Talk:The Assayer

Lousy
Your punctuation is lousy. This page is for improving the main article. I refer to 69.159.210.13.

This article relies on Recondi (1983), however in some respects his work on teh Assayer have been found to be "fanciful", "implausible" and have "selective use of the evidence" - from Goodman, D and Russell C.A. (eds.). The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500- 1800. Milton Keynes : Open University, 2003, [which also cites Ferrone and Firpo as critics of Recondi (but which I haven't personally read) specifically dealing with the theory that the sensory theory in the Asssayer (which was from atomism/ Lucretius?) was part of the reason for Galileo's trial, as if true would undermine transubsantiation in the sacrement of the Eucharist.]

Also I have the spelling of the author of the work to which Galileo repsonds as Horatio Grassi in the above text book and three other associated Open University books, but as a new person at Wikipedia I haven't altered it. Should I? WOuld I need to cite source just to correct spelling? The text of the Assayer can be found here: Bigcitydeserter (talk) 01:46, 1 May 2008 (UTC)bigcitydeserter

Grassi was right?
The claim in the lede that Grassi was right is apparently misleading since Grassi argued that comets moved around the moon, at variance with current wisdom. Tkuvho (talk) 08:55, 19 May 2015 (UTC) Tkuvho (talk) 17:19, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I want extensive quotation from Galileo and Grassi on the comets. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.83.0.202 (talk) 10:25, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
 * User:Tkuvho is contradicting himself, crossing out his own remark in this paragraph. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.0.0.172 (talk) 08:48, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Grassi's follow-up critique

 * Grassi's follow-up critique is certainly relevant to this page in that it was a critique of The Assayer, the book under discussion. What is relevant is not so much indivisibles as atomism. Tkuvho (talk) 07:48, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
 * A thousand writers have made remarks about the "Assayer". This article will get very long if they are all included. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.125.220.140 (talk) 09:33, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Fire
In attempts to pull Galileo's chestnuts out of the fire for him, Tkuvho has depicted Galileo as a liar. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.180.201.239 (talk) 09:09, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
 * There is a request by ‎William M. Connolley to "please provide evidence, per talk request."  However I am not sure what the request is exactly.  The comment by IP 91.180.201.239 that  ‎William M. Connolley restored is apparently not requesting any evidence but rather proposing a conspiracy theory. William, if you can explain the mendacious chestnuts to me, I may be able to comment. Furthermore, I did provide more evidence recently, found in the reference by Feingold (see the page). Tkuvho (talk) 08:37, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
 * You removed a talk page comment with the edit comment removing comment by banned user. I requested evidence that this was indeed a banned user. The talk page request is, err, the request on your talk page . My apologies for hiding it from you so cunningly William M. Connolley (talk) 15:31, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
 * The administrator who just protected the page feels that there is a pattern of behavior indicative of sockpuppeting. Given the history of Galileo-related pages, these are probably sockpuppets for Azul1411. Are you more interested in protecting trolling IPs than in discussing content? Tkuvho (talk) 15:34, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Now you're throwing around accusation of enabling trolls; this is not good-faith behaviour on your part William M. Connolley (talk) 17:07, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
 * You didn't answer my question. Tkuvho (talk) 05:18, 25 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Your question was stupid. You should not have asked it; no-one with good faith could possibly have asked it William M. Connolley (talk) 06:45, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Confined
User:Tkuvho should be confined to telling us about pseudo-mathematicians, like Cantor and Godel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.230.86.201 (talk) 15:59, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Discussion
The following material has recently been added to the page:

Grassi's response
In 1626 Grassi published a further tract against Galileo entitled Ratio ponderum librae et simbellae, again under the preudonym "Sarsi." While Grassi's earlier text Libra focused on mainly astronomical issues, Ratio focused on doctrinal issues. Writes Redondi:
 * ... unlike The Assayer, which had recourse to the lethal polemical weapons of satire and the new philosophy, the Ratio used those no-less-lethal weapons of doctrinal and dialectical retort based on religious and philosophical orthodoxy. (Redondi p. 191)

Grassi's critique was consistent with the Jesuits' opposition to Galileo's atomism and the geometry of indivisibles. The doctrinal weapons in question included a particularly literal interpretation of the second canon of Session 13 of the Council of Trent in the matter of transubstantiation, as well as the scholastic adoption of the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, with Grassi claiming that Galileo's atomism is heretical in that it contradicts the real presence of the body and blood of the nazarean in respectively the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Coming as they did in the oppressive atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, these accusations frightened Galileo, who did not respond to Grassi/Sarsi's book (Redondi p. 198-199).

A few decades later, Galilean Donato Rossetti would complain that a certain Florentine Jesuit had gone so far as to order one of his students, so that he should not fall into the sin of atomism,
 * "to swallow every morning as a preventative, and before reciting Christian prayers, a certain ridiculous medicinal tirade of his against atoms."

G3
A denunciation of The Assayer labeled "G3" and written sometime during the 1620s was conserved in the Vatican archives and discovered by Redondi in 1982. The author of the denunciation writes that if one admits
 * very tiny particles with which the substance of the bread first moved our senses, which if they were substantial (as Anaxagoras said, and this author seems to allow ...), it follows that in the Sacrament there are substantial parts of bread or wine, which is the error condemned by the Sacred Tridentine Council, Session 13, Canon 2.

I attempted to engage editors opposed to its inclusion on this talkpage (see section "fire" above) but the editors in question did not respond, and continued deleting the material. Tkuvho (talk) 05:10, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Recent edit warring
Start a RFC, go to dispute resolution, do something besides reverting please. --Neil N  talk to me 03:28, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

The opening claim is false
"first broaching the idea that the book of nature is to be read with mathematical tools rather than those of scholastic philosophy, as generally held at the time."

This idea was circulating at least since the 1300s.

To quote historian of mathematics, Clifford Truesdall:

"The now published sources prove to us, beyond contention, that the main kinematical properties of uniform accelerated motion, still attributed to Galileo by the physics texts, were discovered and proved by scholars of Merton college…. In principle, the qualities of Greek physics were replaced, at least for motions, by the numerical quantities that have ruled Western science ever since. The work was quickly diffused into France, Italy, and other parts of Europe. Almost immediately, Giovanni di Casale and Nicole Oresme found how to represent the results by geometrical graphs, introducing the connection between geometry and the physical world that became a second characteristic habit of Western thought..."

So it probably should be scrapped. GeneCallahan (talk) 21:07, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Copied content from article "Galileo Galilei"
Copied "Controversy over comets and The Assayer" from article "Galileo Galilei"; see that page's history for attribution. The Cosmic Ocean (talk) 11:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)