Galileo in the Digital Age [Effect Measure]

I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think about things. In fact I frequently have a problem with early waking. I think it’s age related. In any event, one of the things I sometimes think about (mainly I think about my research or something connected with it, which is one reason why I have trouble going back to sleep) is what side of the great scientific controversies I’d be on. Like Galileo. Everyone thinks of his problem with the Church (allegedly) because he championed heliocentrism (the true story seems to be more political, complicated and nuanced, but I’ll leave that for others). But what I think about is his claim that “objects in motion tend to remain in motion” — which of course they don’t, at least not that anyone on earth has seen. There’s this little matter of friction, so no one had ever seen it happen. Would I have bought it? It was an inspired and fruitful abstraction and the cornerstone in one way or another of a good chunk of classical physics (Newton’s First Law). I thought about it again today — this time during my usual waking hours — because of news reports that Galileo had finally entered the Digital Age. Literally.

I’m not talking about Galileo’s ideas or his books or his image in pixels. I’m talking about Galileo in the form of his digits:

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