A Brill Calendar: January 7

The Discovery of the "Medici Stars"

Few scientific observations demonstrate the growth of science & technology in Europe during the first years of the 17th century as convincingly as the one Galileo Galilei (Pisa, Febrary 15 1564 – Arcetri, January 8 1642) made while studying the night-sky on January 7, 1610; at one hour past midnight.

The star-gazer discovered that the planet Jupiter doesn’t roam solitarily, but enjoys company of other heavenly bodies. Galileo called them ‘Sidera Medicea’; the ‘Medici Stars’. The illustrious Medici family ‘sponsored’ his investigations...

Even more remarkable than these heavenly newcomers was the technology proving their existence and the idea behind it. Galileo used a brand-new optical device, invented two years earlier in one of the United Provinces, Zeeland: the telescope, an instrument to overcome diminishment to the human eye of far away things. It was not only Galileo’s genius to improve the simple apparatus, but also to aim it at the universe, proving the majesty of its Creator.

It is seldom in history that progress in "investigative" tools runs parallel with a momentous change in the linguistics of disseminating information and knowledge. To later generations, Galileo became a superb scientist victimized by narrow-mindedness of the Vatican; connoisseurs of early Italian literature assert that he should take pride of place as a master of prose as well.

His books on physical worlds are not written in Latin anymore; but in his mother-tongue in an elegant, lucid style. European vernaculars became particularly popular for phenomena previously not studied. Not only in Galileo’s Padua; also in Leyden, where Simon Stevin applied mathematics and arithmetic to many types of endeavour: from decimal fractions, book-keeping and economics to civil engineering, transportation technology and warfare. He was convinced that his mother-tongue was unique in coping with formulae and reasoning; and created a vocabulary for men with ‘little Latin & less Greek’ almost single-handedly: like ‘wiskunde’ instead of mathematics. Few languages boast a word for that notion not hailing from Antiquity.