Galileo: Decisive Innovator Paperback - 1996

First line

Sir Henry Wotton, the English Ambassador to the Republic of Venice, was taking a risk when he wrote to the Earl of Salisbury, sending King James I what he called 'the strangest piece of news' that the King had 'ever yet received from any part of the world'.

From the rear cover

In this entertaining and authoritative biography Michael Sharrat examines the flair, imagination, hard-headedness, clarity, combativeness and penetration of Galileo Galilei. To follow his career as he exploited unforeseen opportunities to unseat established ways of comprehending nature is to understand a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo was a path-breaker for the newly invented telescope, the decoder of nature's mathematical language and a quite brilliant popularizer of science. Even his reluctant excursion into theology has at least been officially and handsomely recognized by the church's 'rehabilitation' of the Inquisition's most famous victim, fully discussed in the last chapter. This book makes his lasting contributions accessible to non-scientists and his mistakes are not overlooked. This is not a mythical story, but the biography of an innovator- one of the greatest ever known.