Inside and Outside the Box: Individual Creativity versus Military Orthodoxy

摘要

Picture a warm June day in Rome. Several men go into a room and look closely at its contents. They react in varying ways to what they see; one of them, an already nervous sixty-nine year old, seems particularly disturbed. After a short while, the group leaves, and does not return. That's it. Not much of a story, you might think. But it marks one of the pivotal moments in the European scientific tradition. It is 1633, and the officials of the Inquisition have just shown the instruments of torture to Galileo Galilei. Galileo was in many ways the creator of the modern scientific method. He took the spyglass, invented by some spectacle makers in Flanders in 1608, and turned it into an instrument of research. Using a telescope of his own design, he discovered the satellites of Jupiter, and was the first man to publish maps of our moon. His consequent book, The Starry Messenger, was a sensation across Europe, and made his international reputation.