Galileo Galilei stands as one of the most important figures in history, not simply for his achievements in astronomy, physics, and engineering and for revolutioning science and the scientific method in general, but also for the role that he played in the (still ongoing) drama concerning entrenched power and its desire to stifle any knowledge that may threaten that power. As such, it is important that the people of the modern era come to understand and appreciate exactly what Galilei accomplished and wrote. But the world in which Galileo lived was a very different world from the one we see today. The structure of the language that he used is not the same of today. The mindset with which he and all others of the time were familiar is far, far gone from the mindset that shapes our world today. As such, modern understanding is made all the more difficult by the tremendous amount of knowledge (in historical, philosophical, geometrical and linguistic terms, among others) required for such an understanding, along with Galileo's often florid writing style (in a mixture of Italian and Latin) and the fact that he made no use of the sort of algebraic formulae that tend to be more coherent to the average reader of today in explaining his ideas. weiterlesen