Where Galileo differed was in his conception of the relationship between physical reality on the one hand, and human ideas, observations and reason on the other. He believed that the universe could be understood in terms of universal, mathematically formulated laws, and that reliable knowledge of these laws was accessible to human beings if they applied his method of mathematical formulation and systematic experimental testing. As he put it, ‘the Book of Nature is written in mathematical symbols’. This was in conscious comparison with that other Book on which it was more conventional to rely.
