualities” removed the concept of objective reality from science. All sense perceptions, including those of sight, are now considered subjective, in that a person is needed for this process. This exclusion of objective reality did not matter in physics until the latest theories, such as string theory, about the origins of matter. All of a sudden, objective reality reentered the picture, as the following reasoning shows:
· By definition, a string particle has only one dimension, length.
·Nothing of only one dimension can be perceived in this world by any of our senses.
· The string particle is defined as the ultimate, indivisible particle of matter.
· If matter is considered real, then so must the string particle be considered real.
· As the string particle cannot be perceived in our real, material, subjective world, it can only be real in an immaterial world.
· An immaterial world, beyond our sense perception, does not need our presence. Its reality, therefore, must be objective.
This string theory argument expands the focus of physics to include once more the concept of an objective reality which had been missing since Galileo’s division of the material world into primary and secondary qualities. For him, the primary qualities of matter and motion did not need the presence of a person and were thus objectively real. To put objective reality into our subjective world as a property of matter was one of Galileo’s philosophical errors. It ceased being important to physics when this whole concept of Galileo’s, to divide the world into two qualities of matter, was discarded by modern physics.
However, it was precisely this Galilean division that brought in the concept of natural law, to replace God. This removal of the Creator caused the deep rift between science and faith which is the cause of much controversy today. If Galileo is now corrected by the reintroduction of objective reality into physics, then this whole controversy which he caused will go away. That conclusion is one of the important results of the line of reasoning followed in Galileo’s Shadow. There are other consequences:
Another consequence of the removal of Galileo’s assumption that part of our material world is objectively real and does not need our presence, is that we can no longer assume that the history of the material world is independent of us. It is only if we assume that all matter exists as objectively real in our world that we can blithely talk about the history of the world before our appearance in it.
If the origin of matter cannot be found in our world, as physics has shown, then it is difficult to think of matter as being the origin of all other manifestations perceivable in our world, such as life, feeling, spirit, mankind and so on.
The elimination of Galileo’s error regarding objective reality in our subjective world also allows for the reintroduction of ethics into an argument about physics. Galileo’s Shadow deals with this aspect in some detail, especially as itapplies to the concept of purpose as an inherent property of the universe. The absence of purpose leads to really astronomical odds against the universe’s reaching its present state, if all events just happened by blind chance or random choice – especially as in the case of the beginning of the universe, everything had to be just right the first time, with no possibility of learning from experience.
In Galileo’s Shadow all these lines of reasoning are summed up in the final chapter, as ideas towards a new model of the universe, to take the place of the last one, scientific determinism, which had to be abandoned in the 1920s. Modern physics also has ideas in this area, of expanding present string theory to include the unification of all force and mass manifestations in the universe under a single set of laws. This is popularly known as the “theory of everything” and it is also shown in this last chapter of the book, to give the reader a chance to compare the two approaches.
Galileos Shadow 
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