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Title: Galileo's Handwritten Notes Discovered in a Medieval Astronomy Text

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/28/0...

In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten
notes on a book printed in the 1500s - and recognized the handwriting as
Galileo's. The finding "promises new insights into one of the most famous
ideological transitions in the history of science," writes Science magazine -
since the book Galileo annotated was a reprint of Ptolemy's second-century
work arguing that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo's notes,
perhaps written around 1590, or roughly 2 decades before his groundbreaking
telescope observations of the Moon and Jupiter, reveal someone who both
revered and critically dissected Ptolemy's work. And they imply, Malara
argues, that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy's cosmos because his
mastery of the traditional paradigm's reasoning convinced him that a
heliocentric [sun-centered] system would better fulfill Ptolemy's own
mathematical logic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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