Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo | By Christopher M. Graney
“For students of the Copernican revolution, here is an unexpected contribution that will force the experts to revise their lecture notes. Christopher Graney (with translation assistance from Christina Graney) has almost single-handedly revised the traditional story about Jesuit Giambattista Riccioli’s list of pro and con arguments for the heliocentric cosmology. Big surprise: in 1651 the geocentric cosmology had science on its side.” —Owen Gingerich, author of God’s Planet
In Setting Aside All Authority, Christopher M. Graney provides an important account and analysis of seventeenth-century scientific arguments against the Copernican system. He challenges the long-standing ideas that opponents of the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were primarily motivated by religion or devotion to an outdated intellectual tradition, and that they were in continual retreat in the face of telescopic discoveries.
Graney calls on newly translated works by anti-Copernican writers of the time to demonstrate that science, not religion, played an important, and arguably predominant, role in the opposition to the Copernican system. Anti-Copernicans, building on the work of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, were in fact able to build an increasingly strong scientific case against the heliocentric system at least through the middle of the seventeenth century.The scientific case reached its apogee, Graney argues, in the 1651 New Almagest of the Italian Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli, who used detailed telescopic observations of stars to construct a powerful scientific argument against Copernicus.
Written in an accessible style that undergraduates and general readers, as well as scholars, will embrace, Graney provides, “The most exciting history of science book so far this century,” says Dennis Danielson (author of Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution); “Graney’s brilliant portrait of Riccioli and his science—amiable but punchy, rigorous but accessible—ought to stimulate a complete revision of what we thought we knew about the Copernican Revolution. Rarely have scientific analysis, historical scholarship, and writerly flair come together with such force.”
Christopher M. Graney is professor of physics at Jefferson Community & Technical College.
Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo
Christopher M. Graney
Publication Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-268-02988-3 / Paperback $29.00
eISBN: 978-0-268-08077-8 / ebook formats: Adobe PDF Perpetual Ownership, $29.00; Adobe PDF 30-day Ownership, $7.00; ePUB / Kindle / Nook
To order: http://undpress.nd.edu/books/P03169
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