Good evening virtual audience and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. My name is kate and on the behalf of bookstore for Harvard University division of science in the Science Library i am so pleased to introduce this event with mario livio, presenting his latest book in one. Tonights event is an installment in our harvard scientists book series and we are so excited to continue to work and bring the authors of recently published science related literature to our communities during these unprecedented times. Just like always you can find announcements about Upcoming Events in the series at harvard. Com events science. You can also sign up for newsletter harvard. Com for more updates. Traditionally we have a Science ResearchPublic Lecture series where you can see previous talks that you might have missed in the series. 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Finally as you might have experienced in virtual gatherings the last few weeks technical issues can arise and if you do we will do our best to resolve them quickly but thank you so much for your patience and your understanding. So now, im very pleased to deduce tonights speaker. A worldrenowned astrophysicist and bestselling author, mario livio known for his previous awardwinning books include why, what makes us curious, the golden ratio, was not a mathematician, accelerating universe and the equation that cannot be solved which is his basis for an mi nominated pogrom. As a fellow of the American Association for the advancement of science doctor livio has made significant theoretical contributions to topics ranging from cosmology, supernova explosions and back holes to extrasolar planets and the emergencies of life in the universe. Moving in this world of Scientific Research and popular renown he has appeared that the galileo story could be treated just as a fascinating history that this book makes clear it is. Though we rarely need because were living to the next chapter of science denial which states that cannot be higher. We are so happy to have him digitally here tonight so without further ado the digital podium is yours. Doctor livio. You very much. With your permission i would now try to share the screen. [laughter] sounds good. Just one second. Okay, galileo and the science deniers, this is, by the way, the cover of the book. Some people ask me why did i decide to write this book and for very simple reasons. One is that im in astrophysicist and galileo is the founder of modern astrophysics so im always fascinated. He is a fascinating person in general and this business of science denial which unfortunately we still have to deal with today so these are, i think, good enough reasons to do this so i started by noting the fact that galileo is, oh wait, i apologize. My presentation jumped to the very last slide. I will start again. I start with the fact that galileo is really a largerthanlife intellectual and for reasons that many of you know i am sure but some of you will find out here. Because he was such a hero many works of art in various areas of the humanities were devoted to him so i just collected a few, for example, paintings where he is being painted and i just throw them one on top of the other and do take a bunch of photographs and look at them and throw them on top of the other so this is the very earliest portrait known of galileo when he was about 40 years and he was done by an unknown painter and you will notice that his eyes are not symmetric which it appeared in other paintings as well. He probably had a problem there. This is a painting at later age and this particular painting is attributed to the famous painter to terrazzo but this is one of the most famous paintings of galileo and he is holding a telescope in his hand and we will be talking about that but galileo appeared in many other types of paintings. For example, here is a painting of him showing through the telescope trying to observe things and this is even a cartoonish like painting that was done in the last century with galileo trying to explain his discoveries to people from the catholic church. But in addition to regular standard classical paintings there are other types of works of art. For example, pop art. He appears in pop art and he appears even in graffiti. I was in florence as part of the research and i saw this on one of the walls of the houses in florence and here he is painted as if scuba diving or something but maybe it is through the Google Doodle as well in the telescope and he made it into works of art in other areas there is a very famous play through the life of galileo and this is a scene of one of the productions and there is even an [inaudible] written by philip glass and i have a small piece of that opera but, believe it or not, we were unable to make the sound work on the shared screen to crowd cast so you cannot hit a visit but you will see at least the images from the opera. Here are those images. Imagine that here you hear singing going on only it doesnt happen. Not only does it not happen but in fact, even the things dont advance which is even worse. I cannot tell you why that is happening. I will just jump over that. Let me jump to the discoveries. I apologize. I never use crowd cast before and i dont know how to arrange any kind of technicalities here. So, the discovery. Some of the discoveries had to do with pure physics. Galileo was very, very interested in freefall and in freefall in particular he dropped objects from certain heights. He dropped rumor has it he dropped objects from the Leaning Tower of pisa but as far as i get up from his research he probably never has done it. He did drop balls from various heights but i found no real reliable evidence that he dropped it from the Leaning Tower, even though his first biographer wrote that he did but viviani wrote when galileo was very old and viviani was extremely young and management could have been on both sides. In any case, what he suspected was that he wanted to study was if heavy balls fell faster than light falls because aristotle said the heavier the ball the faster it falls and not only that but it would fall faster in proportion to the weight. Galileo wanted to test that. At the time of galileo there was no goodtime measure so to measure small differences in time was very difficult so he came up with these incredibly clever idea of using inclined planes. He realized that freefall is, in some sense, could be seen as an extreme case of balls rolling down inclined plane when the plane is vertical to the ground. But by making the angle inclined plane very, very small he was able to dilute gravities, if you like, to slow down the motion sufficiently so that it could make more accurate measurements for the motion. But he did more than that. By allowing the ball to roll down the plane and fly into the air he was able to see the trajectory that projectiles do when thrown into the air and he discovered that the projector re is actually a curve that was wellknown from the ancient greeks and this is the curve of the parabola and he was the very first to discover that that the projectiles trace a parabola as they go through the air. He also discovered, you know, laws of freefall that for example the distance traveled is proportional to the square of the time meaning if a balls falls twice in that state one ball balls for a second and another for two seconds the ball that falls for two seconds covers the decision that is for time that if it is to squared that the distance covered by the ball at the falls only one a second. Many other such things. Of course, he is most Famous Discoveries were the telescope. He did not invent the telescope but the telescope was invented in the netherlands but as soon as he heard about the invention he realized that this could be a fantastic instrument and he basically took tubes from organs and polished his own lenses and put the own lenses at the end. These are few of the original telescopes and these are the only ones that survived. Instead of using this telescope to look at ships for after all he was in the venetian republic or to look to spy on his neighbors he instead turned his telescope to the skies. And there he saw incredible things. This was one of the lenses that he polished and is not is very ornate frame around it but this is the experience. He very quickly managed to generate telescopes that had the power of about 20. The original telescopes had only powerful at about four and these telescopes had the power of 20. When he the first object he looked to was the moon. And here is the First Encounter that we have with the situation where galileo artistic education helped him in his scientific discoveries. You see, at the same time was this english astronomer harriet who also looked at the moon but when you look at what he drew from what he saw you cannot understand anything and neither did harriet. Even though he saw some features there but galileo, because of his training in drawing as an artist and his understanding of light and shadow he understood immediately that what he was observing was the rugged surface of the moon, surface with mountains and craters by looking at the dark part near for example, if you look at the bottom right of the small figure in the one that is three above it you will see that there are points of light in the dark side, in the dark parts already, on illuminated parts i mean. He understood that that actually was tops of mountains that were illuminated by the sun and he noticed that as time was progressing and light was creeping down the mountain just as it would do on earth. He understood very well that what he was seen here in this was also extremely important because until that time the idea was that there was a huge difference between terrestrial and celestial. Things on earth were supposed to be corruptible, full of blemishes and could die but things in the sky, in the heavens, or supposed to be pristine, perfect and no blemishes but what he showed was that the moon had a surface just about like the surface of the earth and of course, we know now, that to be true and this is an image of taken by [inaudible] from actually the orbital of the moon and hes an astronaut and you can see the craters on the surface of the moon. Of course, we also see the earthrise there and this has become a very, very famous painting because of that. As i told you galileo started also freefalling objects and what he concluded in the end which was amazing was that all objects in freefall fall exactly at the same rate irrespective of their weight but the only difference we observe here on earth is because of the heirs resistance. At this time there still were no vacuum pump so we cant perform experiments and vacuum so it was really his intuition and basing his things on the experiments of thinking what would happen if you drop a heavy ball and a light fall. This experiment was done on the moon by astronaut scott and i want to show you the video of that now but i am now a little bit concerned because that video also has sound in it and the sound does not work so not sure the video will be successful but lets see. I dont know if you hear him but he has a hammer. [audio difficulties] you see they hit the ground at the same time. He says i guess mr. Galileo was correct. Im not sure if you heard the sound but im telling you what he was saying. He said we got here to the moon because of a certain gentleman named galileo and made some certain discoveries about falling objects and then he did this experiment. Now, turning his telescope to other celestial objects he discovered four satellites of jupiter and that was an immense discovery. This is the very first document where it describes it and this is in the bottom half of a letter he wrote and you can see his drawings very simple drawings showing for, all four satellites and sometimes only three or two or two on one side and three on one side and one on the other side and so on. But the importance of these discovery cannot be, you know, over emphasized. The thing is the following paid first of all, these were the very first objects since antiquity new objects discovered in the solar system and second the people that objected to the copernican model and at the time what was still prevailing was basically the model where the idea was that all the planets and the sun revolved around the earth. Galileo adopted the copernican model and he lived some decades before him and wrote this book where all the including all the planets of the earth revolved around the sun. People who objected to these raised a variety of objects, some of those were the following. They said wait a second, if the earth is really just another planet like all other planets how come it is the only planet that has the moon and galileo showed that jupiter is not just one moon but even four. Second they said if the earth were to evolve around the sun surely it wouldve lost its moon so how come it manages to preserve its moon. Here is jupiter revolving around something and choose whether you want to make it revolved around the earth or the sun but keeping its form though that objection so this was extraordinarily important. It is less known that galileo also detected the planets neptune in 1612. This is the point that you see on the very left of the video. It did not recognize it as a planet because the telescope wasnt good enough at an observation was not long enough but to be able to tell that it was moving. It did detected. The discovery of neptune was delayed until the middle of 19th century when it was really discovered to be the planet. One of the most important discoveries and by all means im not giving you all of them just a flavor of the discovery is the phases of the planet venus. Venus was known to be between the earth and the sun and if venus is revolving around the sun then it should show a whole set of phases just like the moon. For example, when it is the farthest from the earth as in the top of the figure it should look smallest and fully lit but when it is closest to earth is in the bottom of the figure it should look largest in basically dark and in between it should show the various crescent phases just like the moon but this is not expected if venus was revolving around the earth. By showing this galileo gave a strong argument, perhaps the strongest against the ptolemaic model. I want now to move to Something Else which is particularly important as we are talking in the context of a bookstore and so on. There is this offer author who in the 1950s noticed the following paid noticed in england that starting from about the 30s people in the literary circles started to refer to themselves as the intellectuals and thereby excluding scientists from that definition and furthermore they were complaining about scientists not knowing much about the humanities at all. At the same time they noted that those same intellectuals knew nothing about the sciences and that did not seem to bother them. So he wrote this book and gave a talk and with the book which is called the two cultures where he basically described the schism that he thought had developed between the humanities and the sciences. If you look at galileo, galileo would not have even understood what they were talking about. Galileo during late renaissance so even in terms of the chronology they called him a renaissance person but he was a renaissance person in every other aspect to an already at age 24 he gave two lectures on dantes inferno, this is from dantes divine comedy. So, you know, he was familiar with that and would cite dante and give lectures on the location and structure for the inferno. He was also the great admirer of this poet [inaudible]. He could cite entire passages from him and he wrote an essay comparing him to another poet and he thought he was far superior and so on but it wasnt just in literature and poetry. First of all, he was a musician. His father was a musician in the music theories and galileo was an accomplished flute player and very often played with his father but not only that but as i say he studied himself drawing but in addition to that he had painter friends and the famous painter [inaudible] was one of his friends and this here is the dome of the chapel that he painted and i want to draw you attention to the figure at the bottom which shows the virgin standing on the moon. If you look closer at that you will find that he painted the moon just as it was in through galileos telescope. Until that time most painters when they tried to paint these things from the book of revelation they painted the book perfect and pristine and with no blemishes but he painted it just like galileo saw it. Another famous painter that was a friend of his was one of the great painters of the renaissance but perhaps one of the very few women painters and she painted this painting which was to the beheading of copernicus and this was her first version of the painting. She spoke to galileo and he told her about this business of projectile tracing parabola when shooting in the air and she applied to the blood squirting from copernicus neck. In her second version, if you look at the same area at the bottom here, you will see this, where you actually see the blood creating this parabolic trajectory and this is her second version of this painting. And for some reason things were stuck on me here. I cannot tell why. I have no idea what is happening here. I apologize but we do have a technical issue here which i am trying to resolve. I cannot even escape from the presentation. I dont know what is happening. Would you like me to cancel out of it and bring it back up again . Please do. One moment everyone could would you hit screen share again . Im not getting it. Everyone sit tight for one second. Im doing it again. Awesome, thats great. However, i would not say because now on track to place where he did not want to i will go. Okay yeah, so we saw the second version of her painting and this is the full second version. Thank you very much. Lets now jump over a few decades in galileos life and this book that he wrote and tried to publish in 1633. Strongly supported and basically ridiculing the opinions of. Galileo knew and his friends pulled him they wouldnt give permission to publish the book. They had to get permission from the catholic church. So for the buck to be accepted, he ended the preface and conclusion section that seemed to say it is inconclusive and you cannot determine whether the versions are correct. Now in fact the special commission was appointed to say whether he defended and concluded that absolutely. That was considered heretical and i would also mention 17 years earlier there was an injunction which in the strict version he had in his possession a better from the chief cardinal at the time which was a somewhat softer version that didnt say they couldnt teach it or talk about it if he thought he was okay but that didnt play very well. I want to emphasize a few points he had in his discussion with the inquisition. Often when people talk about the galileo affair they present it as if it was a clash between science and religion. It was not a universal such. Between the science he was presenting and liberal interest actions and his point was one shouldnt interpret it literally because it isnt a science book for example the mobility or stability of the earth isnt a matter of faith contrary to ethics. The names of the planet are not even mentioned in the bible so basically his point was it was written for our salvation and not as a science book. Whenever there is a conflict between observations and experiments and a literal interpretation it just means we missed the interpretation because it was written for people to understand. The language wasnt scientifically accurate. The basically if the observations in the reasoning tells you one thing that seemed to be contrary, you need to change the interpretation. He was put on trial and perhaps an attempt that worked particularly well. He was found suspect it of heresy and forced to adjourn. I want to make a point here. They see the true title as an assault. The point is irrespective of whether he was talking about the correct model, it was still his right they didnt have the right to prohibit his books. The dialogues he looked at the 19th century and so on. They read this verdict and he was supposed to recant all of these and he did which basically went against him much of his lifes work so this was a horrible incident. From its own perspective because he didnt tell the people who gave him permission to print a book about the injunction from 17 years earlier the church was right to find him guilty as an assault on intellectual freedom there is no question about this. I hate to use the following phrase but he ended up giving them the finger. When his body was moved from a rather obscure grave for a couple of teeth and vertebrae were removed for whatever reason. The point however is the following reason. In 1992 john paul the second recognized he was right and the church was wrong. He basically said simply that we lost connection. The i canceled your screen. They wont screen share a. Pope john paul set fee had proven himself on this issue the majority didnt perceive the distinction that exists. Basically the pope completely agreed with. It is a cardboard image and this is at the catholic university. He also said it doesnt contradict and nature isnt inconsistent. The book is called galileo and the science deniers i want to get a clear example of Climate Change. The disc shows the concentration it certainly may be didnt convince you it was related in the last 300 years in particular the rise of the past few years and furthermore if you look at the fisa court to. It is what happens in the last few years and from the past 800,000 years but this isnt the right figures of it and, i am stuck again. Would you like to screen share again . If i gave a talk for seven hours maybe by then we will be perfect. Loobut look at what happens n the recent past. When you have todays situations where people try to ignore these which recognize first that the existence of Climate Change but after that, whether humans have anything to do with it, this is i think what they should remember. Its very sad they are in the middle of a pandemic now and at the very early stages, statements such as now we have 15 cases and soon it will be close to zero didnt help. There are no mothers that show had the initial response to the we could have ended up with far fewer people dying of the disease. Basically i want to finish here with some less than. This is galileos tomb. Here you can see me standing in front of it. The main lesson here is the following. It is never really a good idea to bet against science. To do so when things like human life or life on the planet are at stake it is unconscionable and it isnt that the science is always right. Scientists are able to admit that its o only provisional. Its only as good as the data that was available to create the models and things at a given time. But science also self corrects. Sometimes it is rapid and sometimes it might take decades but it does self correct so basically the main lesson is belief in science. I want to thank you and take questions if there are. So i will take this and close it. Everyone if you have questions you can feel free to enter them in the question box below but lets look at what we have so far. Richard asks what was the relationship if any between galileo and other scholars at the time such as kershner. I might have pronounced it wrong. Not with him, but definitely good relations with many scientists of his time. In particular, for a while he was any good relationshi in a gh a very famous moscow number. They exchanged correspondence and he was in relationship with astronomers and mathematicians in rome. With some of them he had disagreements and in particular he was annoyed when they didnt come to his defense even though their observations confirmed this so he was in relationship with other people in science at the time. Does tieins advance building on itself over time with many incremental contributors or the geniuses like galileo who was the galileo of the 21st century cracks the i imagine from the question that this person also read thomas kuhns book which talked about revolutions in science, the the truth is i think that if advances in both coming off one of the two. There is a lot of incremental work that needs to revolution. But sometimes it isnt so noticed independent resolution is more noticed. There are solutions that are inspired for example in galileos case the fact that suddenly there is a telescope available. When you have Something Like this clearly that is like a quantum leap. When you have people like einstein who suggest general relativity almost out of thin air thats the type of revolution, but otherwise most of the time its incremental. With the 21st century i dont know that we have yet. For a while we thought it would be the answer to many questions but now there are serious account whether that is true, so we dont really know. I think with advancements in telescopes and things like this, we will have new discoveries. Host how do we combat the assault on science that is still happening 400 years later, how do we turn the tide back to science . I wish i knew the answer to that. As i said, i think that the current sidelining is alarming to be honest. What worries me more is there are some studies that appear to show a once they form certain opinions its difficult to change those opinions even if you present them with contradictory facts. The only way in my opinion to combat, but it takes time is to start throughout the education system. Everyone needs to know for example the Life Expectancy was half of what it is today. And its only because of science. If you look at the difference between what they call the modern world and the medieval world, the defense has to do with science as a people need to have this appreciation and know some basic things like there are laws of nature the whole universe appears to obey. A question about galileo did in the fascination did he ever tackled the question it is a good question, and if the answer is no. He was a revolutionary but in some ways still a prisoner of the previous views. He didnt believe much in force, Mysterious Forces acting across distance and this is also for example by a. But he did other things. This is a related question about his research. Was he aware that they were symbols of our own and where did he have the speculation . I didnt show up among the many discoveries and he showed what normally looks like the continuous broke down to into different animosities, said he understood that there were a vast number of stores and he was aware that was burned at the stake unfortunately. I dont know what to say that to that. Thats portable. So, Michael Connelly asks concerning the term intellectual, the parallel term has been in use for some time at least on the continent. Does it refer to both scientists and literary scholars or only the latter end of the latter was it before in bolshevik term . I don the i dont think that it was in the response there was no distinction they did also science experiments by the way who was born on this date today, may 21 he was a great feature but also an accomplished mathematician and get all kinds of things. So people around that time people were architects and painters. Shortly the phenomenon i dont think it really started in the 1930s. It probably started before that. Theithere are people who still k today that it exists. There are people who try to bridge the gap by Popular Science books and things like that that make it clear that its part of one culture. We have a question that is bleak but an interesting thought experiment. As the professor thinks the experience will be the end of science deniers if they die from unprotected behavior . No. First of all i dont wish anybody to die, even if i completely disagree with their opinions. But it wouldnt be the end. The fact is that even now we are living through this stage where there is no question that the response was inadequate maybe even to some extent now. I looked for example on may 14. The u. S. Has 328. I calculated the number of deaths per million in south korea and the u. S. In the u. S. , the deaths per million or 264. 264 per million. Do you know what the number was in south korea, it was five. What was 264 in south korea was 5. 03 to be precise. Now what is the difference . Dare responds from the beginning was follow the science indicated the tracing in isolation and all the steps the number isnt as good as in south korea. Its Something Like 95 per million. But they responded more quickly. I think we have time for about one more question. I think him going to takes it easy question. What would be your answer to someone who doesnt agree with the consensus on Global Warming which i know you talk about some but for the people not just in Global Warming but that are not looking at science as a part of culture or a source for decisionmaking how would you respond to people in our own life like that . This is totally nonpartisan. The graphs speak for themselves. We are facing a serious problem here even if you are not 100 convinced that humans are responsible for this, there is no doubt human activity if we continue to burn fossil fuel and is coming it doesnt help the situation. We have to do something about this and hopefully everybody will recognize it at some point. Now with this pandemic it didnt cost money of course the price may be very difficult to. Its horrible. I recognize that its horrible but its also to have hundreds of thousands. It is a sad week note to end on but believing in science is a very positive note. And that is kind of this theory is all about. Thank you for your presentation and your patience with technology. Thank you to all of you out there. Purchase in the link below to all here in massachusetts, have a good night, keep reading and please be well. Goodnight everyone. , everyone. Thank you, everyone. Its a thrill to invite you to the program those that want to watch with closed captions go to youtube where you can enable them in the bottom right corner. The video will also be available immediately following tonights