The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the fame of this outstanding genius rests mostly on discoveries he never made, and on feats he never performed. Contrary to statements in even recent outlines of science, Galileo did not invent the telescope; nor the microscope; nor the thermometer; nor the pendulum clock. He did not discover the law of inertia; nor the parallelogram of forces or motions; nor the sunspots. He made no contribution to theoretical astronomy; he did not throw down weights from the leaning tower of Pisa, and did not prove the truth of the Copernican system. He was not tortured by the Inquisition, did not languish in its dungeons, did not say ‘eppur si muove’; and he was not a martyr of science. What he did was to found the modern science of dynamics, which makes him rank among the men who shaped human destiny. It provided the indispensable complement to Kepler’s laws for Newton’s universe: ‘If I have been able to see farther,’ Newton said, ‘it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.’ The giants were, chiefly, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes.