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galileo could be associated with Cesare Cremonini, who was put
on trial for atheism a few years before; galileo had worked with
Cremonini during the period of the Studio of Padua. Within a year,
then, galileo turns from the relative tranquillity of Padua to the
spotlight of the judgment of the ‘international scientific commu -
nity’, and is forced to cope with the first really serious disputes of
his career. The commitments on many fronts and his strong
response to every objection directed to him appear clearly in the
introduction of the Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno in su
l’acqua (Discourse on Floating Bodies, 1612) in which galileo,
addressing Cosimo II, explains with an inner urgency the reasons
that pushed him to write the Discorso. The ‘scientific community’
had been expecting a completely different kind of work from him,
and the Jesuit Father Cristoforo Scheiner – under the pseudonym
of Apelles latens post tabulam – originated the controversy by
questioning galileo’s discovery of sunspots2:
Because I know, Your Highness, that when I will publish the
present treatise – whose subject is so different from what
many people have been expecting and which I, according to
what I wrote in my Avviso Astronomico, should already have
published – one could believe that I gave up dealing with my
new celestial observations, or that perhaps I am wading
through them; I thought it would be correct to explain as well
the reasons of deferring the latter work as the reasons that
urged me to write and publish the present one […] many rea-
sons pushed me to write the present treatise, whose subject is
the dispute I had with some literati in town, some days ago,
concerning which many discussions followed, as Your
Highness knows.3
SIMILarITIES BETWEEn SCIEnTIFIC LanguagE …
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2 about the paternity of the discovery of the sunspots, see Walter M. Mitchell, The History of
the Discovery of the Solar Spots (1916), in Popular Astronomy, Carleton College goodsell
Observatory, Vol. 24, pp. 562–570. The article is also accessible on-line at
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/seri/Pa.../0024//0000562.000.html (accessed
november 9, 2010). On the same subject matter see also girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della
letteratura italiana (1833), Milano: nicolò Bettoni e Comp., Vol. IV, pp. 444–445. The vol-
ume is also accessible on-line at http://books.google.it/books?id=duJDaaaaYaaJ&
printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
(accessed november 9, 2010).
3 “Perch’io so, Principe Serenissimo, che il lasciar vedere in pubblico il presente trattato,
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