Galileo's Tragic Fall
357151
I have a fairly long commute to work, and being a fan of history, I am always on the lookout for a great story to listen to and learn from. I saw the PBS documentary (which I also own btw). The abridged version is of course short, but is a rich source of details that were absent from the movie that I relished learning of. The treatment of Galileo always angers me whenever I hear it. A horrible defeat in the war of Reason vs. Blind Dogma. Luckily, people were able to secret copies across borders of his banned works so that we could know of them today.
3414328
Excellent revisit to Henri Pirenne's book. This is a much more likely explanation of the end of classical civilization through a careful examination of archeological evidence. There is a completely unjustified mythology that Islam was a great, civilization that achieved great things as the surviving civilization from Rome shriveled to its own death. Instead, Scott shows that Islam's inherent violent nature did fatal damage to a thriving classical civilization that was so civilized that armies and serving in them was not held in high esteem. This is a must read to dispel the false notion that the West "fell".  The terror and anti-civil phenomenon of Islam was in every way a destructive force as it has been since its invention in the 600s. The book starts off slow - in my estimation - and the review of archeological remains such as coins seemed a weak argument and stretched too far to make such a sweeping argument about the fall of the West. However, as you read further there seemed to be a snow balling effect. Far more data and real history started to build a strong argument. We are all in danger if we do not learn the truth of history and the foe and enemy of all civilized peoples which is Islam.
1618111
As the sun rose on November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, the people of Lisbon had much of which to be proud.  Capital of a sprawling empire, Lisbon was a fabulously wealthy city given over to excess of every kind.  Its palaces, opera houses, and markets were ornate and crammed full of everything a European's heart could desire.  Its multitudinous churches were just as ornate and just as excessive in their devotion to worship. Then, within a few moments, everything was swept away.  A massive earthquake estimated to have been 9.0 or higher erupted under the Atlantic and swept across the city, followed by a gigantic tsunami that swamped the ruins and swept thousands out to sea.  A firestorm then engulfed what was left of the city, burning for weeks and destroying countless lives as well as an incalculable number of magnificent books, paintings, and other artwork. The earthquake and its accompanying tsunamis wreaked havoc across Europe and Africa and did damage in North and South America as well.

The Lisbon Earthquake struck in the middle of the European Enlightenment, a time period during which science and reason were popularly believed to have relegated much of religion and faith to the wayside of history.  People who believed that the world ran like clockwork, ticking along without  divine intervention, were stunned by this incontrovertible evidence that things could suddenly go very wrong indeed.  Mark Molesky's riveting account of the Earthquake and its aftermath is a highly readable and entertaining account of the days just before, during, and after the Earthquake in Lisbon, the rest of Portugal, and all of Europe and beyond.  Its pages are filled with fascinating accounts of Lisbon's pre-quake magnificence, the varied ways in which its citizenry dealt with the disasters that struck them, and the long recovery. Among the fascinating characters are the Marques de Pombal, a selfmade nobleman who rose to power after the quake when neither the King nor the rest of the aristocracy could grasp what needed to be done.  Pombal took control and ruled dictatorially, doing much to alleviate distress and begin rebuilding but also making Portugal's economy more state controlled and clamping down hard on any opponents.  Among those opponents was the much admired Jesuit priest Gabriel Malagrida, who had served as a missionary in Brazil for many years and was considered almost a living saint.  When Malagrida preached that the earthquake was a judgment from God Pombal, who was intent on modernizing the country and sweeping away superstition, had him charged with heresy and eventually burned at the stake.  Then there was my favorite character, Sir Harry Frankland. An English baronet who lived with a woman not his wife and scandalized the populations of both Old and New England with his shenanigans, he was in Lisbon when the earthquake struck on his way to church in a coach with another, unnamed, woman.  Eventually he was rescued from the ruins by his live in lady friend, whom he eventually married.

Besides the history of the quake and its impact on Lisbon Molesky gives us much fascinating material on how the tremors affected the rest of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.  He compares the quake with other massive historical disasters and recounts the long term consequences to Lisbon, Portugal, and the world.  Among those  whose lives were forever changed by the quake was the French philosophe Voltaire, who saw the disaster as further evidence that the Enlightenment's  optimistic world view was misplaced.  Perhaps that shift in attitude by Voltaire and many others is the most significant long term consequence of what happened along a fault line deep under the Atlantic Ocean on the morning of November 1, 1755
2209971
Anyone who watched the incredible computer-generated graphics of Hurricane Ike nearing the coast of Texas this month might find this book quite fascinating. It traces the history of weather prediction and the development of the science of meteorology over the past 200 years and an interesting story it is, replete with colorful individual geniuses who pushed the frontiers of knowledge forward -- and dumb bureaucrats and politicians who tried to block them at every turn.
The book begins with Benjamin Franklin who was the first to notice that the winds in a storm moving northwards might actually be blowing in a southerly direction.  But most of the other men profiled in this book who made the most striking contributions to meteoroloy -- Americans, Britons and most noticeably Norwegians and Swedes  -- I had never heard of.
  There was the chemist Luke Howard who classified the different kinds of clouds and gave them the names we know today -- cumulus, stratus, nimbus.
  William Redfield was not a trained scientist but in 1821 the New Yorker was the first to describe the circular motion of winds in a hurricane. Twenty years later, Elias Loomis, a professor of mathematics and philosophy, was the first to produce a weather map. But for much of the 19th century, weather forecasting faced tremendous opposition from those who said it was contrary to God's will as well as producers of popular almanacs who faced the loss of their business.
  Robert FitzRoy, who captained the Royal Navy ship The Beagle which took Charles Darwin on his historic voyage to the Galapagos, coined the word "forecasting."  But progress in the United States ground to a halt after the Civil War when weather prediction was placed under the control of the Army. Things grew even worse at the end of the 19th century when political appointees hostile to science took over in the administration of Grover Cleveland.
  The comparison to today's debate over global warming and the Bush administration's refusal for so many years to admit the problem, much less grapple with it, are too obvious to be ignored, though the author of this book does not belabor them.
  The consequences of blindly ignoring science were graphically and tragically demonstrated in the great hurricane that destroyed Galveston in 1900.  Isaac Cline was in charge of weather forecasts in the city, though he was not a leading scientist. He baldly stated, based on no reliable data, there was no chance of a hurricane striking Galveston. He encouraged the city fathers to demolish the sea wall protecting the city. The government also took the distastrous step of denying weather watchers in Cuba access to the telegraph system because "hurricane warnings unnecessarily riled the natives." After the disaster in which he lost his own wife, Cline launched a coverup, falsely stating that he had posted hurricane warnings -- and emerged a hero.
  There are many fascinating stories in this book which is a stark warning of what happens when politicians and bureaucrats hostile to science start their meddling. In 1944, there was a tremendous battle between two forecasters, one renowned scientist Sverre Petterssen and the other Irving Krick, a charlatan who had somehow built himself a career in the field. They disagreed over the weather on the day set aside for the D-Day landings in Normandy. Thank God Petterssen prevailed. If General Eisenhower had listened to Krick, who assured him the weather would be fine, the landings would have been a disaster. Thankfully he heeded Petterssen's advice and postponed the landings by one day.
  There are some faults with this book. The writing can be a bit plodding and the characters hardly burst to life from the page. Still, I found it wonderfully interesting and recommend it to anyone who would like to know about the nightly weather forecasts we now take for granted.
1046030
I watched a recent episode of the popular series "The Universe" after reading this book and had a very different impression than I would have prior to reading it.  Listenting to a respected astronomer "pontificating" about how "we have not yet detected Dark Matter, but it has to be there, because the Big Bang Theory says it has to be there, and the Big Bang Theory is an article of faith..." seemed almost foolish, in the context of Van Flandern's theories.

Van Flandern covers a lot of ground in his excellent book and I confess that I skimmed through the chapters explaining celestial mechanics.  The book covers many topics and it is unlikely that everyone will want to read every chapter (pick and choose).

Among many other interesting things, Van Flandern asserts that gravity waves (or particles)propagate at a speed that is 20 billion times the speed of light!  To put that into perspective, it means that a graviton would traverse the entire span of the known universe (plus or minus ten billion light years)in 1.5 years!

To me, Van Flandern's key take away message is that scientists today have gone astray of the "tried and true" Scientific Method and rely more and more on inductive reasoning to attempt to prove their theories, rather than observations and the use of deductive reasoning.  Van Flandern cites as one example the increasingly complicated, convoluted and hard-to-fathom "fixes" offered to maintain support for the Big Bang Theory, when new observations do not fit the model.

Van Flandern also asserts that scientists today are behaving more-or-less the way the Church behaved 400 years when it banned Galileo's writings.  To put it another way, we are "back-sliding" into personal attacks and bullying when a scientist's theories differ from those that are commonly accepted - especially anything that treads on the "sacred ground" of The Big Bang Theory and Special Relativity.  Van Flandern predicts that historians will one day look at the last hundred years of certain aspects of scientific research (notably astrophysics)with a degree of distress and humor.

Van Flandern also admonishes scientists for refusing to acknowledge acumulated credible observations over the last 20 or so years that collectively support "artificiality" as the explanation for the geometric structures and "Face", on Cydonia on the planet Mars.  Van Flandern is not a crack pot - he is a highly credentialed scientist.  Review the evidence and draw your own conclusions.

You may completely disagree with Van Flandern's observations, theories and conclusions, but it is hard to disagree with his logic.

This is a terrific book - buy it and read it.
3057165
Told in the first person, mostly in Lady Jane's voice, this novel meticulously details this tragic and heartbreaking tale of a young aristocratic girl who lived in England in the mid-1600s during the outbreak of the religious wars.  Because Lady Jane had the misfortune to be living in a very dangerous period of English history surrounded by brutal and irresponsible people, she was executed for treason at the age of sixteen.
Lady Jane Dudley ne Grey was distantly related to the Tudors, and during the period of time when there was a power vacuum in the country between the death of the Calvinist King Edward VI and the accession to the throne of his Catholic sister Mary I, Lady Jane Grey was made Queen of England by her father-in-law the Duke of Northumberland. Because of this, Lady Jane is also known at the Nine Day's Queen.
Naturally, a teenager could not really be a traitor, and Alison Weir's outstanding novel details how her self-absorbed and selfish parents betrayed Lady Jane by acting irresponsibly in ways that contributed directly to her death.  The tragedy is not just that a young life was lost to no purpose, but that Lady Jane was an outstanding young woman.  She was highly intelligent and a gifted scholar of Latin and Greek, who already was developing a correspondence with some of the leading intellectuals of her day.  By forcing her to marry at the age of fifteen - especially to the son of a person with dangerous pretensions to the throne - her parents showed that no only did they not appreciate Jane, but they were willing to sell her off for political and financial gain.  Such actions were not unusual in aristocratic families of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and in a forthcoming novel I discuss this issue myself.  But what makes this story so tragic is that Lady Jane was exceptional, not only in her academic gifts but also in her level of maturity and piety.
4821256
This is the sequel to "From the Earth to the Moon." It was first published in 1870 and, although it contains many scientific errors, it also contains some accurate predictions as well. It is perhaps the very first  novel to treat travel in space. It was surprisingly fun reading. However,  care should be exercised. There are a number of very poor translations  available. Make sure yours is fine. In the story, the travelers are unable  to land on the moon. They see the "dark" side of the moon before  they head back to Earth.
2474442
The premise for the book is Sobel's new translation of letters to Galileo from his eldest daughter Virginia, a cloistered nun who adopted the name Sister Maria Celeste and who was, on the evidence of her correspondence, an extraordinary person in her own right. The letters themselves are, as advertised, poignant, and in the mutual devotion they illustrate between father and daughter they help to soften the historian's view of Galileo as a brilliant but insufferably egocentric blusterer. But in the absence of Galileo's side of the correspondence, which has not survived, they shed little or no light on the historically momentous confrontation on which the book is focused.
Sobel has filled out her narrative with a well-crafted but ultimately unedifying story of the major events of Galileo's dispute with the Church. A more recent book that sheds more light on Galileo's genius and his relationships that I greatly enjoyed is Wade Rowland's Galileo's Mistake.
1835104
If you like those wonderful articles in the science section of The New York Times, you've undoubtedly read Mr. Johnson's writing before. Reading this book is like gaining access to a whole collection of the best of such articles.

I've always preferred experimental evidence to theorizing as a way to advance knowledge. Many things can be better understood, both in and out of scientific fields, if thoughtful experiments can be designed and properly measured.

Many science courses emphasize what the law of physics is or whatever is being studied and provide little perspective on the evidence for that law or natural function. That's too bad: In the process, those who are interested in the subject miss the chance to gain a deep appreciation for the subject.

George Johnson does an excellent job of providing pithy, clear, and interesting histories of the scientists, the problems they addressed, and the experiments they used to advance knowledge. Some of these stories were more compelling than any television drama I've ever seen.

Prior to the rebirth of inquiry in the Renaissance, Greek theories about how the world works often dominated. Those theories had to be overcome. In some cases, equally arbitrary theories were proposed by more modern scientists. The search for new knowledge almost always began with observing something in nature that didn't follow the "rule" that everyone else believed in.

The section on Galileo will quickly get your attention because Mr. Johnson dispels the notion of dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in favor of describing how an inclined plane was used by Galileo to measure acceleration of a rolling ball. The most fascinating part of the work is how Galileo used his experimental results to derive a theory of what was really going on. Very nice!

The chapter on William Harvey nicely explains the prior view that there were two types of fluids, one in veins and a different one in arteries, rather than one quantity of blood circulating throughout the body. The evidence that this idea was silly is pretty clear, but the challenges of figuring out how the blood circulated are nicely explained here.

The chapter on Isaac Newton requires a strong stomach as Mr. Johnson describes how Newton put a probe into his own eyes to see what the effects would be. The experiments that showed how colors are contained in light are quite interesting.

My favorite chapter, however, is the one on Luigi Galvani in which he sought to demonstrate that animals use electricity to move. Galvani faced a persistent critic in Volta who conducted experiments to disprove Galvani. In the best scientific tradition, both men were right in defining different qualities of how electricity works.

I was almost as intrigued by the chapter on Pavlov that explained a fuller range of his experiments with changing reflexes. It made me want to read more about Pavlov.

The chapter on Millikan was uniquely intriguing, as Mr. Johnson explains through his re-creation of the experiment that Millikan used to measure electron movement that experiments can be almost as much of an art as a science.

In some cases, the personal details of the scientists' lives were almost as fascinating as the science such as Lady Ada Lovelace's single-minded pursuit of the much older, married Michael Faraday who outlived her by many years.
3106253
From elementary school we are taught that 1492 is the year that Columbus discovered America. Certainly this was an important year in American history. But in our America centric education, we neglectic to understand or even learn what was happening in the rest of the world. This book might be called '1492' instead of the Dogs of God. It was the year that these tidal waves of history came together.

After several years of pleading, Columbus finally got permission and funding for his ships to go to the East by sailing westward. He would have made it, but the Americas got in the way and all of a sudden the known world was twice as big. This was pretty good proof that the world was round and in turn went around the sun, the Copernican system. Yet it was a century later that Galileo had to appear before the Cardinals of the Inquisition and was given a life sentence. Pope John Paul II, in 1992 admitted that errors had been made in Galileo's case, but did not admit the church was wrong.

In 1492 the Spanish finally eliminated the Moors from Southern Spain when the great fortress at Granada, the Al Hambra, fell. The Muslim Moors had brought many things to Spain in science, mathematics, medicine. But the Catholic leaders of Spain were determined to expell them. They suceeded. After the bombing of the Madrid trains, the spokesman for AlQueda blamed the attacks on the explusion of 1492.

The Spanish Inquisition was running amuck in 1492. Perhaps 10,000 people were burned at the stake, and some 100,000 were 'cleansed' from the population. From 800,000 to 2,000,000 Jews were thrown out of the country. Indeed as Columbus traveled to board his ships, the roads must have been crowded with Jews leaving their homeland.

After 1492 both Spain and Islam turned inward to spend much of their time concentrating on religion. Neither has been noted for advances in science, mathematics, or medicine since.

This book is extensively researched, well written, very readable and covers one of the pivotal years in world history.
2939015
The dense language and riddling nature of Heracitus' prose has baffled many of us for the past 2500 years. The approach here taken to Heraclitus' fragments is fascinating. The author points out that only by putting the  fragments in context with the way the greeks of the fifth century BC  reasoned, Heraclitus' thought may come to life to the modern reader.
Unlike today's "rational" thought, the greeks of the fifth  century BC were not yet enslaved to deductive thinking and causality, but  were quite aware of the self-referent nature of things, of the unending web  of interelations that makes up Nature and the Universe.
Science  exclusively endowed with causality and deduction is very good at finding  the hows, but terribly clumsy at finding the whys. This book is definitely  recommended to all science people interested not only in learning the hows,  but also in understanding the whys.
245317
This children's book about Galileo has very beautiful illustrations, but the history leaves much to be desired.  It's a perfect example though of how myths about the past take on a life of their own independent of historical evidence or historical context.  Sis offers another variation on the "warfare" of science versus religion  with Galileo representing the modern rational scientist (which he was not) and his opponents in the Church representing ignorant, dogmatic tradition.  Of course the reality was much more complex, especially considering that Galileo did not have proof that the earth moved.  This book shows why children are so often misinformed from an early age for the sake of telling a good story.
2690653
Was the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the man known as the father of Western philosophy, murdered?

Descartes officially died in Stockholm, Sweden, from pneumonia. Sweden was the most powerful nation in Europe at the time, and its queen, Christiana, collected everything imaginable, including academics and philosophers. In 1996, based on a letter by the court physician, a German writer hypothesized that Descartes may actually have been poisoned.
But the natural causes for his death remained accepted.

In The Irrationalist: The Tragic Murder of Rene Descartes, author Andrew Pessin has written a fictional account of the philosophers death indeed being murder. And Pessin constructs a fascinating murder mystery with a very unlikely detective.

Its a wonderfully intriguing story.

Adrien Baillet is sent from the Jesuit school where he serves the rector to Stockholm, to represent the school with the Swedish government. Baillet is not a Jesuit; in fact, hes not much of anything except a servant to the rector. But the school decides it is him who must be sent. When he arrives, he discovers that his schools most famous graduate, Rene Descartes, has died. The French ambassador and the Swedish ambassador decide between them that Baillet must investigate, to put the rumors about murder to rest.

And so Baillet bumbles and stumbles his way through the investigation. And hes told, more than once, that he must know the dead mans life to know how he died, and, if its murder, why.

The story unfolds in two primary narratives  the life of Descartes and the investigation by Baillet. Eventually they converge, and Baillet indeed discovers that what happened to Descartes is buried deep in the mans past, a past that includes his education, his becoming a soldier, the Thirty Years War, and the contemporary politics of Europe, Sweden, and France in 1650.

And the murder investigator may just discover some of his own history. Baillet will find himself attacked, his rooms ransacked, and more than one knife at his throat. The stakes are high in the most powerful monarchy in Europe, and someone, perhaps more than just one, is playing for keeps. The tension continues to build until the very end.

Pessin, a professor of philosophy at Connecticut College, is also the author of The 60-Second Philosopher, Uncommon Sense: The Strangest Ideas from the Smartest Philosophers, The God Question: What Famous Thinkers from Plato to Dawkins have said about the Divine, and other works. The Irrationalist is his first work of fiction.

Well research and including real people as many of the characters, its a story that never flags. Heres hoping Professor Pessin continues to write historical fiction.
3357773
I strongly recommend The Day Without Yesterday to anyone with an interest in physics, astronomy and the history of the universe. As well as being an excellent layperson's introduction to Lemaitre's development of the expanding model of the universe (what has become known as the "Big Bang") it provides an excellent description of how real scientists deal with new data, theories and their philosophical implications.

Up until the mid Twenties, virtually all scientists (from ancients like Aristotle and Lucretius to the greats of early and modern science such as Newton and Einstein) had envisioned an essentially static universe. Lemaitre (a World War I veteran, Catholic priest, and physics/mathematics PhD) realized that Einstein's field equations equations implied an expanding universe, which must have had its origin in a "primeval atom" containing all matter in the universe. Lemaitre also made important contributions to "black hole" theory and other areas of theoretical physics.

He was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Pius XI and was made its president by John XXIII, who also (somewhat to Lemaitre's confusion) appointed him to the pontifical commission to study birth control. (Lemaitre died well before the commission provided its report to Paul VI.)

Although a certain amount of familiarity with mathematics will help, you don't need a great deal of knowledge about the field to enjoy Farrell's writing. I would class The Day Without Yesterday with books like Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, which provide a good popular introduction to an important transitional period in science while remaining accessible to the general reader.
4269045
This is not a book I would have chosen for myself, but I'm very glad someone lent it to me.  A fairly slim volume, with large type and well-spaced lines, I knocked it over on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Due to the large numbers of people dying at sea simply because they banged into rocks they thought were miles away, in 17th century England a committee was set up to award a prize to the person who could come up with a way for sailors to easily determine their longitude to within half a degree - apparently determining latitude is relatively simple.  The prize of 20,000 pounds offered was substantial; probably closer to $1,000,000 in todays' terms, so all sorts of weird and wacky ideas were put forward - in fact, the committee didn't even convene for many years, with most ideas rejected by members acting alone.  The committee survived for over 100 years; possible because it was made up of incumbents of esteemed positions, e.g. the Astronomer Royal, the mathematics professors at Oxford, etc.  Some pretty illustrious people filled those positions over that time (Halley, of comet fame, for instance) and not all of them were impartial - some wanted to win the prize themselves.
Navigation by the stars is a romantic notion, but in those days, mariners could only determine their position with any accuracy on cloudless nights.  How could they find their way in the daytime or in storms, especially if they had to rely on observing of the moons of Jupiter to make their calculations?  Even if the sea was calm enough to allow them to take the necessary sightings, the calculations took seven or eight hours to resolve (by which time they could be dashed against an unexpected rock).  With GPS, modern navigation must be a cakewalk!
John Harrison, a man of humble origins, was a self-taught clockmaker who knew that accurate timekeeping was the way to go.  A carpenter by trade, his understanding of the properties of various woods enabled him to make highly accurate clocks with self-lubricating frictionless WOODEN parts that still run today!  This man was certainly a genius, and the single-minded determination with which he pursued the longitude prize is admirable, especially in the face of the opposition of a committee which seemed to be determined to allow only a celestial method to win the prize.  Until Harrison's breakthrough designs, clocks were notoriously inaccurate while the heavens were constant, so a committee heavily weighted by astronomers and mathematicians were hard to convince.  Harrison's clocks were put through extraordinary testing, with the committee determined not to award him the prize until the King himself intervened and took part in one of the trials.  Even then, as a very old man, he only received part of the prize (along with a special payment) and the rest was still unawarded when the committee disbanded.
Three of the four sea-going clocks Harrison invented in the 1700's still run and keep astoundingly accurate time, despite the dreadful treatment they endured.  The prize winner, made in a different way and susceptible to wear, is too precious to run but, with the others, is on display in England.  I wish I'd known about them when I lived there.  The edition I read had no pictures, but it contained a bookmark with pictures of each of the clocks, although you get no idea of their relative size.
I found this book very disjointed, and perhaps because she was not intending to write a technical treatise, I found the author sometimes tended to oversimplify, sometimes was downright chatty, and other times was very judgemental.  The topic, however, is so fascinating that it is worth reading if you have any interest whatsoever in navigation, horology, or genius.
3080594
To get a true sense of the Copernican Revolution, it is necessary to understand both:
1) Christian Europe's theological transformations, primarily , from 1400 to 1517 (Protestant Reformation & Catholic response), to 1687
2) an astronomical paradigm shift as result of instruments, discoveries & theories, 1400 to 1687. Kepler, Tycho, Galileo, & Newton.

Koyre has done the hard part of Task 1 for the  scholar / scientist / theologian.  Koyre has meticulously laid out logically the competing arguments (by originator) for:

the medieval geo-centric closed world / Chain of Being (Scholastics, mostly),
early Renaissance's helio-centric closed world (1543, Copernicus) which undermined the divine Chain / divine right of Kingship, etc
the 17th century mathematically-exact, mechanical, infinite universe that resulted from the astronomy of Kepler, Tycho, Galileo, & Newton.

This theological transformation was a gradual shift from:

1) an infinite, omnipotent, transcendent Christian God that was WHOLLY different from finite Man & his cosmos
to
2) an immanent & infinite 'Deist clock-maker' God  who expressed His infinite power through the 'plentitude' of an infinite universe.
Koyre considers the transference of earlier attributes of God -- Absolute power & divine infinity, to the physical description of  Newton's Absolute Space --  the 'divinization of Space'! This transformation also revitalized the place of Mankind in the cosmos as 'Renaissance Humanism'.

These changes did not progress without the pain of inquisitions, self-exiles & house arrests, and the occasional martyr. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake around 1600 for his heresy of an infinite, immanent God. As a priest, his infatuation with infinity was too close to the Church, and, too soon, lacking the support of Galileo & Newton's observations. Cardinal de Cusa, on the other hand, theologized an 'indeterminate cosmos' as a transition from Copernicus to infinite cosmologists and profoundly influenced the theological transformation from medieval to Renaissance.
I would recommend first reading The Sleepwalkers by Koestler, as a generalist summary of the astronomical paradigm shift.  With this astronomical background, Koyre will be much easier to understand. Then try Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was deeply influenced by Koyre.
2915504
Great account of the disaster of the failure of this very large curved gravity dam.  Would recommend this to anyone in engineering