Rating: 
Summary: Onward to the past
Review: I should wait till I have more time to do it properly but here it is: I found the book terribly argued. When he writes about subjects that I know about he's got his facts wrong. The writing is disingenuous and falsely profound, and in conclusion is a celebration of irrationalism in what to me is a frightening way.
Rating: 
Summary: Of two roots of truth, one leads to magic that works
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book - the elegant interlacing of more difficult philosophical treatises with enjoyable dialogue of fictitional characters made this a page-turner for me.Some other reviewers blame Wade for being biased against science - I feel the author would be the first to admit to it. The market is swamped by books of the opposite bias - Hawkin's "Brief history of time" being a good case in point; so perhaps this book with its bias was necessary to reestablish some balance. The two intertwined brances of metaphysics and philosophy of science are clearly exposed as they unfold throughout history. Two totally different roots of truth are magnificently revealed: One through exploring the external world, and the other one through exploring our inner space. And it is for that reason that I liked the book - it is not for the Author's hypothesis that the conflict between Galileo and the church lay in the latter's rejection of scientific realism as it began to appear. Actually, I do not think that the author succeeded in proofing his point: Almost all of the church sources he quotes appear to pit religious realism against scientific realism, nothing more. (With "religious realism" I mean the position that the world must be exactly as described in the scriptures. Of those two positions, I would prefer the latter) Another shortcoming of the book is an insufficient exploration of the strange fact that science works so well in manipulating our environment. "Science is magic that works", like Papa Monzano says in Vonnegut's cat's gradle. Not that the book is unaware of it. Quite on the contrary. There is some lengthy exploration of this issue, but it doesn't go deep enough, and ultimately it does not acknowledge science's power, based on the fact that its consequences are not always good. But even if the outcome is not good, the power still exists, and this calls for an explanation. If it is not because science contains truth about the world, what is it then? In summary: The book is entertaining, educational, and immensely thought-provoking. I will buy it for others, and I will probably read it a second time.
Rating:
Summary: Wade Rowland Challenges Conventional Wisdom
Review: In Galileo's Mistake Wade Rowland challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the notorious 1633 trial of Galileo by the Inquisition: that Ignorance and Superstition persecuted Science and Reason and that Galileo was a lonely, courageous freethinker oppressed by a reactionary and anti-intellectual institution fearful of losing its power and influence. Rowland asks if that is an accurate picture of what actually happened. As the dust jacket states, "The disagreement between Galileo and the Church seemed to center on Galileo's belief in the Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun - something we know to be true today. But was the debate really about the Copernican theory per se? If so, why was Copernicus never condemned?" In 1533, a hundred years before Galileo's trial, Pope Clement VII listened to a presentation of the Copernicus' theory and ten years later, Copernicus' De Revolutionibus was published - with Church sanction. Why did the Church not bring to trial the other leading astronomers of the day who shared Galileo's Copernican views, some of whom were Jesuits in the Vatican? If the debate was not about this revolutionary theory of planetary motion, then what was it about? Professor Rowland argues that the debate was not about Galileo's science, but his philosophy. He further argues that modern advances in science (Quantum Physics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) indicate the inadequacies of the "naïve realism" behind Galileo's mechanistic philosophy. Neither a Catholic nor an apologist for the Church, Rowland has written a fascinating and balanced book on an historical event which continues to have vast implications for us today. An interesting side note: In 1629 Galileo published a book titled Dialogue of the Ebb and Flow of the Sea as his decisive proof of the earth's motion. Just as the motion of water inside a vessel is affected by the motion of the vessel itself, so, according to Galileo, the motion of the Earth affects the motion of the oceans. He thought that during its compound motion (rotation plus revolution), the Earth is subject to decelerations and accelerations of its rotation motion, whose period is 12 hours. Due to its own inertia, the seas would rise when "left behind" by the underlying Earth, and vice versa. Although Galileo was a very great scientist, this theory is not correct. Nor, argues Rowland, was his mechanistic philosophy.
Rating: 
Summary: Galileo's Mistake?
Review: In his book "Galileo's Mistake" Wade Rowland takes the reader on a philosophical adventure through the murky waters of faith and reason. Attempting to reconstruct the emotional and metaphysical setting of the trial of Galileo (and not just the legal/historical), Rowland reveals a tale not often told in the annals of science... Galileo, the ardent realist, was also a good Catholic.
In addition to this admission, Rowland weaves in his own intellectual journey while researching Galileo's life and trial to arrive at some very anti-scientistic conclusions concerning the nature of reality. In all, this history of science tome is both enlightening and fun to read. It also challenges our modern view of science as salvation and forces even the most ardent of realists to consider the possibility of a reality beyond the reach of mathematics.
Rating: 
Summary: blind faith
Review: In his book "Galileo's Mistake" Wade Rowland takes the reader on a philosophical adventure through the murky waters of faith and reason. Attempting to reconstruct the emotional and metaphysical setting of the trial of Galileo (and not just the legal/historical), Rowland reveals a tale not often told in the annals of science... Galileo, the ardent realist, was also a good Catholic.
In addition to this admission, Rowland weaves in his own intellectual journey while researching Galileo's life and trial to arrive at some very anti-scientistic conclusions concerning the nature of reality. In all, this history of science tome is both enlightening and fun to read. It also challenges our modern view of science as salvation and forces even the most ardent of realists to consider the possibility of a reality beyond the reach of mathematics.
Rating:
Summary: Galileo's Mistake?
Review: In his book "Galileo's Mistake" Wade Rowland takes the reader on a philosophical adventure through the murky waters of faith and reason. Attempting to reconstruct the emotional and metaphysical setting of the trial of Galileo (and not just the legal/historical), Rowland reveals a tale not often told in the annals of science... Galileo, the ardent realist, was also a good Catholic.
In addition to this admission, Rowland weaves in his own intellectual journey while researching Galileo's life and trial to arrive at some very anti-scientistic conclusions concerning the nature of reality. In all, this history of science tome is both enlightening and fun to read. It also challenges our modern view of science as salvation and forces even the most ardent of realists to consider the possibility of a reality beyond the reach of mathematics.
Rating:
Summary: Galileo's mistake
Review: Our society takes so many things for granted, especially if they are deeply embedded in the past. In Galileo's Mistake, Rowland has the courage and knowledge to question one of the most significant and influential events of the history of mankind: the trial against Galileo of 1633. Rowland's approach to the trial is scientific and objective; he studies the charges, the evidence, and the defense like a modern day detective but with the erudition of an established historian. And, objectively, he is right: Galileo was wrong. But there is more to Rowland's approach that makes this book quite extraordinary: the brilliant use of Socratic dialogues with a layman and a nun to examine the relationship between truth and science and the implications of Rowland's discoveries as he re-opens the trial. These conversations, these musings, are enlightening without being pedantic and yet provide plenty of food for thought. Here is a true gem, an act of courage, I recommended it highly to anyone who has ever wondered how much science relies on leaps of faith and to all those who enjoy the intellectual exercise of questioning what our society labels as facts.
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as the reviews make it out to be
Review: So I recommended this book to the friends based on a review I had read of it. Now that I've actually read the book, I have to say that it was not very thought-provoking, only annoying. As a historical account of Galileo's trial before the Inquisition, as well as of his life and work, it was interesting. But Rowland puts entirely too much of his own spin on the events, and he attacks science by setting up a straw man in the character Berkowitz, thereby devaluing whatever legitimate points he might have had.
Rating:
Summary: Very Misleading Arguments
Review: The arguments in this book may sound plausible to someone who has not read widely about the science of Galileo's era, but there are serious flaws throughout the book. Rowland's presentation of the issues is ill-founded. To start with, the book is unreliable on a basic technical level. The description of the Ptolemaic system is among the least coherent I have read. In particular, the equant is not the center of any orbit, as Rowland states, but an off-center point from which the angular motion of the center of the epicycle appears constant. This was a key problem for Copernicus, not a trivial technical point to be glossed over. On the other hand, Rowland's presentation of Kepler's laws is equally garbled, so at least he is consistent in his lack of concern for detail. The honest Reader deserves more careful writing. Rowland's main goal is to question the authority of science as the sole source of natural knowledge. His principal argument is good old-fashioned philosophical skepticism: essentially the idea that observation can only tell us about the appearance of things, not their underlying nature. He fails to tell the reader that these ideas were very much alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the essays of Montaigne and the works of Descartes, Mersenne, and Gassendi. Skepticism applies not only to science, but to all knowledge, including the theories of historians and social scientists, and even the everyday experiences that we use all the time in our practical decisions about life. You can't use skepticism to undermine science without undermining everything else. The solution of Mersenne and Gassendi is to realize the knowledge about appearances is enough; theories about reality can safely remain tentative while science advances. All this was known in the seventeenth century, though Rowland would have the reader think otherwise. The book also trots out the usual arguments about science being a mere social construction with no inherent objectivity, arguments which seem to be very popular these days. These arguments fall to the same flaw: to whatever extent they are true about science, how much more true are they about the theories of social scientists, including the social contructionists? A skeptic might just as well conclude that Galileo himself is a mere social construction! The author has a particularly silly attempt to explain away the obvious progress of science. The goal of science is knowlege, he says, and since it does not actually generate knowledge (see skeptical argument above) then it has not really made progress. I hope the reader sees the circularity of this reasoning. The usual understanding of the trial of Galileo is that it was a conflict between academic freedom and the doctrinal authority of the church. For all that Rowland tries to show otherwise, he has no reasons that stand up to thoughtful scrutiny. This is a misleading book, slick in presentation but selective in what it chooses to tell the reader. Approach with caution.
Rating:
Summary: A+ on theory, C on presentation
Review: The books thesis is right on, though Roland is so poor at bringing it to a point you might miss it. The thesis is this: Religion and Philosophy tells us WHAT the world is, science tells us HOW the world is. If science could tell us WHAT the world is - could give us the what of phenomena - there would be some physical proof that the world exists independent of us, that we are not in the Matrix. But there is no peer reviewed study that establishes that fact in a scientific way. There has been no such proof, because by tracking what is measurable, you can not reach such limits. Newton (who thought you could track **how** motion is through gravity, and thought that ***what*** made things move was God) and Bruno said the same things. But Moderns do not understand this, hence they are ashamed of Newton's Alchemy (which was his philosophy of what things were, not how they are). Science became good when it gave up on the metaphysical nature of the world. In fact, the Neo and the gang were to turn off the Matrix, we would not have to outlaw a single finding of physics. Because, again, it does not claim we are not in the matrix. It only explains "phenomena" no matter if they are real or a public illision Roland points out that the Church got this and Galileo did not. Not getting it, was Galileo's mistake. But he makes the point in a such a shallow and and un-artistic way, it seems much more complex and hard to grasp. The only reason I give the book 4 stars is that it is at least an intro to a very important topic, that so few understand. It is a book to start with, not to finish with. After this read a book from the 60's "Saving the Phenomena", and "History, Nature, God".
| 
