I am a astrophysicist and author of seven Popular Science books, the most recent of which is about galileo and the science denials. I lived in baltimore, and i currently am in baltimore at my home. You can see i imagine [inaudible] i have something that looks like that in every room of the house so it almost doesnt matter where i am. The book as i said is called galileo and the science deniers. This is a fresh biography of galileo, but at the same time with an eye on the science denial today which unfortunately we have quite a bit of so the idea is to study from this fascinating person who lived in the 17th century to see what lessons we can learn from that or what extent he already fought some battles that we have to find again today. So, you know when people hear i wrote a book about galileo, the natural question is how come i decided to write this book although there are already quite a few biographies on galileo. There were several reasons for this and they were all important at some level. One is that i am an astrophysicist and galileo is considered by many to be one of the founders of modern astronomy. I was always completely fascinated by this person and was familiar with him but not all the details and i wanted to write about him. The second thing is searching through the literature, i discovered very few if any of the existing biographies were written by researchers in the field of astrophysicists. More often they were written by science historians, Science Writers and so on, so i thought maybe i could bring a certain new perspective to his discovery and especially to put them in the context of what we know today. The other thing is the scholarly written biographies which are fantastic usually are very detailed and are not so appropriate for a regular reader that wants to just read something simpler so i decided to write a somewhat shorter book but tried nevertheless to stay as accurate as i could. Finally and perhaps most importantly, i was struck by the fact that we are encountering science denial today on many fronts with Climate Change or even the initial response to the pandemic and of course galileo is famous for fighting for intellectual freedom and against science denials so for all of these reasons i decided that this was a book i really wanted to write. Now of course there is a difference between. His battle is sometimes described as a battle between science and religion. It wasnt and he never saw it as such. What he was fighting against was a clash between science and literal interpretations. He basically argued that it wasnt written as a science book. He borrowed words from a cardinal who said scripture tells us how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go so it was this type of clash. Today the reasons for science denial are different. Usually they have to do with political conservatism although occasionally they also go into religion, but for example, in the case of Climate Change, it definitely has to do with conservatism or economic issues, sometimes with fewer political issues than being in an Election Year so the causes are different but the effect is somewhat similar. Galileo by the way was up only in terms of the time in which he lived. He lived in the late renaissance but was largely a renaissance person. He had what was called today the liberal arts and he used that knowledge when he did his drawings of the moon. He gave the two lectures about dantes inferno. Some painters for his personal l friends so he really was very wellversed in areas other than science. He wrote about breakthroughs and he was no doubt a fighter for intellectual freedom and he wrote about that. You really cannot have those if you do not have intellectual freedom. But there were no good time measurements at the time so he had to find a way to dilute gravity if you like so that the times would be a bit longer and he had this clever idea to make them roll down the motion was much slower and he was able to measure times better. Over the years his name has inspired a lot. I mention two things, the famous spacecraft was named galileo. They observed other things along the way. Astronaut david scott was on the moon and did a famou the famous experiment where he dropped a hammer and a feather on the moon to show that they follow the same rate which is something again that galileo was the first to discover and write about. We see how his name and the work he did compared to the ingenuity today and a lot of creativity. David scott started the experiment saying the reason we are here today is because of some gentle man named galileo. One other thing was in the fact that he declared the universe was written in the language of mathematics. Today we take that for granted because all of the laws and physics are written as mathematical equations but in his time there were no such laws in fact he wrote the very first few of those and yet he had this incredible intuition that somehow the universe has to be written in the language of mathematics and of course people after him picked up on that in particular, isaac newton and his theory writing the laws of mechanics and of course today we all do that when we want to write a theory in physics or any fundamental science it is written in the language of mathematics. But he really was the first by some incredible intuition of his. Galileo was a very complex personality. He had a very complex personality. I dont want anybody to get the impression that he was the nicest person. He could be nice and supportive to members of his own family, but when it came to people who objected to him in science or otherwise, he had an extraordinarily sharp tongue and he was really strong. Almost unparalleled he wrote a very witty way in one case he mocked somebody who told the story and he said thats an interesting story but we also have eggs and people that can do this and they dont cook so what is it that we lack that the babylonians had. He said the only thing is being babylonian so it must be that they are cooking because they are babylonians. So, this type of thing i wanted to convey this personality of galileo thats not the nicest person, a genius, intellectual freedom, extremely important to him. At the same time, a lot of selfrighteousness. He was very, very feisty even when he was wrong and he was wrong a good number of times. He was not always right but this is part of the thing we have to learn today. You see, scientists are actually the first to admit that science is only provisional and as good as the data that exist at the certain time so the good thing about science is that sometimes the self correction happens fast and sometimes you have to wait decades or even centuries but it does selfcorrect. In this we have to understand. Science is the best guide we can have for example in this pandemic there is no other way to follow the science or Climate Change. You have to follow with the whae scientists are telling us because that is the best guidance we have on this. To bet against the judgment of science at the time when human life or even the entire evolution of the virus here on earth is just unconscionable. We have to follow the science. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you will enjoy the book galileo and the science deniers. This is a book about a great person with important lessons i believe for today, and i hope that we will learn from his example even though the person he said had his own flaws like we all do. Thank you all very much. As far as i can tell we probably have readers from all over the world in