Galileo's Dream Read Online Free PDF

Signoria and the campanile, then inside the great bell tower, winding up the tight iron staircase to the open observation floor under the bells. Here Galileo reassembled the device.
    The floor of the viewing chamber stood a hundred braccia above the Piazza. It was a place all of them had been up to many times. From here one could overlook the whole of Venice and the lagoon, and spot the passageway through the Lido at San Niccolo, the only navigable channel into the Adriatic. Also visible to the west was a long stretch of the mainland’s marshy shore, and on clear days one could even see the Alps to the north. A better place to display the powers of the new spyglass could not have been found, and to aim it Galileo looked through the device with as much interest as anyone else, or even more; he had not yet had an opportunity like this, and what could be seen through the glass was as much news to him as anyone. He told them as much as he worked, and they liked that. They were part of the experiment. He stabilized and sighted the glass very carefully, feeling that a little delay at this moment was not a bad thing, in theatrical terms. As always, the image in the eyepiece shimmered a little, as if it were something conjured in a crystal ball by a magician—not an effect he wanted, but there was nothing he had been able to do about it. Feeling a sharp curiosity, he tried to spot Padua itself. On earlier visits to the campanile, he had marked the vague tower of smoke coming from the town, and knew precisely where it lay.
    When he got Padua’s tower of Santa Giustina centered in the glass, as clear as if he were on Padua’s city wall staring at it, he suppressed any shout, any smile, and merely bowed to the doge and moved aside, so Dona and then the others could have a look. A little touch of the mage’s silent majesty was not inappropriate at this point either, he judged.
    For the view was, in fact, astonishing. “Ho!” the doge exclaimed when he saw San Giustina. “Look at that!” After a minute or two he gave over the glass to his people, and after that the rush was on. Exclamations, cries, incredulous laughter; it sounded like Carnivale. Galileo stood proudly by the tube, readjusting it when it was bumped. After everyone had had a first look, he spotted terra-firma towns even more distant than Padua, which itself was twenty-five miles away: Chioggia to the south, Treviso to the west, even Conegliano, nestled in the foothills more than fifty miles away.
    Moving to the northern arches, he trained the glass on various parts of the lagoon. These views made it clear that many of the senators were even more amazed to see people brought close than they had been buildings; perhaps their minds had leaped as quickly as Galileo’s servants to the uses of such an ability. They gazed at worshippers entering the church of San Giacomo in Murano, or getting into gondolas at the mouth of the Rio de’ Verieri, just west of Murano. Once one of them even recognized a woman he knew.
    After that round of viewing, Galileo lifted the device, helped now by as many hands as could touch the tripod, and the whole assembly shifted together to the easternmost arch on the southern side of the campanile, where the glass could be directed over the Lido and the fuzzy blue Adriatic. For a long time Galileo tapped the tube gently from side to side, searching the horizon. Then happily he spotted the sails of a little fleet of galleys, making their final approach to the Serenissima.
    â€œLook to sea,” he instructed them as he straightened and made room for the doge. He had to restrain himself to hide his euphoria. “See how using one’s plain sight, one sees nothing out there. But using the glass …”
    â€œA fleet!” the doge exclaimed. He straightened and looked at the crowd, his face red. “A fleet is approaching, well out from San Niccolo.”
    The Sages of the Order crowded to the front