Galileo's scientific work which led him into a quarrel with the church. "Re-creates for the first time the full drama of Galileo's ill-starred encounter with the Inquisition. Publication of Galileo's monumental treatise, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, aroused a bitter controversy between the old science of Ptolemy and the radical teachings of Copernicus in seventeenth-century Italy, a controversy of profound religious and political import....

"Modern science has its source in the great philosophical ideas of antiquity, in the earliest answers to the questions: What is the physical world?...How did it begin? This brilliant volume re-creates the very spirit of the first epoch of science as it began to run the course from myth to method. It covers the eleven centuries between Anaximander and Proclus, and shows how and in what intellectual climate were born the scientific ideas that future...