Galileo's Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

knot. I’m going in to cut the world in two
.
    Venice stood on the lagoon, its usual grubby midday self. Magnificence at low tide. Galileo got off the ferry at the molo at San Marco, and was greeted there by Fra Paolo. The great friar looked gaunt in his best robes, his face still a wreck, as it always would be. But his crooked smile remained kindly, his look still penetrating.
    Galileo kissed his hand. Sarpi patted the case gently: “So this is your new occhialino?”
    â€œYes. In Latin I call it a perspicillum.”
    â€œVery good. Your audience is assembled in the Anticollegio. It’s everyone who matters, you’ll be happy to know.”
    An honor guard assembled in response to Sarpi’s nod, and escorted them into the Signoria, up the Golden Staircase into the Anticollegio,which was the anteroom to the Signoria’s bigger halls. It was a tall chamber, sumptuously decorated overhead in the usual Venetian style, its octagonal ceiling covered with gilt-framed paintings allegorizing the origin myth of Venice, while the floor underfoot was painted like the pebbled bed of a mountain stream. Galileo had always found it a strange space, in which he had trouble focusing his eyes.
    Now it was stuffed with dignitaries. Better yet, as Galileo soon learned, the doge himself, Leonardo Dona, was waiting in the Sala del Collegio, the larger assembly hall next door that was the most sumptuous room in the Signoria. As he entered the room, he saw Dona and the Savi—his six closest advisors—along with the grand chancellor and other state officials, all gathered under the long painting of the battle of Lepanto. Sarpi had outdone himself.
    Now the great Servite led Galileo to the doge, and after a cordial greeting Dona led the entire group into the Sala del Quattro Porte, then to the Sala del Senato, where many more senators stood in their purple, around tables loaded with food. Under the intricacy of crowded paintings and gilt trim that covered every wall and ceiling, Galileo pulled the two parts of his device from their case and screwed the spyglass on top of the tripod. His hands moved without a quiver; twenty years of lecturing to audiences large and small had burned all possibility of stage fright out of him. And it was also true that it was never that difficult to speak to a crowd to which you felt innately superior. So even though all his hundreds of lectures were now only the prelude to this culmination, he was calm and at ease as he described the work done to make the device, indicating its various features as he pointed it at Tintoretto’s
Triumph of Venice
on the ceiling at the far end of the room, fixing the image in the glass so that it revealed the tiny face of an angel, enlarged to the point that it stood out as vividly as Mazzoleni’s had on that first night of work.
    With a sweep of his hand, he invited the doge to have a look. The doge looked; pulled away to gaze at Galileo, his eyebrows shot high onto his forehead; looked again. The two big clocks on the long side wall marked ten minutes’ passage as he bumped the glass from one view to another. Ten more minutes passed as one purple-robed man after another took a look through the glass. Galileo answered every question they had about how it was made, although failing to bring up the ratios he had discovered, which they did not even know to askabout. He volunteered often that the process being now clear to him, future improvements were certain to follow, and also (trying to hide a growing impatience) that it was not the kind of device that could best be demonstrated in a room, even a room as big and magnificent as the Sala del Senato. Finally the doge himself echoed this point, and Sarpi was quick to suggest that they take the device to the top of the campanile of San Marco to give it a thorough airing. Dona agreed to this, and suddenly the whole assembly was following him out of the building and across the Piazzetta between the