The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson

was not until later that Galileo came to realize the position he’d argued in the lectures was incorrect and his contention that the cone-shaped structure of Hell was scale-invariant, meaning it could increase in size without a loss of integrity or strength, was not true. If Hell actually existed in the Earth’s interior, the immensity of the cavity would cause the roof (the earth’s mantle) to collapse unless the walls of Hell were much thicker than he had originally argued. So Galileo set to work on the nature of scaling laws and, late in life, published his discoveries in Two New Sciences, whose principles helped establish modern physics—a science that now exists in part because Galileo realized he made a mistake in his application of natural laws to a supernatural location.