Blog post #5

"Galileo: Right: here's the earth and here's you standing on it. He takes a splinter from a  piece of firewood and sticks it into the apple. Now the earth's turning around.
Andrea: And now I'm hanging head downwards.
Galileo: What d'you  mean? Look at it carefully. Where's your head?
Andrea: pointing: There. Underneath.
Galileo: Really? He turns it back: Isn't it in precisely the same position? Aren't your feet still underneath? You don't stand like this when I turn it, do you? He takes out the splinter and puts it in upside down.
Andrea: No. Then why don't I notice it's turning?
Galileo: Because you're turning with it. You and the air above you and everything else on this ball."


This is one of my favorite scenes in the whole play. I know it seems a little boring to be a favorite scene, but the whole idea of relativism is extremely interesting to me. In this scene, Galileo is explaining to Andrea why he doesn't notice the earth turning. This reminded me of my childhood when I would constantly ask questions about space. I knew the earth was round and I thought that that meant half the people on earth were "upside down". I didn't understand the concept of frames of reference. One particular thing I wrestled with for the first few years of my life was why the "moon followed the car" I was in when my parents would be driving at night. I just couldn't grasp the idea that the moon wasn't actually moving and that it was just so big that it looked like it was following us. Even recently when I'm driving at night, I see the moon and I remember how I used to see it and it makes me think how people for thousands of years thought quite literally that everything revolved around them. They didn't know that they were entirely at the liberty of the rock we're riding on shooting through space at incomprehensible speeds. When I grew up and started to understand the world better I had to explain similar things to my brother, like why the cars next to us on the highway were sitting still even though we were going 60 miles per hour. This scene in the play really captures the innate ignorance we all possess. It shows that we can't really blame everyone on earth during  this time period for thinking the earth is motionless because they had always been told that and they had no pressure to think otherwise, until some of the more modern astronomers came around. I think this scene represents an awakening that occurred around this time where the truth started to click for many people. Galileo represents scientific progress, and Andrea represents the "hatching" of an entirely new way of thinking about and seeing the world in society at the time.