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110 The Bible According to Einstein
The seventh book of Chronicles, called
Newton
Father, speak to me.
Now it came to pass that, in the year 1609, Johannes Kepler wrote down the three laws of planetary motion.82 And suddenly did planetary motion have a mathematical description. And soon thereafter did Galileo Galilei observe and measure falling bodies. And suddenly he understood the falling motion of a falling body. And he realized all bodies fall the same. And he understood the projectile motion of a cannon ball.
And so the seeds of classical mechanics were tossed into a fertile ground; in such soil would one man cultivate great things.
And it came to pass that Galileo Galilei died in 1642.83 And like the transcendental passing of a Dalai Lama, the scientific spirit of Galileo Galilei passed into the body of a newborn child. And that newborn’s name was Isaac Newton.
Now in his youth, Newton studied the work of Aristotle, Descartes, and others. And Newton spoke:
"Amicus Plato,
amicus Aristoteles,
magis amica vertas."
which means
"Plato is my friend,
Aristotle is my friend,
but my best friend is truth."
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82 See the New Testament Book of Classical Physics. The other physics terminology and laws of this Book of Newton are also explained in Classical Physics.
83 During his life, Galileo made important astronomical observations, some of which supported the Copernican idea that planets revolve around the Sun. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, he saw them as they really were: The Moon was not a flat object painted on the celestial dome, as many had supposed; indeed there were shadows on the Moon cast by craters and small mountains. And Galileo saw four spots of light going around Jupiter and not the Earth. And by observing the position and the phases of the planet Venus, he could deduce that Venus was orbiting the Sun. The heavens were telling him that heliocentric theory was correct. And when Galileo announced his findings, there was an outrage, particularly from Aristotelian professors. He was denounced for blasphemous utterances. In 1616, Catholic authorities in Rome declared Copernicanism to be false and told Galileo that, although he made discuss the theory, he could neither defend nor hold its doctrines. Sixteen years later, in 1632, Galileo’s Dialogo appeared. In this book, which was understandable to the common person, a debate occurs among three characters over solar system motions. In 1633, Galileo stood trial in Rome and was found guilty. Bowing to pressure, he recanted his heliocentric beliefs. Although he should have gone to jail, the Pope commuted his sentence to house arrest. Galileo spent the last eight years of his life in isolation.
In 1992, the Catholic Church reopened the case, issuing a retroactive sentence of not guilty and saying that the original judges had not properly separated issues of faith from facts of science.
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